AI Risk Management for Community Banks: A Strategic Guide

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AI Risk Management for Community Banks: A Strategic Guide

Strunk’s Risk Manager is a risk management solution for community banks and credit unions, providing comprehensive oversight of emerging technologies and regulatory compliance.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the banking landscape, offering community financial institutions powerful ways to improve efficiency and enhance decision-making. From automating routine processes to strengthening credit analysis, AI presents meaningful opportunities for growth. However, these benefits come with significant risks that require active management.

The Evolving AI Risk Profile

AI introduces unique challenges that can impact a bank’s stability. Institutions must be prepared to address:

  • Model Risk and Fairness: Preventing biased or discriminatory outcomes, particularly in customer-facing decisions.
  • Data Governance and Privacy: Protecting sensitive customer information and ensuring data quality throughout the AI lifecycle.
  • Regulatory Compliance: Keeping pace with evolving guidance while applying existing laws to AI use cases.
  • Vendor Management: Maintaining oversight of external AI vendors, including transparency, performance, and control environments.

Integrating AI into Enterprise Risk Assessments

Evaluating AI-related risks across key domains is no longer optional. Institutions should focus on:

  1. Operational Risk: Potential system failures or processing errors.
  2. Compliance Risk: Ensuring AI outputs meet strict lending and privacy laws.
  3. Reputational Risk: The impact of “black box” decisions on customer trust.
  4. Strategic Risk: Aligning AI adoption with long-term institutional goals.

Secure Your Strategy with Strunk

Strunk’s Risk Manager software suite enables institutions to systematically identify, assess, and monitor AI-related risks. Our tools streamline vendor due diligence, support risk tiering, and provide clear audit trails – helping banks stay aligned with evolving regulatory expectations.

Proactively addressing AI risks is a management priority. Institutions that leverage the right tools will be best positioned to capture the benefits of AI safely and strategically.

Contact Strunk at 800.728.3116, email info@strunkaccess.com or visit our site to learn how we can help you manage your institution’s risk.

Overdraft Privilege Program: 10 Reasons to Use Strunk

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Strunk’s Overdraft Privilege (ODP) program has supported the industry for over 40 years. Many banks continue to leverage this strategy, which has proven to be one of the most successful fee income programs in banking history. By treating the daily overdraft process as a dedicated line of business through Strunk’s proven program, your institution can achieve greater efficiency and compliance.

1. Drive Revenue Without Raising Prices

The primary advantage of Strunk’s program is its ability to substantially increase fee income for your institution without requiring a price hike for your customers.

2. Ensure Regulatory Compliance

In a complex shifting landscape, Strunk ensures your program remains compliant with all applicable laws, regulations, and industry best practices.

3. Automated Decision Making

Manually reviewing accounts is inefficient. This program automates the daily “pay/don’t pay” and “charge/don’t charge” decisions for accounts with negative balances.

4. Advanced Reporting & Transparency

Strunk provides the data-driven insights necessary to manage your ODP effectively:

  • Coverage Oversight: Reports ensure every eligible customer receives an ODP limit for checks and ACH items.
  • Performance Metrics: Utilization and opt-in reports track performance by branch and product type.
  • Customer Awareness: These reports help the bank ensure customers are fully informed about the program.

5. Empower Consumer Choice

Rather than the bank making assumptions, this program gives consumers the power to choose how they want their accounts handled.

6. Essential Point-of-Sale Access

A formal ODP program provides a safety net at the register. It allows consumers to complete essential purchases—such as prescription drugs or groceries—using a debit card that might otherwise be denied at the point of sale.

7. Support Customers with “Fresh Start” Loans

When customers struggle to repay an overdrawn account, Strunk offers a responsible solution. The “Fresh Start” four-month installment loan provides an opportunity to help customers regain their financial footing.

8. Streamlined Collections

The program generates compliant collection letters. These communications are automatically triggered based on the specific amount of time a customer’s account has remained overdrawn.

9. Comprehensive Employee Training

Implementation includes training for your staff on the specific benefits of ODP and the mechanics of how the program functions.

10. Proven Customer Satisfaction

Despite common misconceptions, consumer complaints regarding overdraft fees and published charges are historically small. Running a compliant, automated program is ultimately beneficial for both the bank and the customer.

With over four decades of experience, Strunk specializes in enhancing customer service while simultaneously boosting fee income. Ready to optimize your bank’s performance? Contact Strunk at 800.728.3116, email info@strunkaccess.com or visit our site to learn how we can help your institution make more money efficiently.

Elevating Efficiency: Why Strunk’s Risk Manager is Your Bank’s Best Ally

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In 2026, the banking world isn’t just about managing money; it’s about managing velocity. With fraud attempts happening in milliseconds and regulatory expectations shifting like sand, the old-school spreadsheet approach to risk management isn’t just inefficient—it’s dangerous.

For community banks and credit unions, the challenge is clear: how do you stay compliant and secure without hiring an army of analysts? The answer lies in optimization through Strunk’s Risk Manager.

The “All-in-One” Advantage: Beyond Checklists

Many institutions treat risk management as a fragmented series of chores. Vendor management is in one folder, policy updates are in another, and “that one IT audit” is buried in someone’s inbox. Strunk’s Risk Manager collapses these silos into a single, cohesive ecosystem.

  1. Risk Assessor: Automated risk assessments & heat maps. Cuts assessment time from weeks to days.
  2. Policy Manager: Centralized policy database & mapping. Links policies directly to regulatory standards.
  3. Vendor Manager: Third-party risk & contract tracking. Calculates inherent and residual risk scores.
  4. Controls Manager: Automated testing schedules & alerts. Ensures “no-fail” monitoring of internal controls.
  5. Issues Manager: Incident tracking & resolution database. Centralizes every mistake and “fix” for examiners.

From “Reactive” to “Proactive” with Real-Time Data

The most significant benefit of the Strunk suite of risk management solutions is its tracking and reporting capabilities. In the past, risk profiles were static documents that collected dust until the next board meeting. Highlighting the outliers or “red flags” allows the board to focus on high-priority items rather than wading through hundreds of pages of “normal” data.

With automated trend tracking, Strunk’s software identifies weaknesses at a glance. If a specific risk indicator starts trending toward “High,” the system doesn’t wait for you to notice—it flags it. This allows your team to pivot resources toward the highest areas of risk before they become expensive failures.

One of the biggest time-sinks in risk management is building the “logic” behind the assessments. Strunk comes pre-loaded with industry-standard frameworks. This means your team isn’t reinventing the wheel; they are simply applying a proven, regulatory-aligned methodology to your specific institution, system-wide.

In a world where fraud is faster and smarter, your internal processes must be leaner. By automating the “heavy lifting” of data entry and scheduling, Strunk’s Risk Manager frees up your most expensive asset—your people—to focus on strategic judgment rather than clerical busywork. By turning risk management into a strategic cornerstone, you aren’t just protecting your bank or credit union; you’re building a foundation for faster, more confident growth.

An Updated Dashboard Experience in Risk Manager

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Strunk recently released an enhanced dashboard experience within Risk Manager, designed to give you clearer, more actionable insight into your organization’s risk posture and compliance activity. This dashboard brings together critical data points into a single view, helping your team monitor, prioritize, and act with confidence.

Expanded Visibility Across Risk Areas
Building on existing insights for enterprise risk assessments and policy management, the updated dashboard now includes summary level visibility across three additional focus areas:

  • Cyber Risk Assessment
  • Vendor Management
  • Issues Tracking

These additions provide a more comprehensive snapshot of your organization’s current risk environment.

Key Insights at a Glance

The new dashboard surfaces meaningful indicators to support faster, more informed decision making. Users can now quickly view:

  • Latest cyber risk assessment results to understand your current cybersecurity posture
  • Vendor risk level distribution to identify concentrations of higher risk relationships
  • Overdue vendor management items by category to keep critical tasks on track
  • Open issues by priority to focus on what matters most
  • Issues coming due by timeframe to stay ahead of upcoming deadlines
These at-a-glance visuals are designed to reduce complexity and bring clarity to day-to-day risk management activities.

Designed for Better Oversight and Efficiency
Whether you’re preparing for an exam, reporting to leadership, or managing ongoing compliance responsibilities, the enhanced dashboard helps your team stay aligned and proactive. By consolidating key metrics into a centralized view, it enables:

  • Stronger oversight and transparency
  • More efficient workflow management
  • Improved prioritization of tasks and resources
Available Now
The enhanced dashboard is now available to all Risk Manager users. We encourage you to explore the new experience and take advantage of the added visibility it provides. For questions or assistance, please contact Strunk Support.

Streamlining Charge-Offs and Recoveries in ODP Manager

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Even after a deposit account is closed and charged off, your financial institution still needs a reliable way to track and report on that data. To make this process seamless, ODP Manager includes a dedicated manual workflow that allows users to monitor charge-off item amounts and recoveries with precision.

Managing these items shouldn’t feel like a chore. At the individual account level, users can easily create a charge-off item by entering the specific principal and fee amounts.

  • Context Matters: You can add applicable notes the moment an item is created.
  • Ongoing History: Notes can be updated over time to provide a clear audit trail of the account’s status.
  • Dynamic Balances: As recoveries are received and entered into the system, the balance of the charge-off item is automatically reduced.
    Comprehensive Reporting & Exporting

Visibility is key to effective management. ODP Manager provides a summary page where you can view all charge-off items within any specified timeframe.
This high-level view doesn’t skimp on the details. The summary displays:

  • Branch and Account Name
  • Charge-off Date
  • Original Principal and Fees
  • Total Recoveries and Remaining Balance

Need to take your data to a meeting or perform further analysis? The entire summary can be exported to PDF or Excel with just a few clicks.

If you have questions about setting up your charge-off items or want to dive deeper into the reporting features, the Strunk Support team is here to help. Reach out to us at support@strunkaccess.com for more details.

Why Vendor Risk Assessment Surveys Matter

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Strong vendor oversight begins with asking the right questions. Vendor risk assessment surveys are a critical component of an effective third-party risk management program, helping financial institutions evaluate vendors’ operations, financial stability, cybersecurity, compliance, and business continuity. To simplify this process, Strunk’s Vendor Manager solution is designed to improve how surveys are created, shared, tracked, and scored.
Through the platform, standardized surveys can be sent directly to vendors based on their specific risk levels. You can easily track which surveys are outstanding and which are complete, providing transparency without manual tracking or long email threads. Additionally, Vendor Manager enables institutions to score residual risk at the question level based on vendor responses. This allows teams to assess a vendor’s controls and quickly identify areas that may require further review or additional safeguards.
A more recent feature is a set of available onboarding questions designed to help institutions quickly gather key information when establishing a new vendor relationship. These questions provide a practical starting point for evaluating vendor risk and ensuring consistent data collection during the onboarding process.
Another powerful enhancement is the ability to customize survey questions. Every institution’s vendor management program is different, and this capability allows organizations to tailor their surveys to their operational needs. Whether adding new questions or modifying existing ones, teams can ensure their surveys collect the most relevant information.
Vendor Manager provides significant value for financial institutions wanting to execute a structured vendor management program with confidence. If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Strunk at info@strunkaccess.com for more details.

How can Banks make more money without raising prices?

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Banks across the country charge fees for all types of services…have you ever looked at the service charge schedule of a bank? Typically, those charges stay the same for years and are never reviewed for potential increases. Just go to a bank’s website and click on service charges and most banks publish their fees. Notice at the bottom of the page the date of the update to the fee schedule. Many times, it has been 5+ years since any changes have been made.

At Strunk we developed a program thirty years ago that increases fee income substantially without raising prices. Our Overdraft Privilege program focuses on the volume of checks/debits that overdraw an account rather than the fee the bank charges. Of course, we don’t want to encourage consumers to overdraw their account, but we don’t want to discourage them either.

Overdraft Privilege gives consumers a choice on how they want their account handled, rather than the bank deciding how the consumer wants their account handled. For checks and ACH items that overdraw and account, those debits are typically not returned to the merchant since fees pile up when that happens. Conversely for debit card and other electronic transactions that overdraw the account, consumers must opt in for those overdrafts. It’s been like this since July 1, 2010.

There are two components to generating fee income for a bank. 1) the fee being charged and 2) the number of “uses” for that service. ODP is all about the “uses” and not the fee.

Let Strunk revitalize your old ODP program to generate some additional income. Contact Strunk at info@strunkaccess.com or call us at 800.728.3116.

Inform Customers of Additional Overdraft Protection Options

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Part of managing an Overdraft Privilege program is monitoring excessive Overdraft Privilege usage by consumers to inform them about alternatives to ODP. These additional available options to cover overdrafts could be an Overdraft Protection Credit Line or an Overdraft Protection Transfer from another account the customer has with the financial institution.

FDIC regulated institutions are expected to give customers who overdraw their accounts on more than six occasions where a fee is charged in a rolling twelve-month period a reasonable opportunity to choose a less costly alternative and decide whether to continue with fee-based overdraft coverage. Strunk also recommends that institutions not regulated by the FDIC also communicate available alternatives to ODP on an annual basis to accounts with insufficient funds items.

The hosted ODP Manager software includes a letter template to assist with notifying customers of the alternative options. If the extract file imported into ODP Manager includes data from the core system that indicates when an account has exceeded the specified threshold, the letter can automatically show as due. If there is not sufficient data available in the extract file but qualifying accounts can be identified from other information tracked in the core, the Excessive Use Notification Letter can be generated by account number as needed. Once generated, the letter will be tracked and stored within ODP Manager.

If you have any questions about the Excessive Use Notification Letter available in ODP Manager, please contact Strunk Support at support@strunkaccess.com for more details.

A modern approach to Enterprise Risk Management: Clarity, Consistency, Confidence

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Enterprise risk management expectations for community banks and financial institutions continue to evolve. Regulators increasingly emphasize risk-based supervision, tailored oversight, and clear documentation of enterprise-wide risk exposure. Consequently, organizations relying on manual or disconnected assessment processes often struggle to maintain a consistent, defensible view of their risk posture. Modern compliance programs require centralized tools that enable organizations to efficiently identify, measure, and monitor risk while demonstrating these processes to auditors and regulators.

Strunk’s Risk Assessor, part of our Risk Manager software suite, provides a structured approach to performing and maintaining enterprise risk assessments. Instead of coordinating assessment activities through multiple files and emails, institutions can conduct evaluations within a centralized platform aligned to regulatory and industry frameworks. This standardization improves consistency, reduces assessment cycle time, and ensures institutions score risks against recognized requirements.

Beyond compliance benefits, Risk Assessor delivers actionable insights to support strategic decision making. Interactive dashboards and heatmaps allow leadership teams to quickly identify areas of elevated exposure, while drill-down reporting provides detailed visibility into individual risk factors and trends. Automated, board-ready reporting simplifies communication with senior management, directors, and examiners. Furthermore, the solution enables teams to collaborate in a controlled environment with managed access and assigned responsibilities.

In today’s dynamic risk environment, enterprise risk management must be a continuous process rather than a periodic exercise. Institutions that can clearly demonstrate their methodology, scoring rationale, and mitigation tracking are better positioned to respond to examinations and meet expanding regulatory expectations. By centralizing assessments, improving visibility, and strengthening reporting capabilities, Strunk’s Risk Assessor helps organizations confidently demonstrate a proactive risk management culture.

For more information, please email info@strunkaccess.com or visit us at https://strunkaccess.com/compliance-software/#risks to schedule a brief demo.

Choosing the Right Cybersecurity Assessment Tool in a Post-FFIEC CAT World

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Since the announcement of the FFIEC Cybersecurity Assessment Tool’s sunset, many financial institutions have taken meaningful steps to identify what comes next for their cyber risk management. The question is no longer whether to move on from the CAT, but how to do so in a way that remains practical, regulator-ready, and right-sized for your institution.
Strunk’s Cyber Risk Assessments feature was built with that exact challenge in mind. Our solution gives organizations the freedom to choose the best approach; designed specifically to align with two leading frameworks recommended by the FFIEC: NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) and the Cyber Risk Institute (CRI) Profile. Both frameworks offer a structured, defensible approach to evaluating cybersecurity risk without adding unnecessary complexity.
For institutions seeking flexibility, NIST CSF offers a high-level, outcome-based structure across six core functions (Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover). Our tool translates those outcomes into clear scoring, progress tracking, and the documentation that examiners expect, supporting strategic planning and board-level reporting.
For institutions looking for greater financial-sector specificity, the CRI Profile builds on NIST with more granular diagnostic statements, nuanced response options, and a dedicated focus on supply chain risk via its Extend function. Strunk’s tool streamlines CRI assessments by automating tiering and highlighting gaps most important to regulators and stakeholders.
Whether you’re transitioning from the FFIEC CAT or looking to modernize an existing program, Strunk’s cyber risk assessment solution helps transform complex frameworks into valuable, actionable results. We are committed to making cybersecurity assessments efficient and repeatable, ensuring your institution can move forward with clarity and confidence.
Contact Strunk at 800.728.3116 or info@strunkaccess.com to learn more.

An independent certified public accountant has examined Strunk’s operations and found them to be in compliance with the AICPA’s Trust Service Principles. It was determined that Strunk meets the Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy criteria for SOC 2 established by the AICPA.