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.
Where it comes from
Assignment is mostly by charter type and asset size. Commercial banks fall into groups 1 through 8 by size, savings banks into the 100s, credit card specialty banks into the 200s, bankers banks are group 301, non insured non deposit trust companies are group 401, and a de novo bank gets a group named for the year it opened. BankingLens reads the assignment out of the FFIEC’s own UBPR file and never derives it.
How to read it
The peer group is what makes a comparison mean anything. A 58% efficiency ratio is top quartile in one group and unremarkable in another, and the group is what an examiner has in front of them when they ask why a number looks the way it does.
The common mistake. Building a peer set by hand out of banks that feel similar. A bank near a size boundary changes groups when it crosses, which reshuffles every percentile it has, and a hand picked set has no such discipline behind it.
Go deeper
- FFIEC peer group codes explained
- How to build a bank peer group
- BankingLens pricing and what a subscription adds: percentile rank against the bank’s own FFIEC peer group, fourteen quarters of trend, and the flags an examiner reaches for first.
See also. Call report, UBPR, De novo bank, Bankers bank.
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