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• 2/9/2023

Rising interest rates have prompted both challenges and opportunities for banks over the past year. Bank supervisors are, understandably, urging bankers to pay close attention to a myriad of ways changing interest rates can affect earnings and capital, or what’s termed interest rate risk.

• 12/13/2022

After a two-year COVID-19 pandemic pause on in-person participation, this year’s Community Banking Research Conference returned to the St. Louis Fed in September. The annual conference—sponsored by the Federal Reserve, the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), and hosted by the St. Louis Fed—spotlights emerging research on issues important to the community banking industry and features keynotes by leading community bankers and regulators.

• 11/14/2022

After several years of pandemic-related internal and external challenges, the nation’s community bankers have largely turned their focus to traditional concerns related to the economy, technology and competition from nonbank providers.

• 9/6/2022

In the last several years, fintech firms and other novel financial firms have expressed interest in obtaining master accounts and services with the Federal Reserve. After several proposals and rounds of comments from interested parties, the Federal Reserve Board in mid-August finalized guidelines for evaluating nontraditional financial institutions’ requests to be granted master accounts and access to the Fed’s payment services.

• 7/28/2022

In mid-June, the Federal Reserve released the Expected Losses Estimator (ELE), a spreadsheet-based tool designed to help community banks calculate their allowances for credit losses under the new Current Expected Credit Losses (CECL) accounting standard. As with the SCALE tool released last summer, the ELE will assist small and less complex banks in complying with CECL.