Testimonials

I also love the resources IntraFi provides for there to be peer-to-peer discussions... Peer Intelligence was such a blessing a couple of years ago when that was launched, where I could post questions without disclosing the bank that I was at and ask critical questions, whether it was regarding products and services … or leadership issues.

Best quality, in my eyes, is their responsiveness. Excellent customer service.

We love that [IntraFi] gives us options. We can either attract deposits through and sell the excess to other banks through or purchase funding. This is especially helpful in today’s regulatory environment.

I was told awhile ago that I’d be the last president here - that the bank would have to sell due to regulatory pressures and constraints on earnings. To survive, we needed to grow. In a perfect world, you use core deposits; but core deposits and the loan demand sometimes don’t flow at the same time. So we use [IntraFi] to fill in the gaps. It allows us to leverage the capital we have to grow.

Unlike its competitors, [IntraFi] doesn’t compete with us for our customers. We own our customer relationships. We set our rates. [IntraFi] crafts its services from a banker’s perspective. Head to toe, [IntraFi] is all about community banks. The company’s services level the playing field, helping us to better compete with much larger players.

Having access to the kind of scale that IntraFi provides us with is why our partnership is so successful. The ability to access large amounts of funding so quickly is essential. We have also been able to use IntraFi’s solutions to access funding on good terms as far as interest rates which is very important to the bank. IntraFi excels in customer service and responsiveness making doing business with them easy.

IntraFi offers a diversified set of tools that can benefit community banks in any environment they encounter

A valuable partnership means helping each other succeed, and IntraFi allows us to do so. Their reciprocal offering enables us to provide our customers access to millions in FDIC insurance while growing our deposit base. We are proud to provide a solution for our customers and bank with IntraFi’s services.

The flexibility of IntraFi’s variable priced funding options for 6 months, 12 months, and 18 months was huge for the bank.

Without reciprocal deposits we couldn’t do what we do in this community

The people are great! So patient and helpful.

IntraFi can be so helpful to banks in terms of their liability management. It can help them attract and maintain their deposits, typically from their local customers, and it can help them earn fee income in addition. I think one of the great things about it is [that] it helps community banks, particularly, compete with the largest banks for deposits and compete with money market mutual funds. And so this is something that's so important to community banks in terms of having the money they need to lend in their communities.

I would highly recommend IntraFi to other banks. They've been such an incredible resource to us, both in good times and in bad, helping us with resources to help our customers. I also love the fact that I can be completely honest with them and transparent about our business situation. They're not competing with me. They're there to help me keep my customers, rather than to take them away.

Reciprocal deposits are popular because they tend to be associated with multi-million-dollar depositors, enabling banks to attract deposits in large chunks with lower acquisition and maintenance costs as costs tend to be spread over much larger deposit amounts. Moreover, they tend to come from local customers at rates that are more in line with local pricing norms. They also tend to come from customers who are more likely to be interested in a broader, more long-term relationship that may include mortgages, credit cards, and other profit-generating services.

[Section 202 of S. 2155] gives Empire State Bank a powerful new tool to compete with the largest institutions for the deposits generated by small professional offices. It provides a way for Empire State Bank to attract new, valuable customers - customers that not only have sizeable deposits, but who can act as a referral source to other customers for our lending and other services. It also gives the bank a tool for managing liquidity.

The resources and the individuals and the integrity of the organization are above reproach. There’s never been a question that’s gone unanswered. Whenever we've had challenging times as an organization, they’ve been by our side.

[IntraFi] gives us a lot of advantages that some of the largest institutions may have today so that we can provide some of our more sophisticated borrowers with the products and services that they really want.

As other institutions started to become more aggressive in raising deposit rates, ICS and CDARS made it easy to accommodate rate-sensitive customers on a case-by-case basis without cannibalizing our other deposits.