5 major retail banking challenges in 2018 (and how to overcome them)
Here are five key trends financial institutions will be forced to fight in the year ahead, and how they can tackle them.
Challenge #1 – Wrangling The Rising Interest Rate Environment
In a perfect world, financial institutions would enjoy a stable, predictable interest rate environment. You’d have a high concentration of core deposits and reasonable costs to acquire more of them.
In the real world, the Federal Reserve has undertaken a policy of quantitative easing a number of times over the past decade. Now, as the Fed tries to reduce the size of its balance sheet and unwind some of those activities, it’s clear that rates will continue to rise. In 2017, the Fed raised interest rates in March, June and again in December. As the economy continues to strengthen, the Fed said it is planning three more rate increases in 2018.
How to overcome this challenge: Now is the time to acquire low-cost deposits, anchored with checking accounts. It can take time to translate low-cost deposits into service relationships that are sticky and profitable — with active debit cards, checks, direct deposit and mobile banking, for example. So don’t wait… start now.
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