Entries by Joel Lawrence

The Importance of Employee Training for your Overdraft Program

Does your front-line staff have a biased opinion regarding overdraft privilege and present it in a negative tone?  Is your front-line staff having a hard time explaining overdraft privilege to your customers/members and not really sure what to say to them? If you haven’t had a chance to listen to your employees’ present overdraft privilege […]

The Importance of an Inherent Risk Survey

One of the most crucial and challenging parts of vendor management is managing the risk associated with each of your vendors.  There are numerous risks that may arise from a financial institution’s use of vendors.  Understanding the vendors inherent risk will help your financial institution to categorize and differentiate the risk for each of your […]

The consumer case for overdraft privilege

The last few years lawmakers have put extensive focus on overdraft privilege programs and are pushing for additional guidance on the way financial institutions handle overdrafts. It seems that the lawmakers that are pushing for changes only have one way of looking at overdraft privileges, so The American Bankers Association (ABA) wrote a response to […]

Overdraft Protection In a New Light

Over the past year, there has been a great deal of scrutiny surrounding overdraft privilege programs. Many news articles focus on the potential negative aspects of overdraft privilege programs. They make the generalization that users of these programs are not sufficiently educated on what usage truly means and that users are typically lower-income. A 2019 […]

What are vendor reviews and why are they important

Vendor review is a process by which a business can evaluate the quality of the vendor performance while also understanding any potential changes that the vendor may have when providing the product or service for the business. A vendor review process will assess a vendor’s capacity to maintain effective and appropriate security practices and other […]

Finding the way through Regulatory Requirements

Recently, there has been a lot of confusion in regards to what is required for non-FDIC regulated financial institutions regarding their overdraft privilege program. Strunk has received several questions from our non-FDIC regulated clients (financial institutions that are regulated by either OCC, Federal Reserve or NCUA) regarding findings from either auditors or examiners.  It seems […]

Top 10 Overdraft Program Questions

Strunk offers overdraft privilege training to our clients to provide consistency on how the employees view the program and how the employees present the program to their consumers.  When providing training we will sometimes get questions on how to handle specific areas of the program. Here are the 10 most frequently asked questions during overdraft […]

New Due Diligence Guidance for Community Bank on FinTech Firms

On August 27, 2021, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, FDIC, and the OCC published new guidance aimed at community banks that are looking to expand their reach and service new customer bases through partnerships with financial technology companies (FinTech). While aimed at community banks, the regulators said the fundamental concepts could also […]

What is a Fourth Party Vendor and Why Should I Care About Their Risk

Fourth-party risk is rising to the top of most auditors and examiners list when it comes to evaluating financial institutions vendor management program.  Fourth parties are your vendor’s third parties and subcontractors.  These vendors you will not have a direct contract; however, your vendor does, and relies on these vendors to produce a product or […]

The Prospect of Eliminating Overdraft Fees

Ally Bank has recently made headlines announcing that it would no longer charge its customers overdraft fees. Ally is a popular online bank that offers one type of checking account and overdraft fees only accounted for less than .07% of Ally’s revenue in 2020.  Ally Bank typically excludes consumers that use overdraft protection to begin […]