Articles by Pat Bator
Pat Bator, senior market and product development analyst
Pat is a graduate of Saginaw Valley State University (1973). He has worked in the financial services industry for more than 25 years (21 years with the Raddon Financial Group). Since joining RFG, he has been a main contributor to the firm's syndicated national research program, analyzing consumer and business preferences for financial products and delivery channels over the past two decades. For many RFG clients, Pat is the go-to person for evaluating competitive strategies and new product initiatives. An avid sports fan, Pat is skilled at debating the merits of the major Chicago sports teams. Additionally, he’s a fan of Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, T.S. Eliot, Jacques Pépin and certain Canadian exports.
When President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act into law, many financial service providers’ worst fears were realized. They know that it will be increasingly more difficult for them to offer a free checking product and other services to their customers.
With his signature to Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act on July 21, 2010, President Barack Obama enacted the most far reaching reform package that the financial sector has seen since the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933.
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In my opinion, the biggest hurdles facing the bill is the votes in the House and Senate. If passed, President Obama will surely sign the bill to regain/build-up “political” capital lost from the government’s handling of the BP oil spill.
Positive gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the third and fourth quarters of 2009 would suggest to some that the U.S. economy may be on the road to recovery. However, based upon the pulse of small businesses surveyed by RFG for a national research study conducted in the fall of 2009, such a recovery may not be realized until late 2010 at the earliest.
Dubbed by some industry analysts as the most “unprecedented and challenging time” facing financial institutions since the Great Depression, the severity of the times may be debatable, but one thing is certain: this period has changed consumer financial behavior and their perceptions of financial institutions. Therefore, we have identified 10 critical consumer research issues to examine in 2010.
As you may remember, the Treasury Department proposed a far-reaching plan to restructure the financial services regulatory system last June. Called 21st Century Financial Regulatory Reform, the general tenor of the proposal addressed many of the 22 specific and substantive areas that the FCIC was charged to investigate.
As you readers are aware, The Raddon Report has been the town crier (see submissions by Mssrs. Handel, Leavell and the Irreverent Reverend Pat) that has proclaimed the time is ripe for financial institutions to …
As financial institutions have continued to employ technology to improve their efficiencies, they have found that customer adoption of new technology is rarely ubiquitous; therefore, it needs to be supplemented with target market specificity (segmentation) in order to better attract, serve and retain customers.
As all financial institutions realize, the cost of doing business has been steadily going up in recent years. According to year-end data gathered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) and National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) since 1994, non-interest expense has risen at all insured financial institutions at an average rate of 5.9 percent per year. The Federal Reserve contends that the cost of compliance with accumulated regulations accounts for about 12 to 13 percent of these rising costs. Applying this contention to the industry’s year-end 2008 figures, insured institutions together spent between $47.1 and $51.1 billion to comply with existing legislation and the regulations that have spawned from congressional acts. Taken in aggregate, that is a lot of money for a pretty fair-sized financial institution.
