Company: ASB
Filing Date: 2025-02-12
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000007789-25-000013
Chunk: 261

Company: ASSOCIATED BANC-CORP
Filing Date: 2025-02-12
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 7
Chunk 261
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 of future earnings due to changing rate environments to measure interest rate risk.

Policies established by the Corporation’s ALCO and approved by the Board of Directors are intended to limit these risks. The Board has delegated day-to-day responsibility for managing market and interest rate risk to ALCO. The primary objectives of market risk management are to minimize any adverse effect that changes in market risk factors may have on net interest income and to offset the risk of price changes for certain assets recorded at fair value.

Interest Rate Risk

The primary goal of interest rate risk management is to control exposure to interest rate risk within policy limits approved by the Board of Directors. These limits and guidelines reflect the Corporation's risk appetite for interest rate risk over both short-term and long-term horizons.

The major sources of the Corporation's non-trading interest rate risk are timing differences in the maturity and re-pricing characteristics of assets and liabilities, changes in the shape of the yield curve, and the potential exercise of explicit or embedded options. We measure these risks and their impact by identifying and quantifying exposures through the use of sophisticated simulation and valuation models which are employed by management to understand interest rate sensitive EAR and MVE at risk. The Corporation’s interest rate risk profile is such that, generally, a higher yield curve adds to income while a lower yield curve has a negative impact on earnings. The Corporation's EAR profile is asset sensitive at December 31, 2024.

MVE and EAR are complementary interest rate risk metrics and should be viewed together. EAR sensitivity captures asset and liability re-pricing mismatches for the first year inclusive of forecast balance sheet changes and is considered a shorter-term measure, while MVE sensitivity captures mismatches within the period end balance sheets through the financial instruments’ respective maturities and is considered a longer term measure.

A positive EAR sensitivity in a rising rate environment indicates that over the forecast horizon of one year, asset-based income will increase more quickly than liability-based expense due to the balance sheet composition. A negative MVE sensitivity in a rising rate environment indicates that the value of financial assets will decrease more than the value of financial liabilities.

One of the primary methods that we use to quantify and manage interest rate risk is simulation analysis, which we use to model net interest income and rate-sensitive noninterest items from the Corporation’s balance sheet and derivative positions under various interest rate scenarios. As the future path of interest rates is not known with certainty, we use simulation analysis to project rate-sensitive income under many scenarios including implied forward and deliberately extreme and perhaps unlikely scenarios. The analyses