The economic impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic is now touching nearly every business and organization in essentially every country around the world. To be able to continue to support your local community, community-based financial institutions need to be able to respond to the evolving financing needs of each customer, including business borrowers.

Since the rapid onset of the novel Coronavirus striking US and global financial markets, benchmark interest rates have fallen sharply. Over the past month US Treasury rates for 5 and 10-year securities have quickly moved to historic lows. If your institution is using unadjusted US Treasury rates as proxies for market-based cost of funding for loan pricing purposes within LoanPricingPRO®, it is recommended that you override these rate curves in the short term with one of a number of other available rate indices.

Between the end of 2016 and 2018, the Federal Reserve incrementally increased the target Fed Funds Rate eight times from 0.50% to 2.50%. During this period, community banks took advantage of this rising rate environment by increasing their Yield/Cost spread. Loan yields increased 45 basis points from 4.65% to 5.10%, while deposit costs only increased 30 basis points from 0.43% to 0.73%. Further, the increase in deposit costs lagged the increase in loan yields, providing further margin enhancement.

Successful loan pricing model implementations rely on many variables including management commitment, lender buy-in, and proper software calibration. Calibration is a 2-step process requiring accurate assignment of product profitability assumptions, and then based on those assumptions, product by product ROE target assignments

Essential Concepts in Pricing Loans Many financial institutions experienced record earnings in 2018.  The one-time impact of the new tax law coupled with continued improvement in both asset quality and loan yields more than offset the rising cost of funds banks experienced in the second half of the year. In 2018, The Federal Reserve continued