Sheshunoff Consulting + Solutions

Phase One – Opportunity Assessment

The road to performance enhancement begins with a complete and objective analysis of your institution’s business processes, staffing, technology, and margin and fee income structure. Together with you and your staff, we analyze the unique workings and interrelationships of each business system at your institution to find available opportunities to increase earnings.

The Opportunity Assessment looks at every key functional area of your bank and provides our consultants a comprehensive, high-level view of your operations. Upon completion of this assessment, our consultants are uniquely positioned to make recommendations across a wide spectrum of operational characteristics, each specifically designed to help your bank achieve the highest level of performance.  This assessment allows us to qualify and quantify your earnings potential and identifies the road map for implementation support.

Phase Two – Implementation, the path to Higher Performance

• Implement strategies and tactics designed to maximize improvements to your bottom line
• Establish fee and pricing structures that reflect the true value of services
• Identify specific opportunities and create action plans to reduce costs
• Uncover hidden opportunities for growth

Targeted, detailed analysis, specific results

Each engagement is based upon the findings and proposed solutions as detailed in the Opportunities Assessment. Working together, our consultants and your management team define the parameters and expectations of the overall engagement. The deliverable is not a report, it is a series of fully implemented strategies and tactics designed to maximize improvements to your bottom line while ensuring extraordinary service for your customers. Each of these initiatives are priortized and meets criterion for the bank’s ROI.

Fee Income Enhancement

In today’s competitive environment, generating fee income is critical to your bank’s long-term profitability. Our consultants assess every opportunity in your bank to grow non-interest income. Through product and competitive analyses, we help re-bundle product offerings, re-price products, and establish fee structures that reflect the true value of services you offer. You’ll keep profits high and create a customer-service focused institution by offering premium products and premium prices. Specific services include:

• Relationship pricing analysis
• Loan and deposit pricing review
• Training
• Performance measurement

Operating Expense Reduction

High operating expenses have become so ingrained in an institution’s bureaucracy that a sense of inevitability protects them. Referring to the best practices and business process designs of high-performing institutions, our consultants identify specific opportunities and create action plans to reduce costs within your business lines. Specific services include:

• Financial comparisons & benchmarking
• Peer comparisons
• Technology impact studies

Margin Improvement

Managing your margin successfully is absolutely critical to long-term profitability. Our consultants will analyze in detail: interest expense, interest income and relationship profitability on both the deposit and lending sides of your business. Our experience has shown organizations that apply structure and discipline around these areas show dramatic improvement in their margin. We bring this structure and discipline to the organization through our loan and deposit pricing models, negotiation skills training for lenders, compensation strategies for behavior motivation and measurement tracking for performance evaluation.

Business Process Analysis for Improvement

Your policies and procedures, work flows and internal controls within your bank may be decentralized or out of alignment with your business objectives. Our experts work with you to examine the work processes at your institution and compare them with our database of best practices. You’re given solutions that range from eliminating duplicate or conflicting work processes to assessing risk tolerance to optimizing your technology.

This analysis is all done through the filter of better customer service. The ultimate goal for the organization is to obtain both the appropriate infrastructure for profitable growth while managing staff expense. Specific services include:

• Organizational design
• Technology integration analysis
• Standardization of best practices
• Customer service reviews
• Customer retention strategies
• Employee retention initiatives
• Corporate culture evaluations

Merger and Acquisition Support

One of the major challenges following a merger or acquisition is meshing the cultures, processes, technology and human resources of two organizations into one seamless, streamlined whole. If your institution is growing as a result of a merger or acquisition, you can count on Sheshunoff’s consultants to guide you during the post-merger adjustment period — a time when it’s critical to maintain efficiency, retain key employees, keep your combined customer base, merge technologies and centralize administrative functions. Specific services include:

• Business process & productivity analysis
• Morale building
• Sales culture transition
• Project management
• Customer relations strategies

Change Management

Our consultants act as your catalyst for change and uncover hidden opportunities for growth in your bank. The solutions identified during an engagement often entail fundamental changes in how your organization approaches business, employees and customers. It’s common to expect some level of resistance, and we know how to manage this. We create action teams made up of our experts and representatives from your functional areas that help create recommendations for improvement. When people support what they create, it ensures the changes will last long after the project’s completion. Your employees will embrace changes rather than fear them, removing one of the biggest hurdles in implementing any new approach.