How should a bank or credit union track what competitors offer?
Track the whole offer, not only the rate. Date and source every figure. Look as often as each product's market moves. And end every review on a recommendation, because a table of what competitors do is the start of the work, not the result.
Why does the usual review fall short?
At the institutions that have walked us through it, a competitive review is copy and paste. Someone visits each competitor's website, copies the product pages into a spreadsheet, and lines them up row by row. No two websites are laid out the same way, so the work is slow and easy to get wrong. One credit union's product team told us a single review took a whole day or more, and a week or more once the data was collected and a recommendation worked out.
By the time a proposal reaches the committee, two to three weeks can have passed, and the rates it was built on may have moved. An investor who works with community banks described the result plainly: a lot of time goes into gathering the data, and it does not necessarily turn into anything.
What should you track beyond rates?
The rate on the homepage is rarely the whole offer. A useful record covers, for each product:
| Part of the offer | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Rates by term and balance tier | A headline rate often applies to one tier or one term only |
| Conditions | Direct deposit, minimum balances, relationship requirements. Two equal rates with different conditions are different offers |
| Fees, and how they are waived | Flat, waivable or conditional. The condition is part of the price |
| Promotions, with start dates | A competitor's special can be the first sign of a funding need |
| Features | What the product does, beyond what it pays |
| Programs and segments | Students, seniors, military, first-time buyers: who each competitor is courting |
Loans need extra care. Many lenders publish only an as-low-as rate, which applies to the best borrower. Compare as-low-as with as-low-as, and keep it apart from rates for a specific borrower.
Who counts as a competitor?
Start with the institutions that share your branches' streets. Then widen it. Savers compare against online banks that pay more and are a tap away. Business customers compare against digital business accounts. Wealth managers we have spoken with make the same point: their competition is not the other community bank. The same investor made the point plainly: geography is no longer the limit of who you compete with.
A practical set has three rings: the local institutions customers walk past, the regional and national institutions advertising in your market, and the digital-first providers your customers mention when they leave.
How often should you look?
As often as the product's market moves. A mortgage desk may need prices daily. Deposit rates move around rate decisions, at the start of months and when competitors run specials, so weekly is a sensible floor. A full review of pricing approach is a quarterly or annual job. A lending leader at a credit union described it that way: watch trends weekly, and evaluate the method quarterly or yearly.
Between reviews, the most useful signal is a short note when something changes: a competitor launched a special, moved a rate or added a fee. When nothing changes, no note.
What should the work produce?
A recommendation. A product leader at a credit union described the assignment given to the team: analyze a segment's programs across competitors and come back with a recommendation, then act on it. They called the output a competitive summary: what each competitor does in the product, where the institution stands, and what to do about it.
The most useful summaries name a gap a committee can act on. A chief lending officer described the kind of finding worth bringing to committee: over twelve months, every competing credit union ran at least one promotion, and the institution ran none. A contentious conversation, and a useful one.
What rules keep the record trustworthy?
- Date every figure, and link it to the page it came from. A rate without a date invites the question of when it was true.
- Compare like with like: the same term, the same tier, promotional apart from standard.
- Keep history. A single snapshot shows where competitors are. Only a record over time shows who moves first and how far.
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