It’s a new year and for many of you, your annual employee training calendar is just kicking off. Regardless of where you are in the process, we want to make you are aware of some of great courses coming to you in the very near future.

In a time of ambiguity, you take notice when there’s unilateral consensus, as was the case at last month’s ThinkTECH Policy Summit. During the summit, assembled regulators, legislators, and community bankers all agreed that community bank innovation will drive the future of financial services.

Community bankers have hit the ground running this year with another round of Paycheck Protection Program lending, Economic Impact Payment processing, and the everyday business of supporting local communities during the pandemic.

In our industry if you’re not moving forward, you’re in danger of falling behind. It’s why we created the ICBA ThinkTECH Accelerator program—to foster community bank innovation.

The end of 2020 is here and so is the end of Adobe Flash! All Community Banker University courses have been converted out of Flash and into HTML so you should have no trouble launching courses come Jan. 1, 2021.

We have had to juggle countless responsibilities this year—to our families, to our businesses, to our communities, to each other. With so many simultaneous demands, we have had to make no shortage of sacrifices.

Last month Google unveiled its new Google Pay app—complete with a DDA-like account attached. This latest effort by Google is part of a trend of non-bank tech companies wading into payments territory.

As we near the close of 2020, we’re all crossing our fingers and hoping that 2021 brings a stronger sense of stability and normalcy. No matter how we define it, “normal” will differ dramatically from this point forward.

Over time, a business relationship develops, much of which is a matter of convenience for the busy portfolio manager. And out of this relationship comes dialogue. In 2020, the dialogue has gone places it had not yet visited. So, as the year ends, and hopefully the COVID-19-dominated headlines begin to recede, ICBA Securities' Jim Reber recounts some questions and comments he's heard for the first time this year.

On Nov. 18, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued Revenue Ruling 2020-27 and Revenue Procedure 2020-51. This guidance collectively addresses the timing of the disallowance of deduction of eligible costs incurred during 2020 that were paid using proceeds from a loan guaranteed under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).