FINANCIAL SERVICES CONTENT

See below for examples of content we have created on behalf of our financial services clients.

FEATURED FINANCIAL SERVICES CONTENT

A Financial Wellness Benefit That Goes Beyond Education To Real Action

Widespread financial stress has made membership in credit unions a critical employee benefit. However, budgeting tips are simply not enough: Credit unions are rising to the challenge to help employers offer impactful financial products and services to their workforce. Together, employers and credit unions can incentivize savings, reduce money lost to high fees and provide a suite of financial products that employees can use to

Fraud and cybercrime are on the rise. Is your small business ready?

According to a recent Federal Trade Commission Report, consumers reported losing more than $5.8 billion to fraud in 2021, an increase of more than 70 percent over the previous year.

Small business owners already have a lot on their plate, between labor shortages, supply chain failures, rising costs and by the way, a global pandemic, and the distraction that these shared challenges pose can easily become yet another headache, in the form of cyberattacks.

LONG-FORM FINANCIAL SERVICES CONTENT

MID-LENGTH FINANCIAL SERVICES CONTENT

Wealth Management 2025 Midyear Outlook

MIDYEAR OUTLOOK Why 1031 Exchanges are a Strategic Tool for High-Net-Worth Investors By Julie Baird FIRST AMERICAN EXCHANGE COMPANY The commercial real estate (CRE) industry looks very different than it did just a decade ago. Asset classes previously praised as “investor darlings” are now under significant pressure and new, niche sectors have captured investors’ attention. The real estate investment landscape is increasingly nuanced, as supply and demand dynamics across several sectors have beco...

Wealth Management 2025 Midyear Outlook

MIDYEAR OUTLOOK The RIA M&A Surge: Why Your Bank Partner Matters More Than Ever By Tiffany Tyson and Scott Mier BYLINE BANK 2024 U.S. advisor report from Cerulli, more than one-third of financial advisors plan to exit the profession within the next decade. As succession planning accelerates, the second half of 2025 is likely to be a pivotal time for mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity in the registered investment advisor (RIA) industry. According to the latest structure financing for multiple...
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Middle market businesses prioritize access to capital, supply chain visibility, and adapting to tariffs

KeyBank conducted the Middle Market Sentiment Pulse Survey in May 2025 to gauge sentiment amongst middle market business leaders amid the current economic uncertainty. The survey polled executives of businesses with annual revenues ranging from $25 million to $1 billion and found that potential tariffs are significantly influencing investment decisions, with most companies prioritizing supply chain adjustments and closely monitoring market signals before implementing growth strategies.
Tariffs h...
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Multifamily Borrowers Seek an Exit From Bridge Debt While Navigating Volatility

There is tremendous nationwide demand for housing and a critical shortage of housing supply — a combination that should create a red-hot investment market. However, economic uncertainty, an increase in tariffs on raw materials, and interest rate volatility have crippled many deals. At Bisnow’s Dallas-Fort Worth Multifamily conference, Patrick McFarland, senior mortgage banker at KeyBank, talked about strategies to help multifamily borrowers find a path forward, build a capital stack, and work th...

The expanding list of challenges facing renewable energy developers

However, the spring 2025 congressional budget bill proposed an abrupt halt to Federal renewable energy tax credits — rather than the slower ramp-down that the industry was expecting. While this suggested policy change infused a great deal of uncertainty into the industry, the underlying fundamentals, investor interest, and financing availability are expected to remain intact.
According to Andy Redinger, Managing Director, Group Head of NA Utility, Power and Renewables Energy practice at KeyBanc...

Fraudsters are targeting auto dealerships: Here’s how to protect your business

Check fraud is not a new tactic, but it has gained momentum in recent years. Between 2021 and 2022, the number of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed with FinCEN to report potential check fraud increased from 350,000 to 680,000, prompting the agency to issue an alert1 on mail theft-related check fraud schemes.
And while many businesses and consumers have embraced various forms of digital payment, certain transactions — for example, reimbursements for DMV fees by auto dealerships — often sti...

Tariff turmoil: the bumpy road ahead for manufacturers

While global business leaders in nearly all sectors have expressed anxiety about the economic effect of the U.S. government’s tariff campaign, manufacturers are uniquely exposed to levies on both completed products and raw materials. Plus, the tariffs are expected to disrupt supply chains, affect labor availability, and slow consumer spending.
A bumpy launch of the tariff plan has exacerbated these obstacles for the manufacturing sector, which accounts for 10.2% of the U.S. economy. Manufacturer...

Middle Market Business Sentiment Report - 1H 2025

Companies are growing their revenues and workforce
There’s good news to share about growth in the middle market: most of the leaders KeyBank surveyed reported year-over-year growth in revenue. Those with a positive company outlook reported higher growth than those with lower outlooks, but surprisingly, those with “fair” or “poor” company outlooks also reported high growth.
Compared to other segments, businesses that are based in the Midwest, operate within the technology industry, and have $250-...

The Family Office Advantage in Private Real Estate

In the last two years, registered investment advisors have been challenged with uncertainty and volatility while trying to protect principal and achieve returns for clients. More and more, RIAs are strategically partnering with—or allocating to—select sophisticated family office investment platforms to provide clients with more options for preserving and growing their generational wealth. By integrating family office strategies into their practices, RIAs can offer clients diversification and dow...
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Adapting 1031 Exchange & Insurance Strategies to Climate Risks | First American Exchange Company

One of the largest concerns for investors is the rising cost and decreasing availability of property insurance in natural disaster-prone areas. High-risk locations like California and Florida, for example, which are often struck by hurricanes, floods, and the devastating recent wildfires, are becoming more challenging to insure. Even as these regions remain attractive for investors due to lifestyle appeal and economic opportunities, the potential long-term costs of risks must still be deeply con...

Spring 2025 Real Estate Market Outlook, Opportunities with 1031 Exchanges

Springtime often sees an increase in real estate buyer activity. But before single-family homeowners and investors spring into action, understanding the economics of the current residential real estate market is paramount.  While affordability remains a major concern, there are signs of gradual improvement. And as noted by First American Financial Corp. deputy chief economist Odeta Kushi, "where housing inventory grows, sales follow." This signals that strategic sellers in markets with increasin...

How Seattle and Bellevue are Cultivating the Right Ecosystem for Growth

Take a second to think about the Bay Area. You’ll probably picture the shoreline of the Northern California coast, perhaps the Golden Gate Bridge or maybe even the iconic Google logo. The Bay Area—including towns like San Jose, Palo Alto and Santa Clara—became a global destination known for its natural beauty, prominent universities and massive proliferation of technology companies. Now, it operates as a regional powerhouse.

Rounding out the capital stack, Commercial Mortgage Affordable Team celebrates 10 years

The nationwide affordable housing crisis has been decades in the making, but in 2024, it has intensified. The National Housing Coalition estimates that there is a shortage of 7.3 million affordable housing rental homes in the U.S.; high interest rates have pushed many people back into the rental market; and homelessness rates have reached record highs, growing 6% in the past five years. To address these challenges, this affordable housing team is working closely with developers and investors to...

How to succeed in financing a multifamily project, despite multiple challenges

What compelled developers and lenders alike to stay on the sidelines? In a word, volatility. Yields on the 10-year Treasury, a primary component in sizing multifamily loans, fluctuated by an average of 6 basis points on a daily basis, twice the rate seen in 2021.1 That kind of volatility can swing financing costs by millions of dollars overnight, grinding deal activity to a halt.
So far in 2024, that measure of volatility has fallen only slightly, to just under five basis points. But that little...

Significant demand and high interest rates: How KeyBank’s affordable housing team Is making progress in the market

Despite the challenging market dynamics, KeyBank’s affordable housing team continues to grow loan volumes year over year.
Affordable housing properties have healthy operating fundamentals with strong occupancy and stable cash flow. What’s more, a national affordable housing shortage has created tremendous demand for more units. The fundamentals have generated remarkable investor appetite for affordable housing — but there is a downside: High interest rates and a challenging capital markets envir...

‘Building to a billion’ while tackling the affordable housing crisis

The United States has been in the throes of an affordable housing crisis. Research from the National Low Income Housing Coalition indicates that in 2023, a full-time minimum-wage worker could not afford a modest one-bedroom rental home in more than 92% of U.S. counties — and could not afford a two-bedroom rental home in any U.S. county or metropolitan area.
At KeyBank Community Development Lending & Investment (CDLI), Stacie Nekus, Head of Equity Investments & Syndications, and Celia Smoot, Head...

Don’t let a DDoS attack derail your business

A DoS attack occurs when an attacker floods a server with a higher volume of network requests than it can handle, causing the server to shut down or fail. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS, pronounced “dee-doss”) attack is a DoS attack in which malicious traffic originates from many different global sources and systems, making it harder to pinpoint and stop. DDoS attacks can overwhelm even the most sophisticated systems, resulting in service disruptions that take significant time and resourc

Prevent and treat ransomware attacks

Train your people. Preventing an attack starts with having a plan. To begin, educate your employees on the business’ IT security protocols. They should be trained on how to identify suspicious links, recognize illegitimate websites, and search results, set up multifactor authentication, create stronger passwords, and select software and vet it for security. Instruct them never to give user information, passwords, or financial data over the phone or on unsecured sites. It’s also important to repe

A Financial Wellness Benefit That Goes Beyond Education To Real Action

Widespread financial stress has made membership in credit unions a critical employee benefit. However, budgeting tips are simply not enough: Credit unions are rising to the challenge to help employers offer impactful financial products and services to their workforce. Together, employers and credit unions can incentivize savings, reduce money lost to high fees and provide a suite of financial products that employees can use to

Project Management Advisors on LinkedIn: Connect CRE

Both major and secondary life sciences markets felt a boost in speculative construction after the pandemic, when interest rates were low and there was an urgency around life sciences investment and development. As a result, the amount of new speculative space coming into the market in 2024 is far greater than at any other point in the sector’s 25-to-30-year history. PMA's Ken Richter spoke with Connect CRE about the current challenges and opportunities in the life sciences spec construction spac
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