Dirt Cheap Banks@dirtcheapbanks
Brenda has worked at this bank for twenty-seven years and she knows which farmers are three months behind on their equipment loans but still good for it and which ones are current on paper but won't make it through the winter, and she knows that Mr. Henderson's weekly deposit should be exactly $2,847.12 every Friday unless he sold extra calves that week, and she knows that the Peterson kid's checking account went negative three times last month which means he's probably using again, and she knows that the widow Morrison always withdraws exactly $300 every second Tuesday for her grandson's piano lessons even though the grandson is now thirty-four and lives in Denver, and this knowledge lives in her head and nowhere else because there is no field in the core banking system for "Morrison withdraws $300 for dead grandson" or "Henderson's deposit timing correlates with cattle market" or "Peterson family addiction patterns affect loan performance," and when the acquisition closes next month Brenda will train her replacement for exactly forty-seven minutes on how to process a wire transfer and how to order new checks and how to run the daily cash report, but there is no training manual for twenty-seven years of watching the same families grow up and fail and get married and default and die, and the acquiring bank's efficiency experts have calculated that eliminating her $47,000 salary will improve the cost-to-income ratio by thirty-six basis points, and they are correct about the math and completely wrong about everything else, and Brenda will clean out her desk on a Friday afternoon and take her coffee mug and her photos of her grandkids and walk out of the building where she has spent more waking hours than her own home, and the bank will continue operating and the customers will learn to use the ATM and the drive-through and the mobile app, and the new systems will process transactions faster and more efficiently than Brenda ever could, but no computer will ever know that Henderson's late payment means he's probably getting divorced again, and no algorithm will recognize the early warning signs in the Peterson kid's account activity, and no spreadsheet will track the subtle rhythms of a rural economy that Brenda could read like sheet music, and six months later when three farmers default in the same week and the loan committee wonders how they missed the warning signs, there will be no one left to explain that the signs were all there if you knew how to look, but the person who knew how to look got eliminated for efficiency.
