Main Street Matters Blog

Let’s face it. We’re not living in our parents’ financial services world. In today’s immediate gratification society, our concern lies more with what’s in our account this second than where it will be next week.

In today’s economy, community bankers are looking more and more to their digital channels for new customer opportunities, especially those with the desire to attract mobile-focused millennials and Generation Z, or centennials as they are sometimes called. The numbers on digital spend, however, indicate there is room to grow.

When it comes to financial services, almost 63 percent of the U.S. population uses digital banking. So, as a community bank, if you are not employing—or at least considering—a digital-first strategy for your customers, you should be.

As customer expectations continue to shift, digital wallets—or mobile wallets as they are sometimes called—continue to grow in popularity as a preferred payment option. While adoption in the U.S. is still in its infancy, it is growing fast.

Community banks continue looking for ways to grow loan volume and improve the customer experience in the process. In today’s digital era, that means simplifying the front-end user interface and user experience as well as streamlining back-end operations.

As an industry, we’re at a pivotal stage where the pace of change increases daily and digital transformation rocks our reality. But amidst everything, community bankers remain steadfast in putting the customer relationship first.

The debate over housing-finance reform often ends up deep in the weeds, but the esoteric details are often of the utmost importance to community banks. Recent developments in Washington bear that out.

It’s the time of year when we celebrate the relationships in our lives, and it’s a great time to build connections at home, within the community or in the workplace. That doesn’t mean composing Shakespearean sonnets for your coworkers, but it does mean showing up in a meaningful way.

Relationship banking is nothing new to community banks. Novel underwriting techniques and recent regulatory guidance have enabled community banks to understand and serve their customers even better.

From concerns about Libra to the development of the Federal Reserve’s FedNow real-time payments settlement service, policymakers are poised for action on behalf of their government, business and consumer constituents.