BankingLENS

Reference

Banking glossary

43 terms a banker, an analyst or a borrower meets on a call report, a UBPR or a bank scorecard. Each one gets a definition in plain English, the formula where there is one, how to read it, and the mistake people make with it.

19 of them also carry what banks actually reported for Q2 2026, by asset size, computed across every bank that filed rather than a sample.

A B C D E F H L N R T U W Y

Published September 20, 2026.

A

Allowance for credit losses (ACL)
The allowance for credit losses is the reserve a bank holds against loans it expects to lose, set aside before any loan actually goes bad.
AOCI
Accumulated other comprehensive income is where unrealized gains and losses sit inside a bank’s equity, and for most banks today it is the unrealized loss on the securities portfolio.
Available for sale (AFS)
Available for sale is the securities bucket a bank uses when it may sell the bond before maturity, which means the bond is carried at market value.

B

Bankers bank
A bankers bank is a bank whose customers are other banks.
Brokered deposits
A brokered deposit is money placed at a bank by a third party rather than by the depositor walking in.

C

Call report
A call report is the quarterly financial filing every US bank has to submit to its regulator, and it is the source of every number on this site.
CAMELS rating
CAMELS is the confidential supervisory rating an examiner assigns a bank after an examination, on a scale of 1 to 5.
CECL
CECL is the accounting standard that makes a bank reserve for the losses it expects over a loan’s entire life, starting the day the loan is booked.
Charge-off
A charge-off is the point at which a bank writes a loan off its books as uncollectible.
Community bank leverage ratio (CBLR)
The community bank leverage ratio is an opt in framework that lets a qualifying bank under $10 billion meet one capital test instead of the full risk based regime.
Construction concentration
Construction concentration is construction and land development lending measured against capital, the second of the two interagency commercial real estate screens.
Core deposits
Core deposits are the stable, relationship based balances a bank can count on staying put.
Cost of deposits
Cost of deposits is the rate a bank pays on its deposits alone, ignoring everything else it borrows.
Cost of funds
Cost of funds is the rate a bank pays for the money it lends.
CRE concentration
CRE concentration is a bank’s commercial real estate lending measured against its capital, and it is the number that decides how much attention examiners pay to that book.

D

De novo bank
A de novo bank is a newly chartered bank, generally treated as de novo through its first three years.
Deposit beta
Deposit beta is the share of a change in market rates that a bank passes through to its depositors.

E

Earning assets
Earning assets are the assets that actually produce interest income: loans, leases, securities, interest bearing balances at other banks and fed funds sold.
Efficiency ratio
The efficiency ratio is how many cents a bank spends on overhead to produce one dollar of revenue.
Equity to assets
Equity to assets is total equity capital as a share of total assets, with no regulatory adjustments applied.

F

FDIC certificate number
The FDIC certificate number is the identifier the FDIC assigns an institution when it insures it.
FFIEC peer group
An FFIEC peer group is the cohort of banks a given bank is officially measured against, assigned by the FFIEC rather than chosen by the bank.

H

Held to maturity (HTM)
Held to maturity is the securities bucket a bank uses when it intends and is able to hold a bond until it matures, which lets the bank carry it at cost instead of at market value.

L

Loan to deposit ratio (LDR)
The loan to deposit ratio is how much of a bank’s deposit base has been lent back out.

N

Net interest income (NII)
Net interest income is what a bank earns on its assets less what it pays on its liabilities, in dollars.
Net interest margin (NIM)
Net interest margin is what a bank keeps on the spread between what it earns on its assets and what it pays for its funding, as a percentage of the assets that earn.
Net interest spread
Net interest spread is the gap between the rate a bank earns on its assets and the rate it pays on its funding.
Nonaccrual
A nonaccrual loan is one the bank has stopped booking interest income on, because it no longer expects to collect it.
Noninterest expense
Noninterest expense is a bank’s operating cost: salaries and benefits, premises and equipment, technology, and everything else it takes to run the bank.
Noninterest income
Noninterest income is everything a bank earns that is not interest: fees, service charges, card interchange, trust and wealth fees, mortgage banking and gains on sales.
Noninterest-bearing deposits
Noninterest-bearing deposits are balances a bank pays nothing on, mostly business operating accounts.
Nonperforming loans (NPL)
Nonperforming loans are loans that have stopped performing: 90 days or more past due and still accruing interest, plus loans the bank has placed on nonaccrual.

R

Return on assets (ROA)
Return on assets is a bank’s profit measured against the assets it used to earn it.
Return on equity (ROE)
Return on equity is a bank’s profit measured against the shareholder capital standing behind it.
Risk-weighted assets (RWA)
Risk-weighted assets are a bank’s assets restated by how risky each one is, so a capital requirement scales with the risk taken rather than with the size of the balance sheet.
RSSD ID
The RSSD ID is the unique identifier the Federal Reserve assigns to every financial institution in its National Information Center.

T

Texas ratio
The Texas ratio measures a bank’s problem assets against the capital and reserves it has available to absorb them.
Tier 1 capital
Tier 1 capital is the loss absorbing core of a bank’s capital: common equity, retained earnings and qualifying preferred, less goodwill and other deductions.
Tier 1 leverage ratio
The tier 1 leverage ratio is a bank’s core capital measured against its assets with no risk weighting applied at all.

U

UBPR
The Uniform Bank Performance Report is the FFIEC’s own set of derived ratios for a bank, computed from its call report and printed beside its peer group.
Uninsured deposits
Uninsured deposits are the portion of a bank’s deposits sitting above the FDIC limit of $250,000 per depositor, per ownership category, per bank.

W

Well capitalized
Well capitalized is the top of the five regulatory capital categories, and it is the status a bank needs in order to operate without restrictions.

Y

Yield on earning assets
Yield on earning assets is the rate a bank earns on everything it has put to work.

Definitions are free. Context is the product.

Every term here describes a number. The scorecard tells you whether a given bank’s number is good for the peer group it is measured in, across every bank that files a call report.

See pricing

Source: BankingLens, computed from FFIEC call reports for the quarter ending June 30, 2026. Quartiles are calculated across the full population of filing banks in each size band, not sampled. Non-insured non-deposit trust companies are left out of every statistic: they take no deposits and make no loans, so a margin or a funding cost computed for them has no meaning. This page and every term page under it are generated by _tools/seo/build_glossary.mjs. See our methodology and disclaimer.