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1. With rising interest rates, Bank of Tampa CEO Corey Neil is paying attention to a few things in 2023.
Neil, promoted to the role in January 2022, says the bank is already starting to see evidence interest rate increases have been sufficient enough to reduce loan demand.“That should not be a surprise when rates essentially more than doubled in the span of nine to 12 months,” he says.
The interesting part of this trend, he says, will be to see if banks without liquidity are active in generating loan demand in the marketplace. “Will there be as many players at the table on each new loan request that might exist?” he poses, noting those banks just may not have the funding or access to meet the loan demand. The Bank of Tampa, with $3.2 billion in assets, has historically been a liquid bank, he adds, so he’s hopeful to see loan growth over the next year.
Additionally, as interest rates climb, the client base begins to pay more attention, specifically to interest on their deposit accounts. Neil predicts banks will have to, in turn, pay attention to deposit pricing in 2023 — the opposite of what the industry has been seeing.
“Since the pandemic, with the flood of liquidity into the marketplace, all banks found themselves rich with deposits,” he says. “As interest rates have grown, the client base has started to identify an opportunity to get yield so they start moving their deposits out of banks into other investments. The trends that all banks are paying attention to is where that flow of deposits are going.”
2. The future for banking is digital. While true for most industries, for client-facing industries, it’s an especially major trend.
“It’s what every bank or any kind of retail environment needs to realize, that this is the expectation of clients today in terms of how they interact,” Neil says.
The Bank of Tampa has two big digital projects planned for 2023: a loan automation system and an enhanced digital banking platform.
Neil expects there to be significant progress in an internal-focused loan automation system that provides insight on how a loan moves through its lifecycle internally. The digital banking platform is the bank’s version of mobile online banking, which provides digital access to all the services that exist for both commercial and personal banking. “We have all of that today,” he says, “but it can be better.”
3. Neil pays attention to possible recession signs, though, so far, he says, there hasn't been any evidence of concerns within the bank's client base or loan portfolio. "It is a threat on the horizon," he says. "I feel really good about the Tampa Bay region in general. I feel good that the recession risk, whatever it may be, will be less than other parts of the country potentially."
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