I've spent twenty years in payments. Here's what still surprises me about community banks:
Your bank benchmarks every major line of business.
Lending — benchmarked. Deposits — benchmarked. Treasury and investments — benchmarked every quarter, and the UBPR does your loans and margins whether you ask or not.
The debit card program? In my experience, it's often the one line nobody has measured independently.
Not because it's failing. Because the main view a bank gets usually comes from its processor, comparing the bank with the processor's book of clients. That's not a benchmark. That's a mirror.
Three questions worth asking about your program:
- If it were quietly underperforming, would anyone know?
- Are your fraud rules costing more in declined good transactions than the fraud they stop?
- How does your program compare with published Federal Reserve and industry data — not just your processor's book?
The answers start in reports the bank already receives. What's usually missing is someone with the time to work through them.
Originally posted on LinkedIn, July 30, 2026.