Weekly Forecasts Special Issue
A new metric for assessing the riskiness of banks, and 200 least risky U.S. banks
We apologize for the late publication of this special issue.
The spring of 2025 has brought an unusual calm to American banking. Inflation is cooling, rate cuts have commenced, and deposit outflows have turned into major inflows. Yet, beneath the calm, the same structural pressures that triggered the regional banking crisis two and a half years ago still run through the system. Higher interest rates continue to suppress bond values, commercial real estate faces a mountain of delinquencies and refinancing cliffs, and smaller lenders compete fiercely for funding.
This is where we introduce our U.S. Bank Risk Score. Using the latest FDIC Call Report data,1 we’ve built a simple composite indicator that distills thousands of balance sheet figures into a single, comparable risk measure. It’s not meant to replace regulatory judgment or common sense but to quantify fragility and to show, using numbers, which banks may be standing on thinner ice than their peers.
The model takes inspiration from the FDIC’s classic CAMELS framework but focuses on what matters most right now: credit quality, liquidity, and exposure to rate shocks. It’s built entirely from publicly available data and is designed to assess a bank’s stability from a simple, yet effective approach.
In the special issue, in addition to introducing our metric, we publish the names and scores of 200 U.S. commercial banks found to be the least risky by it. Not a single bank scores 0 (the ultimate best), but some are close. We will publish the list of the worst (most risky) U.S. banks later this week.
Mate & Tuomas
Understanding the metric
The effectiveness of a risk model depends on the narrative its inputs convey. The five measures we have chosen reflect the main fault lines of this cycle: credit losses, property exposure, liquidity tightness, deposit stability, and market value risk.
