The Other Foot

EVERYWHERE (Oct. 12, 2026) — EveryBank has benchmarked itself against the FDIC’s Quarterly Banking Profile since it was founded, and it has been losing. The industry’s net interest margin is 3.32%; ours is wider. The industry’s charge-off rate is 0.57%; ours rounds to nothing. The industry holds 8.98% leverage capital; we hold two points more. For years the explanation on file was that EveryBank is a small, conservative, slightly dull institution, and the Chief Risk Officer was content with that.

The explanation is wrong. The Quarterly Banking Profile is not a report about banks. It is a report about dollars. It adds every bank’s income to every other bank’s income, every bank’s assets to every other bank’s assets, and divides, which is the correct way to describe the dollars and no way at all to describe a bank. Eighteen institutions hold nearly two-thirds of the dollars. The Profile is, arithmetically, mostly them.

So this quarter the bank built the other report. The Quarterly Median Profile Report — QMPR, which the Chief Economist pronounces Quimper, after a town in Brittany that has done nothing to deserve it — takes the same 4,238 FDIC-insured institutions, the same Call Reports at the FDIC’s own August vintage, and the same definitions, computes every ratio bank by bank, and reports the one in the middle, with the quartiles around it and one statistic the Profile has no column for: the share of banks that do the thing at all.

Before a single median was taken, the bank reproduced the Profile itself — 86 of 93 published chart and summary figures to the printed decimal, the other seven off by between $21,000 and $3.4 million on figures in billions, every size-class bank count exact. Nobody argues with a median that comes from the same spreadsheet as the FDIC’s number. They argue with the spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet is on the table.

What the typical bank is

A quarter of the industry’s loan book is in four products that the median bank does not offer and that exist at between 4% and 16% of charters. The median bank is a real-estate lender; half its book is nonfarm nonresidential and residential mortgage, against a third of the industry’s. Take the eighteen out and the nonfarm nonresidential share rises by two-thirds and lands on the median. The card and warehouse books fall by less than half, because the second tier of those lenders sits in the $10–250 billion class. "Collateral is collateral once," said Kal Lateral, Head of Lending, who has said it before.

What it earns

The industry without the eighteen earns 3.95%. The whole sixty-basis-point gap between "the industry" and the typical bank is eighteen institutions; inside every size class the median sits within thirty basis points of the class figure. The typical bank’s margin is not a point but a band, and the published 3.32% sits below the bottom of it. The typical bank also earns less on that margin — return on equity 12.0% against the industry’s 13.8% — because it carries more capital and has no fee business to speak of. Stan Deveaux, Chief Financial Officer, described the spread of outcomes as "about what you’d expect," and declined to say around what.

What it loses

The industry net charge-off rate was 0.57%. The median bank’s was 0.004%. Below $1 billion in assets the median rounds to zero and one bank in four recorded net recoveries. The non-owner-occupied commercial real estate past-due rate that the Profile charts by size class is zero at the median; six banks in ten report none past due. The headline that would be written from the Profile — "charge-offs at 0.57%" — describes a rate that lives in about six percent of charters. Reserve coverage is the one credit measure where the median bank is the more conservative: 201% against 173%, with one bank in eight holding an allowance against no noncurrent loans whatsoever.

What it holds

The median bank’s leverage ratio is 10.96% against the industry’s 8.98%; its equity to assets 10.6% against 9.9%. Its long book is short — 6.4% of assets repricing beyond fifteen years against 12.5% for the industry. The eighteen hold the long duration and the thin capital. One caution the Chief Risk Officer asked to have printed: below $10 billion, the median bank holds less capital than its class’s dollar-weighted figure, because the smallest and most over-capitalized charters dominate the sum; above $10 billion it holds more. The median is above the industry and below its own class at the same time. Perry Sentyle called this "a range," then said it was not a range, and a retraction is on file.

Who "the industry" is

Read by dollars, the largest banks grew loans 5.5% in a quarter while the $10–250 billion class shrank 3.3% and the two classes between $100 million and $10 billion shrank or stood still. Read by the median bank, every class grew about 1.7% — within a quarter of a point of each other, six times. The class figures are not lending. They are banks changing classes: a bank absorbed by a larger one carries its loans into the larger class the day the charters merge, and banks crossing the $10 billion and $1 billion lines take their books with them. The industry total is right. The rows beneath it are an artifact of adding, and nobody reads them as one.

"We have been the other foot the whole time," said A. Verne Ridge, Chief Executive Officer, who is named for the figure this report was built to replace and has taken it well. "The Profile tells you what the dollars did. This tells you what a bank did. We will publish both. We will read one."

The bank has added three entries to its Risk Register. RR-11: the bank’s own margin, long believed to be below average, is above the industry figure and precisely at the median; the bank has decided to side with the median. RR-12: the published loan growth by size class measures reclassification rather than lending; the bank has reclassified the finding as a finding. RR-13: a report named for a French town will be mispronounced by everyone, including the Chief Economist, who chose it.

The full report, with every chart in the Profile recomputed for the median bank and all six size groups, is in Investor Relations. The third quarter’s edition will follow the FDIC’s by about a week, as soon as the data is in and the Chief Economist stops hitting refresh on Freddie Mac’s mortgage-rate page.