Area Deposit Map

What the shading means — and what it does not

The heat encodes one thing: deposit volume. It is not concentration, not your own share, and not a judgment about any institution. A dark county is a county with a lot of money booked in it.

The 6 shades are quantiles of the counties currently in view, not a fixed national scale. That has a consequence you should expect rather than be surprised by: the same county changes shade as you pan, because the population it is being ranked against changed. That is the honest behaviour for this ramp — a fixed national scale would spend nearly all of its range on a handful of booking towns and render every community-bank market the same pale colour — but it means the legend is part of the reading. The surface says so beside the ramp, every time.

The shading is a rendering device. It is ours, it is labelled as ours, and it is not a threshold, a band or a watch level. Nothing on this surface says a county is high or low; it says where a county sits among the counties you are looking at.

Deposits are booked to the branch of record

This is the single most important thing to know before you read the map, and it is the reason the ramp works the way it does.

The Summary of Deposits records deposits at the branch of record — the office the account is booked to — not at the place the customer lives or the money was gathered. A handful of counties host the booking offices of national franchises, and those counties report totals that are not markets in any useful sense. Sioux Falls, Wilmington, Charlotte, Columbus and Salt Lake City are the usual names.

We do not correct that figure and we do not drop it. Instead we measure it and hand it to you: for every county the surface computes the share of the county total held by its single largest booking office, and when that share reaches 50% or more the county is marked and says so in words. That mark is a disclosure about our data — it is not a finding about a bank, and nothing about it suggests any institution is doing anything unusual.

The panel fills in as you zoom

The right-hand panel answers a different question at each scale, and the scale it keys on is the width of the map in miles, never a zoom level. Two viewports at the same zoom on different displays show different amounts of ground; miles are what a reader actually has in front of them.

• Wider than 600 miles — the national and regional read: how many counties are in view, what they hold between them, and the legend. Plus an instruction to zoom in, because no market has been resolved yet.
• Between 60 and 600 miles — the counties in view, ranked by deposits. Each one is a row you can click.
• 60 miles or narrower — the full market read for the county under the centre of the map: its ranked competitors, its concentration and band, its coverage line, and the branch-of-record disclosure if it applies.

You do not have to wait for the zoom. Clicking a county at any scale pins it as the market being read, which is usually faster than navigating to it.

Reading the competitor ladder

The ladder is ranked by deposits booked in the county, largest first, and it rolls subsidiaries up to the holding company — so a franchise that operates under three charters in one county appears once, at its real size. Where that roll-up is uncertain, the row says so rather than presenting a tidy number.

Your own institution is marked in the ladder when it is present. It is marked as a companion— it is there so you can find yourself, and it never changes anybody else's rank. Which institution is yours is resolved from your account, not from the address bar: a link somebody sends you cannot tell this surface that their bank is yours.

The concentration figure carries the note that always travels with it: the bands are general reference ranges, they are not a test any particular bank passes or does not, and no number here is an opinion about whether a transaction would be viewed favourably.

What the map cannot tell you

Being explicit about this is most of what makes the surface usable.

• The vintage is annual. Summary of Deposits is as of 30 June each year. The surface names the year it is reading and whether that year was the latest available or one you asked for. Branches opened, closed or sold since then are not in it.
• County outlines are drawn, not decided. The boundaries are simplified so they can be rendered at speed. They shade a market; they do not determine whether an office is inside one. Membership comes from the county each office reports.
• The county is our market definition, and ours alone. The Federal Reserve defines banking markets differently, and where a competition question matters, theirs is the definition that applies. The surface labels ours as ours.
• A rural county can be very few institutions. The surface carries how many are in each county so you can see when a share ladder is really two or three names, and read it accordingly.
• Zero is a reading, absent is not. A county with no reported deposits reports zero, and that is a real observation. Where we have nothing, the surface says we have nothing — it never prints a zero to fill a gap.
• The service types are a filter. Not every office in the Summary of Deposits is a deposit-taking branch. The surface names the office types included in its basis line; the totals are of those, not of everything filed.

Reading a market for the first time

1. Open the Area Deposit Map and read the legend before the map. It tells you what the shades are relative to, which changes as you move.
2. Pan to the part of the country you care about and let the shading re-rank. At national width every community market looks alike; the map is built to be zoomed.
3. Click the county you actually operate in. Check the ladder for your own institution and read your position among real observed deposits — not an interpolated percentile.
4. Check whether the county is marked for booking concentration before you draw any conclusion from its total. If one office holds most of it, the total is a booking fact and the ladder below it is the market.
5. Carry the question into Find & Compare Banks when you want the banks rather than the ground: draw the market there and the same institutions become a set you can compare, screen or combine.