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? For most community banks, the honest answer is: nobody has ever independently measured it.

Not because it's failing. Because the only view most banks get comes from their own processor — comparing the bank to the processor's own book, on the processor's own network. That's not a benchmark. That's a mirror.

Three questions worth asking about your program:

  1. If it were quietly underperforming, would anyone know?
  2. Are your fraud rules costing more in declined good transactions than the fraud they stop?
  3. How does your program compare with published Federal Reserve and industry data — not just your processor's book?

In one recent engagement, a single issue hidden inside reports the bank already received was worth more than $110,000 a year. No one was hiding it. No one was measuring it.

Originally posted on LinkedIn, July 30, 2026.