Wow…who among us would’ve thought how much our lives have changed since Valentine’s Day. To give you perspective, on 2/14/20: the Dow Jones closed at 29,423.31, you could go out to dinner and an actual movie theater with a crowd of strangers and the average American spending $142 on a gift for their significant other (per CNBC titled “Here’s how much Americans plan to spend on Valentine’s Day gifts” written by Anna Hecht).
Fast forward a whole month and: the Dow Jones closed up 10% to 23,185.62, shelter-in-place social distancing are now actual terms and are in effect for several regions and gaining traction around the country and I believe most average Americans are rethinking the $142 on Valentine’s day gifts as millions are about to be unemployed for the first time.
The banking world has also been turned upside down since Feb 14 with: a 1.50% drop in the prime rate in less than a 30-day span, millions of first time unemployed combined with and as a result of hotels, restaurants and other service companies forced to close their doors and a load of probable/possible work-out loans for both commercial and retail clients necessitating a virtual stop-down from loan/deposit/fee income growth discussions to extensions, modifications, deferrals and restructuring.
With our company being focused on the consumer and business banking landscape, we’ve heard from several clients inquiring how they could take advantage of the tools we offer in our CreditCore LOS. These discussions led us to quickly putting together a forum for our clients to freely share what they are doing in response to and asking for advice from others in how they are handling the turbulence and planning for the unplannable.
We ended up hosting two virtual meetings with attendees from loan operations, CreditCore administrators, retail, credit administration and even bank presidents with topics ranging from small unsecured personal loans to multi-million-dollar commercial credits. Everyone that attended felt the time spent was worthwhile so we’re now hosting these forums each week for the foreseeable future until no one shows up.
If you and your FI are interested in joining these weekly calls, we would be happy to have you. Feel free to email me at tanderson@3530tech.com and I can coordinate an invite.