Main Street Matters Blog

From having to adapt to retail closings, diminished staff and customer capacities, a new work-from-home infrastructure, and more, the nation’s small businesses have reacted quickly in the wake of the pandemic.

Second-quarter FDIC Quarterly Banking Profile statistics are not just evidence of community banks’ resilience in times of economic hardship, but an attestation to the resilience of their commitment to Main Street as a guarantor of essential financial services.

In an environment where innovation needs to be continual, how can community banks succeed? Blake Swafford, senior innovation officer at SimplyBank, sums it up well. “It’s about being really committed to innovation."

Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, which is why we recently kicked off its application period for our third ICBA ThinkTECH Accelerator cohort--to maintain the program's momentum and ongoing quest to identify technology solutions that solve for community bank pain points.

While policymakers continue debating new approaches to mitigate the coronavirus' ongoing impact, one issue has attracted newfound scrutiny as the pandemic’s economic consequences unfold: How will these financial pressures affect the U.S. housing market?

Unless you have been living on a desert island for the past few years, you would be hard-pressed to miss the technological revolution that is sweeping our nation’s financial system and the larger global economy.

Catching synthetic identity fraudsters remains difficult, and the fall-out of not detecting it, is substantial. AI company Coalesce estimates that synthetic identities account for more than 20 percent of losses in a loan portfolio, and for credit, they average 4.6 times the typical loss.

Community banks have long served the small-business market, but given the pandemic impact, new opportunities have emerged to support these customers’ payments needs and address areas of friction.

When I think about customer-permissioned data sharing, I am reminded of the scene from the movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off where Ferris and his best friend, Cameron, leave the keys to a Ferrari with an attendant only to discover later that the valet has taken the luxury sports car out for a joy-ride.

Well before coronavirus saturated our headlines, community banks accounted for 60 percent of small-business lending, served 58 percent of small businesses nationwide as their primary lender, and lent over $1.5 trillion to small businesses in 2019 alone.