Comment Detail
Date: 10/19/22 First Name: Kyle Last Name: Abrahams Email: kabrahams@bankfnbt.com Organization Type: other Organization: FNBT Chickasha, OK Comment
We are a $1 Billion asset bank in central and southwestern Oklahoma with offices in 9 different communities. The financial services we provide, plus all of the support given through charitable giving and the time invested by our 175 team members each year are vital to the success of these communities. There are countless stories of customers who have thanked us for supporting their businesses and enabling them to open, sustain, and grow their operations and employ countless citizens. And many more consumers that have shared their gratitude for the bank's support in their ventures of buying homes, cars, farm equipment, etc. and working with them through good times and bad.
We were fortunate enough to receive the 2021 FHLB Topeka Community Leader award for carrying out our mission across our communities throughout our 130 year history. We utilize FHLB to ensure that we are always in a position to provide for our customers' and communities' needs and do so quickly and efficiently. Most of the municipalities in our markets have chosen to make us their banking relationship of choice and we are honored to be entrusted as such. These municipal deposits make up a significant portion of our balance sheet and the balances are quite volatile. This can create some funding challenges to ensure we always maintain plenty of liquidity to lend out to our local customer base, so we consistently rely on the FHLB overnight lines of credit in order to bring much needed stability to our deposit base. The broad array of loan collateral pledging options for these borrowing lines enable our bank to always gain a sense of security that we can meet the needs of our markets without having to keep in mind that we need to focus on any particular sectors in order to meet pledging requirements.
We also rely on FHLB letters of credit to shore up the collateral pledging requirements for our municipal depositors in order to allow them to adhere to state treasurer requirements for the security of those public funds. The combination of these sources of security and liquidity being provided by FHLB go a long way in providing peace of mind for our management team and stakeholders as we continue to carry out our mission statement in meeting the needs of our customers and communities and we are grateful for our membership.