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Federal Reserve Supervision Outreach Resources for Bankers
Carl White

Higher Deposit Costs Continue to Challenge Banks

One of the pressures the banking industry has faced over the past two years is the rising cost of deposits. Rates paid on deposits have risen sharply since March 2022, when the Federal Reserve began tightening monetary policy. Although last week’s reduction in the Fed’s target range for the federal funds rate promises relief, there are factors other than monetary policy at play.

9/27/2024 Read more about Higher Deposit Costs Continue to Challenge Banks

Risk in its various forms and how it is evaluated was the overriding theme of the 2023 Community Banking Research Conference, held last fall at the St. Louis Fed. The annual conference—sponsored by the Federal Reserve System, the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC)—spotlights emerging research on issues important to the community banking industry and features keynote addresses by leading community bankers and regulators. More than 1,100 academics, bankers and regulators participated in person or virtually.

Maintaining the spread between interest income and interest expense, deposit growth, liquidity, and cybersecurity lead a list of community bankers’ top concerns, according to an annual survey. Several of these concerns spiked from their rankings in the 2022 survey, an indicator of how much the banking environment has changed over the last year.

U.S. banking supervisors are asking the nation’s bankers to evaluate the liquidity risk inherent in their banks’ current operations and to have contingency funding plans in place and ready to execute in the event of liquidity shortfalls.1 That guidance is spelled out in an updated interagency policy statement issued in July.

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Take Five is a popular video series featuring St. Louis Fed senior business economist  Kathleen Navin. In each video, Navin provides a quick, concise synopsis of the most recent meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).