A Specialized Inventory Problem in Banks: Optimizing Retail Sweeps

FRB of St. Louis Working Paper No. 2005-023A

28 Pages Posted: 1 Aug 2005

See all articles by Suresh K. Nair

Suresh K. Nair

University of Connecticut - Department of Operations & Information Management

Richard G. Anderson

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis - Research Division

Date Written: April 2005

Abstract

Deposits held at Federal Reserve Banks are an essential input to the business activity of most depository institutions in the United States. Managing these deposits is an important and complex inventory problem, for two reasons. First, Federal Reserve regulations require that depository institutions hold certain amounts of such deposits at the Federal Reserve Banks to satisfy statutory reserve requirements against customers' transaction accounts (demand deposits and other checkable deposits). Second, some inventory of such deposits is essential for banks to operate one of their core lines of business: furnishing payment services to households and firms. including wire transfers, ACH payments, and check clearing settlement. Because the Federal Reserve does not pay interest on such deposits used to satisfy statutory reserve requirements, banks seek to minimize their inventory of such deposits. In 1994, the banking industry introduced a new inventory management tool for such deposits, the retail deposit sweep program, which avoids the statutory requirement by reclassifying transaction deposits as savings deposits. In this analysis, we examine two algorithms for operating such sweeps programs within the limits of Federal Reserve regulations.

Keywords: Retail banking, deposit sweeps, regulation D, required reserves, stochastic dynamic programming

JEL Classification: D20, G21

Suggested Citation

Nair, Suresh K. and Anderson, Richard G., A Specialized Inventory Problem in Banks: Optimizing Retail Sweeps (April 2005). FRB of St. Louis Working Paper No. 2005-023A, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=763685 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.763685

Suresh K. Nair

University of Connecticut - Department of Operations & Information Management ( email )

368 Fairfield Road
Storrs, CT 06269-2041
United States

Richard G. Anderson (Contact Author)

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis - Research Division ( email )

411 Locust St
Saint Louis, MO 63011
United States