08/06/2001
I relatively recently took a position as CEO with a small community bank ($45 million). Formerly, I was President of a $450 million bank. Needless to say, at a smaller institution, we all wear many hats. One of mine is CRA Officer and, since I had a dedicated person before, I'm rusty. I just read your entire section on the CRA regs. I want to be sure I'm not missing anything. As a small bank, is it really true that our total evaluation will be based solely on loan to deposit ratio, having the majority of our lending within our assessment area, reasonable distribution to low to moderate income individuals/families, reasonabel geographic distribution within our assessment area and prompt corrective action to any complaints? Is that really all? And, if we were graded "satisfactory" on those 5 elements, we'd have a crack at an "outstanding"? Small banks may elect to be evaluated on the lending, investment, service tests. Why would a bank want to do this if, as a small bank, they can elect to only be graded on those five areas? Ditto for submitting a Strategic Plan? Is there any benefit to a small bank in electing to be graded on either of these other two options? If, as we do, have a significant level of "service" and "investment" activities, do these get evaluated at all if we ultimately elect to be evaluated as a small bank? Can you give me some concrete examples of "Investments"? We currently participate in a local CEDE (Center for Economic Development) organization and are also involved in several minority organizations (Washtenaw County Homebuyers, POWER) with board positions, loans, agreeing to accept IDA's, participating in financial education seminars . . . are all those activities considered "Investment" activitiesor are there others I'm not recognizing? Other than the five elements of evaluation for a small bank, am I missing any other significant difference between how we would be evaluated and how a bank over 250 million would be evaluated? There seemed to be some di!fferences in data collection . . .please elaborate. Also, our bank is an 80% owner in a mortgage sub servicing company located in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (we are in Ann Arbor)and that subsidiary also engages in originations. What kind of reporting do we need to be concerned about with the sub, if any, since all loans are sold into the secondary market? I thank you in advance for guidance and elaboration on this so I can relaunch our compliance with the CRA correctly for our small bank.
08/06/2001
We have established a mortgage company subsidiary of the bank. Is there any legal way around the prohibition of paying tellers for referrals of bank customers to the mortgage company? Does a referral, either verbal or using a referral form, require an immediate affiliated business arrangement disclosure?
08/06/2001
We have a message posted on our Web site that tells customers not to submit emails that contain sensitive or confidential information and that tells them not to use email for specific transaction-related requests. Our system gives us the capability of doing auto-responders to any email submitted. We have drafted an auto-responder that thanks the sender for their message, acknowledges that it was received, but basically reiterates our policy about how they shouldn't be sending confidential or sensitive information or anything about a specific transaction or account. It has been suggested that we might want to add something to it to say something like "We will not act upon email requests for funds transfers, stop payments, account closings, or fraud notifications. These must be done either in person, or by calling such and such number." I'd like to know whether you think this is a good approach or whether there's a better way to handle this. We almost considered not even posting an email address on our site at all to just stop the email.