St. Louis Fed Creates One-Stop Shop on Banking Competition

If you are planning a merger or an acquisition, you should make a new St. Louis Fed web site must reading. The site, http://CASSIDI.stlouisfed.org, went live in August with the goal of serving as a one-stop shop for information on banking competition.

"One of the appealing features of the site is that it includes information on institutions and banking markets for the entire United States," said Adam Zaretsky, an economist in the St. Louis Fed's Research division, who led the effort to get CASSIDI® (Competitive Analysis and Structure Source Instrument for Depository Institutions) started. "This is the only web site where the public can get banking competition information packaged in this convenient way for free." CASSIDI® helps bankers:

• view banking market definitions from across the country;
• search for information in a user-friendly format;
• benefit from regular updates as market structures change;
• explore "what if" (pro forma) scenarios by seeing how a potential transaction might change a banking market's concentration, or affect HHI;
• select whole institutions or individual branches as potential targets;
• look up geographic and depository information for all institutions and their branches; and
• view maps of many banking markets throughout the United States.

Other important CASSIDI® features include banking market maps, which enable users to zoom in to see what market a city is located in or zoom out to see what market(s) a county is located in; and the ability to select individual branches as targets in potential transactions.