Reflecting Back on 2023: Community and Regional Banking

In looking back at this year, one thing is clear to us in the Supervision, Regulation and Credit department at the Richmond Fed: Supervision is built on relationships. The relationships that we have with our bankers, our state banking counterparts and with each other in our department were put to the test earlier this year. Since the banking failures in March 2023, we’ve been taking time to assess and evaluate our processes. What’s been made public through the Supervision and Regulation Review of Silicon Valley Bank report released in April is clear: that more work needs to be done. Here in our community and regional unit, our central points of contact reached out to the leaders of the financial institutions within their portfolios to understand what they were experiencing during the early days of the banking turbulence. We found that those relationships allowed us to understand where stakeholders were impacted negatively and where the impact was not being felt. It is those supervisory relationships that make for more opportunities for us to get together and hear from each other like at our recent 2023 Community and Regional Banker Forum.