We provide liquidity stress testing to our ongoing ALM clients because we believe credit, interest rate, and liquidity risk should be considered holistically.

Why Choose Us

We recognize financial institutions can meet their liquidity needs in different ways. We offer independent fee-based advice so we do not have financial bias as to the solution(s) an organization opts to implement. We simply want what is best for our client and provide customized solutions to meet their objectives.

We believe effective liquidity stress testing requires a thorough understanding of our client’s balance sheet, business philosophies, operating procedures, and tolerance for balance sheet risk. We also believe that a thorough understanding of our client’s non-maturity deposits is a critical part of liquidity stress testing because they comprise 85% of the financial institution industry’s total deposits.

Our Approach

Our asset liability management (“ALM”) advice engagement begins with a thorough review of our client’s ALM policies, procedures, ALCO minutes, and reporting packages. We then have discussions with members of our client’s senior management team to better understand our client’s goals, objectives and tolerances for interest rate, liquidity and credit risk. Our next step is to review our client’s financial statements for at least the most recent 10 years to understand the institution’s financial performance.

This context provides us with the information we need to develop our liquidity stress testing. For example, a client could have a significant amount of investments that could be sold to meet liquidity needs. We would want to understand the liquidity and duration risks to determine whether this would be a financially viable approach. As another example, a client could have a high loan-to-deposit ratio with a concentration in residential real estate loans. We would want to ensure that the loans would be eligible collateral for borrowing and consider the level of advance rates under varying interest rate and credit conditions to ensure our client would have the necessary funds to meet disintermediation demands.

We always consider non-maturity deposits, recognizing that forecasting non-maturity deposit behavior is difficult because they contain two embedded options:

• The financial institution holds the option to determine the interest rate to offer the depositor, while;
• The depositor holds the option to withdraw all or part of the account balance at par.

As a result, we approach our non-maturity sensitivity analyses holistically. We review the performance history for each account considering the organization’s strategies regarding account design and offering rate. We benchmark our findings to our overall industry performance studies and cost estimates.

We then develop multiple methods for our clients to meet their potential liquidity needs in the context of their balance sheet, their goals, and the requirements of their primary regulator.