Main Street Matters Blog

As an entrepreneur at heart, I truly like to build businesses. When I look at ICBA Payments, I see a fantastic opportunity to take a solid 40-year history and write our own story of innovation and growth into the future.

Leading a community bank means balancing countless responsibilities, managing your team, serving your customers, and keeping pace with the tempo of innovation in an ever-changing financial landscape. When your familiar rhythms are being tested daily, we understand how hard it can be to hit a new note.

In today’s environment, the proverb, “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst,” serves as a standard mantra for community banks. The regulatory landscape hurls new challenges, and community banks pivot, adjust, and act to ensure that, no matter the outcome, the best interests of their communities and customers remain the top priority.

The propensity of federal banking regulators to enact new regulatory burdens on community banks in response to the risky behavior of the largest institutions—a decades-long problem for local lenders—has only accelerated in recent months.

Bankers are operating in a fast-paced world, with solutions addressing customer growth and engagement. This technology can be a key driver to help them become more competitive; however, these solutions can only help if deployed strategically.

“Pig butchering” scams — in which victims invest increasing sums in supposedly legitimate virtual currency enterprises before being conned out of their money — depend on cryptocurrencies to function. But the connections between crypto and this skyrocketing scam run much deeper than the fake investments that ensnare consumers.

A new form of investment scam has skyrocketed in recent years as criminal syndicates target consumers through online channels. Called “pig butchering,” this new scam is increasingly relevant, including among the consumers and communities that community banks serve.

Banks and their customers continue to be challenged by a rise in fraud and scams across payment types. Most significantly, check fraud has emerged over the past several years as a leading concern.

It’s an exciting time for ICBA Innovation, culminating in the long-awaited opening of ICBA’s Center for Innovation—an initiative more than a year in the making with the promise to help drive community bank innovation.

To ease the regulatory and economic forces pressuring margins and embrace new payments opportunities, community banks should focus on six key trends this year to drive their payments plans and activities