Regional Banking Crisis? Not Happening, Natixis Says

When Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed in March, amid hemorrhaging deposits and shrinking investment portfolio values, dire predictions were rife that regional lenders would take down the economy. Well, such a catastrophe is a nonstarter and small banks should be fine, according to Natixis.

“We’re not totally out of the woods, but there’s not a banking crisis,” says Garrett Melson, a portfolio strategist at the Paris-headquartered investment firm. In the firm’s view, the problems were “confined to a handful of banks.”

Western Alliance, one regional lender that investors have fretted over, just announced that its deposits had grown more than $2 billion this quarter to date. Its shares jumped 12% in response, rising along with shares of other beaten-up small lenders such as PacWest, Zions and Comerica.

The KBW Nasdaq Regional Banking Index increased 7.3% on Wednesday after the Western Alliance news broke, although the index remains off one-third from its 2023 high. One persisting question is whether any more bank failures will occur, even if they are outliers. The most recent was First Republic, which the federal government seized and sold to JPMorgan Chase on May 1—the second largest bank failure in U.S. history after the 2008 collapse of Washington Mutual.

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Deposits at small banks started to slide in early March and lost some $200 billion, Federal Reserve data show. Then the decline stopped. Overall deposits have been steady since mid-April. Meanwhile, Fed stats indicate that lending has not flagged among these banks at all.

Chasing away deposits at the likes of SVB was the recent swelling of “unrealized losses”—bonds and other assets that had lost value, as interest rates have soared over the past 14 months. But Melson dismisses this as a problem affecting just a handful of regional banks. “It’s the unintended by-product of the tightening cycle,” he says. To extend that phenomenon to the entire small-bank category is “a red herring,” he adds.

To be sure, regional banks still face challenges, Melson says, notably competition for investors’ dollars from money market funds and Treasurys, which pay higher yields. Banks’ one-year certificates of deposit pay 1.67% on average, according to Bankrate. Money funds yield 4.84%, Crane Data indicates, and one-year Treasury bills 4.92%, per the U.S. Treasury Department.

Long term, another worry is that commercial real estate loans will sour. At the moment, there is no sign of widespread defaults. The CRE loan delinquency rate (a broader category for bad loans than defaults alone) is just 0.68%, down from the recent peak of 1.13% in 2020, during the pandemic’s onset.

Problems with CRE loans could occur if a recession hits, of course. “That could be a drag on growth,” Melson notes. Still, he points out, these loans constitute just 2.5% of gross domestic product.

Federal Reserve Expected to Hike Rates Next Week, Despite Shaky Banks

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Tags: certificates of deposit, CRE loans, deposits, Federal Reserve, Interest Rates, KBW Nasdaq Regional Banking Index, lending, money market mutual funds, Natixis, regional banks, Stocks, Treasury bills

The Universities Superannuation Scheme had stored participants’ details on Capita’s Hartlink platform, yet states ‘USS member data … has not been compromised.’

Approximately 470,000 members of the Universities Superannuation Scheme, the U.K.’s largest private pension fund, may have had personal details accessed during a recent data breach at pension administrator Capita.

In early April, Capita announced it had “experienced a cyber incident” on March 31 that mainly affected access to internal applications. As a result of the breach, The Pensions Regulator, the U.K.’s watchdog for workplace pensions, sent letters to hundreds of pension plan trustees to inform them of risk to their plan’s data. The Information Commissioner’s Office—the U.K.’s independent body for upholding information rights—and The Financial Conduct Authority have also urged companies to find out if any data has been stolen.

The USS stated that although it could not be certain if information about its members had been accessed or copied by the hackers, Capita recommended that the pension fund work from the assumption that it was.

According to the USS statement, it uses Capita’s technology platform Hartlink to support its in-house pension administration processes, and it has been working closely with the company during its forensic investigations. The pension fund announced that “it has been confirmed that USS member data held on Hartlink has not been compromised,” but that USS member details were held on the Capita servers accessed by the hackers.

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The information potentially accessed includes the names, dates of birth, National Insurance numbers, USS member numbers, titles, initials and retirement dates of some 470,000 active, deferred and retired members, according to USS. The pension fund is waiting to receive specific data from Capita, which it will then have to check and process, and plans to write to all members affected and, where applicable, their employers.

“We are very sorry that some USS member data held by Capita may have been accessed by a third party,” USS Group CEO Bill Galvin said in a statement. “We are very confident members’ pensions remain secure.”

The ICO said in a statement that affected organizations “should also consider their position and report data breaches where necessary.” Companies are required to notify the ICO within 72 hours of becoming aware of a personal data breach, unless it does not pose a risk to people’s rights and freedoms. However, if a firm decides a breach does not need to be reported, the ICO said it should keep its own record and be able to explain why it did not report the breach.