VBlog: Three Ways to Remain Close to Customer Using the Bank Division Approach

My western swing teaching Bank Profitability to the Oregon, Washington, and Utah Bankers' Associations Executive Development Program spurred a lot of discussion on the multi-bank charter strategy and how to grow over large geographies yet empower local decision makers and remain close to the customer. 

Here are three ideas from me. How about you?

~ Jeff

Bank Deals: How Are They Working Out for You?

Bank mergers are picking up steam. Technological change, regulation, and scale are cited most often by sellers. Take a premium now, rather than drift slowly into the abyss of irrelevance.

But what about buyers? I have written about achieving positive operating leverage in the past. In fact, it is one of my most read blog posts. In his most recent Chairman's letter, Warren Buffett weighed in with the following about buyer performance post acquisition:

"We've also suffered financially when this mistake has been committed by companies whose shares Berkshire has owned (with the errors sometimes occurring while I was serving as a director). Too often CEOs seem blind to an elementary reality: The intrinsic value of the shares you give in an acquisition must not be greater than the intrinsic value of the business you receive.'

'I've yet to see an investment banker quantify this all-important math when he is presenting a stock-for stock deal to the board of a potential acquirer. Instead, the banker's focus will be on describing "customary" premiums-to-market-price that are currently being paid for acquisitions - an absolutely asinine way to evaluate the attractiveness of an acquisition - or whether the deal will increase the acquirer's earnings-per-share (which in itself should be far from determinative). In striving to achieve the desired per-share number, a panting CEO and his "helpers" will often conjure up fanciful "synergies." (As a director of 19 companies over the years, I've never heard of "dis-synergies" mentioned, though I've witnessed plenty of these once deals have closed.) Post mortems of acquisitions, in which reality is honestly compared to the original projections, are rare in American boardrooms. The should instead be standard practice."

How can Warren's words be put into practice? To exemplify, I took two of the largest acquisitions in 2011 to back-check if it improved the buying bank's EPS and efficiency ratio. I went back over three years because mergers should be considered and executed with long-term financial improvement and overall bank strategy in the forefront of the "should we buy" decision. Citing the first few "clean" quarters after closing the transaction perpetuates the short-term budgeting culture that plagues our industry and prohibits long-term investing. By looking three plus years after merger announcement, I avoid that self defeating game.

I didn't take the largest deals from 2011, which were: Capital One Financial/ING Bank ($9.0B), PNC/RBC Bank (USA) ($3.5B), and Comerica/Sterling Bancshares ($1.0B). These transactions were so large, and two were foreign banks selling US subs, that it doesn't relate to my readers. But the next two deals in the table certainly relate.

Both deals look like they improved the buyer's EPS, with People's United achieving a 10.8% annual growth rate and Susquehanna achieving an even better 19.9%. People's efficiency ratio, a measure of how much in operating expenses it takes to generate a dollar of revenue, went down slightly. Achieving economies of scale should drive down the efficiency ratio. Although People's decline in this ratio was small, the relative size of Danvers ($2.6B) was only 10% of People's size ($25.0B) at the time the deal was announced.

Susquehanna's efficiency ratio went up. This is counter-intuitive, especially since Tower's relative size ($2.6B) was more significant to Susquehanna's ($14.2B) at the time of announcement. One would think that realizing the necessary cost savings to justify paying a premium would result in a lower efficiency ratio. Susquehanna was unable to achieve this "economy of scale". It is also worth mentioning that Susquehanna's earnings were sub-par at the time they announced the Tower deal. They had a 0.32% ROA at announcement. Not something to include in the shareholders' letter. Nowhere to go but up, right?

People's, on the other hand, had a better ROA (0.84%) when they announced the Danvers deal than in the fourth quarter (0.74%). The primary culprit was a precipitous decline in net interest margin of 116 basis points (yikes!). The fact that their efficiency ratio went down tells me they hit their operating expenses hard. As Warren alluded to above, I bet that wasn't in their post-merger projections.

I don't think it's very complicated to decide to do a transaction or not. What fits your strategy? Can you build it or must you acquire it? If an acquisition, can you afford the premium for the target so your bank is better off for having done the deal than passing?

Once you land a deal, accountability should be equally uncomplicated. My firm once represented a bank that had an activist investor on the Board. All that guy wanted to talk about was the efficiency ratio. Very one dimensional. But I digress.

He did hold management accountable for achieving the cost savings in the projections. So management prepared a spreadsheet of the phase-in of cost savings and the overall cost structure of the combined bank once all synergies were achieved. It wasn't a very complicated spreadsheet, and also gave management some leeway to alter where things were cut, so long as they achieved their aggregate numbers.

At the end of your strategic measurement period post-acquisition, the value of your bank (intrinsic value mentioned by Warren) should be greater for having done the deal than if you went it alone. If People's and Susquehanna could not achieve the earnings growth in the table above, then doing those deals improved their value.

If each could have achieved those numbers on their own, and there are reasons to believe they could have, then why do the deal at all?

Is it a fair question?

~ Jeff

A Community Banker for the Ages

On Sundays, I go old school. I pick up the Sunday paper from my sidewalk, go inside, pour a cup of coffee, and read it. On a recent Sunday, the headliner in the Business Section was about the retiring Bob Enck, a long time community banker in my hometown, Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.

Bobby Enck is a relic of an old time era in banking, when you started and finished your career at the community bank in the center of town. Bob started at the Elizabethtown Trust Company, which was aquired in 1981 by what is now Susquehanna Bank.

Did Bob climb the corporate ladder, and pick up stakes and move to the corporate headquarters 20 miles away. No. Did he stop burning shoe leather and shaking hands in E-town. Again, no. Bob works in the same office he cleaned when he was 15 years old, the old E-town Trust Company's headquarters. He served on the school board, helped found the ambulance company, and is raising money for athletic fields.

There are precious few Bob Enck's remaining in community banking. As I often say, if you succeed in banking you move farther and farther from the customer. Recently, I was interviewing community bank Board members regarding their strategy, and one director lamented that nobody wanted to work in the branch. They all wanted to transfer to the back office. A situation I think is the rule, not the exception.

But bankers keep telling me they want to erect the foundation of their bank around customer relationships. If so, why do they foster an organizational structure that encourages distancing key employees from customers if they are to succeed? 

Susquehanna stuck with the market manager concept with Enck. I am unsure if they do it throughout their franchise, or they made exception in E-town. I suspect the latter. E-town Trust was a market leader when acquired, and the remnants of that franchise, namely Bob Enck, continue to lead the market (see table). They now have three branches in a town with 40,000 residents (one came by way of acquisition). 

Not all markets can support senior level support like Susquehanna's E-town market, where the bank boasts $190 million in deposits, larger than many community banks. But there is a case to be made that, if relationships are the core to your strategy, your bank should have senior, lifelong bankers in your market. That means you have to build compensation, incentives, and support around this strategy.

Relationship building within communities requires time. Operating your branches with an employee revolving door doesn't get the job done. That is transactional bank thinking. Does your structure support your strategy?

Do you know of other Bobby Enck's? Or should this old-school approach go the way of the rotary phone?

~ Jeff

Note: After posting this, a Susquehanna Bank executive called in a correction. They do pursue a market manager approach and work to replicate Bob Enck's throughout their franchise.

How I use Twitter

I am no social media expert. The media is so relatively new, I'm skeptical of those that make the claim. But I was making a half hour presentation to a bank board of directors regarding their strategic plan two weeks ago. The plan called for the bank to evolve its marketing capabilities to include social media. When I mentioned I had a Twitter account, half of my allotted time was spent in a Q&A on how I used it.

I was surprised by this turn, but impressed that a relatively older Board was so interested and had detailed questions about social media. In my mind, I thought "oh no, they must think I'm a social media expert". But I pressed on to tell them how I, not knowing the right way from the wrong way, used Twitter. Here is the gist of what I said.

I signed up for Twitter about two years ago (@jeffmarsico), and have tweeted nearly 3,500 times. That is about five per day. Probably light compared to some, and moderate compared to others. I have no target regarding how many times I tweet. The reason I signed up was two-fold: 1) curiosity about the hype, and 2) as a replacement for a journal.

I have always thought of keeping a journal to remember things that occurred in my life. But I'm not one to sit down at night and jot down events and certainly not my feelings. So, at only 140 characters per tweet, I thought Twitter a decent substitute. So off I went with no strategy other than that.

I searched for people to follow using three themes: 1) local to my hometown; 2) banking-related; and 3) sports-related. Most that I follow have followed me back, either as a courtesy or judging that my tweets may interest them. I hope the latter, but am not foolish to believe this is always true. If you looked at the lists I have compiled on Twitter, you will note these three themes.

I am somewhat bipolar in how I use Twitter. Right or wrong, I typically tweet banking by day, and Yankees by night. This is an oversimplification, as I also like interacting with those that I have never met via Twitter, tweeting things happening in my personal life, and other sports teams that I follow.

Some may criticize how I use Twitter because while some tweets may be interesting to a segment of my followers, they may be irrelevant to others. For example, tweeting an interesting statistic I heard at a banking conference may interest @bankmarketing, but be a snore to @lennysyankees.

Although I still use Twitter with similar objectives to when I started, I have evolved in my thinking. Since joining, I started this blog. I use Twitter to update my tweeps (slang for your Twitter followers) that I just put up a new post. This week, the second-highest traffic source into the blog was from Twitter.

I now use Twitter as an education source. There is a whole universe of blogs and news sources that were unknown to me (see below for a couple good examples of very fine banking blogs). For example, my banking tweeps keep me updated via news links of what is happening in our universe. If I am working in the office, I read Twitter-fed articles that are of interest to me, in addition to my regular reading. When traveling and I see an interesting article or blog post in my Twitter stream, I "favorite" it for later reading.

I also follow sports via Twitter. For example, yesterday I kept apprised of how my favorite MLS soccer club, @philaunion was doing in their match as I was unable to watch it. Watching a Yankees game while following an #yankees hashtag stream and interacting with my tweeps is a whole different experience than watching alone. I would miss the snarky comments from @huntforringsnyy when AJ Burnett bumbles through a start.

I have made my Tweets private, which seems to be counter-intuitive to expanding a tweep-base. But I noticed that Twitter receives a pretty high ranking in search engines. For example, when searching "Jeff Marsico", my Twitter account appeared fifth on Bing and third on Google. If somebody Googles me, I'm not sure I want their first impression to be "The barber chopped off my sideburns, again" (actual tweet that showed up in a Google search). To follow me, a potential tweep need only send a follower request, 95% of which I accept (unless you are a porn site or serial marketer). Most of those I follow back. But I suppose I probably lose potential followers and therefore relationships by making tweets private. I accept the trade off.

I don't know much about establishing brand. For evidence look no further than my Twitter avatar (thumbnail picture, logo, or animation that comes up next to your tweets). I first started with a cartoon (see pictures), then moved to an image of myself after reading some blog posts on the subject, and I now use a simple photo. I suppose the evolution is because I would like to be viewed as a human being like everybody else, and not Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. See the @inking_media link below regarding avatars. Inkling Media is local to Central PA and I would not have known the owner, Ken, other than through Twitter.

This segways to the most important benefit I received from Twitter: meeting people I otherwise would have never met. I'm not saying that I know my tweeps in any material way (although some I do because @shannon_marsico is a tweep). But I never would have known @sharistorm, a credit union marketing executive, mom, blogger, and author from Washington state if I did not follow her. Just this past week I spoke on the phone with @mbartoo about possibly putting on an industry event. I first met Mike via Twitter.

Could Twitter be a short-term fad that goes the way of the Betamax? Possibly. Is it the answer to our industry challenges? Doubtful. But an industry marketing consultant told me last week that financial institutions must learn how to leverage the spheres of influence of their business development officers. If you believe what he said to be true, then social media, and yes Twitter, can be part of that conversation. See Susquehanna Bank link below to a well-done bank blog positioning BDOs as experts. But I do not know many other FIs that are doing this well or have received material benefit from their Twitter or social media efforts yet. We are still in the experimental phase.

But my experimental efforts have given me things that were unknown to me when I first signed up for Twitter... i.e. knowledge, interactions during sporting events, and relationships (if only limited relationships). Perhaps your experimentation can result in lessons learned, brand advancement, and relationship building success. I don't know, but in my experience it's worth a try.

How do you use Twitter?

~ Jeff

Banking blog links:

Marketing Tea Party by Ron Shevlin

http://marketingteaparty.com/

The Financial Brand

http://www.financialbrand.com/

Blog post on Twitter Avatars by Inkling Media:

http://inklingmedia.net/2010/10/25/branding-engagement-pt-1-whats-in-a-name-or-face/

Susquehanna Bank blog:

http://blog.susquehanna.net/