September 17, 2021

The Virginia Association of Community Banks fondly remembers Patricia G. “Pat” Satterfield. Pat served as Chief Staff Officer of the VACB for 27 years. After her retirement from the association, Pat continued to stay involved with VACB through her work at Williams Mullen and volunteering at VACB events. Pat’s selfless devotion to the association and championing of community banks will always be remembered and appreciated. We will miss her smile and welcoming personality and extend our heartfelt condolences to her family.

Contracts provide you with the ability to clearly identify rights and responsibilities and address significant issues. Financial institutions can feel like they must sign the vendor’s contract as-is, especially when dealing with a big company.

If there’s a constant in the world of a community bank investment manager, it’s disappointment. If you buy a bond today and yields go down tomorrow, you wish you’d have bought more; if yields go up, you wish you had bought none. If your overall portfolio has unrealized gains, you lament the poor yields that are available; if you are presented with attractive rates on new offerings, it means you’ve got losses on the balance sheet.

The Cyber Threat Landscape is increasingly prominent in the news, represented by the major security breaches of SolarWinds and Colonial Gas. In recent years, the United States federal government has passed many bills related to cybersecurity. One of the most comprehensive actions was just recently enacted in the Executive Order signed by President Biden on May 12, 2021 – “Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity.”

Today, we have increased prices (inflation). But these increased prices are due to “re-starting” economies, not a huge demand growth economy, which is a much different scenario.
Recently, discussions about inflation have been commonplace. People are offering opinions on what lies ahead, and the topic seems to be everywhere in the headlines.

As I write this message, your VACB staff is up to its eyeballs in challenging tasks and, in some cases, even impossible missions. It’s simply impossible to predict the course of the Delta variant over the next few weeks, which will determine the eventual nature of our 44th annual convention in Roanoke. Will we be celebrating a renewal of face-to-face relationships held too long in abeyance, or be compelled to convert once again to a virtual convention (Heaven forbid)? By the time you read this, we will know that answer. We’re certainly committed to a successful in-person celebration, and it will be, calamities notwithstanding. But time will tell what kind of success we will share.

Our 2020-2021 year together was a time of many firsts and unknowns. Through the ebbs and flows of COVID, over the last 16 months, community bankers have met the enormous challenges head on and served both our communities and employees with amazing leadership. The one thing that this past year has shown us is that leadership is critical to the vitality of our organizations and communities.