SuiteBlog

2009-05-13T22:36:00.001-04:00

Suite attended the Pacific Coast Bankers Bank executive conference last week. As always the guys from PCBB/BiG had tons of data and some interesting insights. Here are my five takeaways from the presentations, most of which were aimed at regional banks.

i) Profit is more determined more by managing loan types carefully and by looking after depositors than by looking for a high rate spread.

ii) In particular higher price loans do not produce profits, they are risky and go wrong.

iii) Managing risk is a constant exercise. Understand how the whole ball of string is connected - the numbers you use to measure loans should connect through to the numbers you use to measure the bank.

iv) Increase the frequency and diligence of credit management. For example you need to manage constantly problem customers and run loan loss reserve calculations more frequently.

v) Quantify and manage the features of your loans that drive profit and those that take away: rate caps and floors take away value, and deposit requirements add to value for example.

In general the mood was cautious, the feeling around the room was that over a year is still needed before W coast banking start to improve.

2009-04-29T20:31:00.008-04:00

We think there's a big opportunity for our analytics outside New York / London / Chicago / Boston, which is where most of our clients live nowadays. There are hundreds of banks, insurance companies and industrials all making occasional (and some not so occasional) use of derivatives and structured products. We can supply valuation services, custom analytics, and first class tools and libraries. We have already made good progress in California with our partner BiG. And we believe there's plenty more of that business, particularly since FAS157, and hopefully even more once the yield curve starts increasing and folks want to lock in some of the current rates.

To help chase some of this regional business, we have opened our office in Austin, Texas. Here are a few pictures of our new place, right on Congress Avenue. Unfortunately our window does not face the Capitol and is not high enough to see the river. Still it's a very comfortable place, right in the center of downtown. Do drop us a line if you are in the area.

Suite's New Office in Austin - nice flowers in the lobby

Entrance to the office - look it even has our name on the door.

And just outside, George W's old, old office in Austin

Spring flowers in Texas

2009-04-03T10:35:00.003-04:00

Hi everyone.

This is the first post on the SuiteLLC Blog.

At Suite, we'll be taking it in turns to put materials up on this site from time to time. As this is the first , we'd like to set out the purpose of the blog. So here we go.

Suite's blog is a place where:

our friends and colleagues can find out news and information about Suite.
we can explain in an informal way some of the features of our products.
we can describe the relevance of our products and services to some of the issues we see today in banking and asset management.
we can comment about recent industry news and Suite announcements.

Of course if you the reader have any comments, we'd be delighted to read them. Just add them in the usual way.