Over the past quarter century, the Atlanta Fed's five branches have changed dramatically. Their role has altered from one primarily focused on operations to an expanded presence in monetary policy and outreach.
For much of the Fed's 100-year history, the branches in Birmingham, Jacksonville, Miami, Nashville, and New Orleans had carried out many of the Atlanta Fed's core operations, including cash processing and check clearing. At their peak, the branches operated as smaller-scale versions of the headquarters in Atlanta, processing millions of checks and pieces of currency each day and making the district a System leader in efficiency.
By the early 2000s, paper check volumes were declining rapidly, and over the next few years the Fed consolidated its 45 check-processing sites across the country to just one, in Atlanta. The branches in Birmingham and Nashville subsequently closed their cash operations in 2006 and 2011, respectively. Although the branches continued to provide some financial services, these changes, on balance, left many branches with a significantly smaller operations footprint.
Branches' role expands into policy, outreach
As one era waned, another was already under way. In 2007, the Bank set about envisioning a new role for the branches—one that capitalized on their regional presence and deep community ties.
The result was an expanded policy and outreach role for the branches as part of the Atlanta Fed's Regional Economic Information Network (REIN). Launched in 2008, REIN comprises a set of activities focused on harvesting real-time economic intelligence about the Southeast economy from a number of sources—including surveys, meetings with business and community leaders, and input from the Atlanta staff and branch boards of directors—to form a deeper, more nuanced picture of economic conditions. Ultimately, those views make their way into the Atlanta Fed's policy discussions, thus providing a critical link between economic conditions on the ground and national policy.
As part of this transformation, the branch managers stepped into new roles as regional executives. Now, more than ever, they are "the faces of the Fed." The regional executives spend much of their time crisscrossing their areas to keep their fingers on the pulse of the Southeast economy. The information exchange goes both ways. Regional executives spend a lot of time in the community sharing information about the economy and monetary policy. These outreach activities were especially important during the financial crisis and Great Recession, a period marked by extraordinary economic uncertainty and a host of new and evolving Fed policy actions.
Today, in their enhanced role as information-exchange hubs, the branches are capitalizing on the Fed's unique regional structure. By doing so, they help bring a diverse and more complete representation of the economy to the national policymaking table.