Imagine what happens when innovation is embraced at a bank. While some banks fear FinTech, Eastern Bank dedicates entire teams to exploring it.

In this episode, Dallas Wells interviews Trish North, SVP of Digital Sales and Implementation in the second part of a look at Eastern Bank's innovation.

Customer loyalty is at the core of a bank's success. When you show that you care about your customer's needs, they are more willing to pay fees, forgive mistakes, and refer new business. 

This week, Dallas Wells interviews Joe Bartolotta, the EVP and Director of Strategic Partnerships at Eastern Bank in Boston, MA. 

There are two type of people. On one hand, you have managers, or the bosses, who work on a schedule filled with hour-long meetings. On the other hand, there are makers. Makers need larger time blocks to get projects completed. 

In this episode, Jessica Stone and Dallas Wells discuss how PrecisionLender has adopted this concept for our own teams, and explore ways to make it work in your bank.

Banks have all sorts of C-suite officers from chief executive officers to chief risk officers to chief loan officers. But for some reason, there’s no chief pricing officer.

Dallas Wells and Jim Young discuss why banks need an advocate for pricing on the executive team. 

When it comes to sales, it makes sense that relationship-builders perform better than others, right? In The Challenger Sale, Brent and Matthew Dixon Adamson argue that the sales people who challenge and educate their customers have more success than relationship-builders. Jim Young and Dallas Wells review the book and discuss how it relates to the banking industry.

Dallas Wells interviews Ray Grace, the North Carolina Banking Commissioner, about innovation and regulation in the banking industry. Grace talks about why the word 'change' is perceived as more dirty than 'FinTech,' and why it's so important to experiment in this complex economy.

If you don't know what APIs are, this episode is for you. Banks are using APIs for consumer applications like transaction history, branch locations, and depositing a check, but there's so much more to it. In this episode, Jessica Stone speaks with Mike Finger, a software developer here at PrecisionLender about what an API is and how it applies to the banking industry.

Dallas Wells and Jim Young discuss the newest chapter of Earn It: Building Your Bank's Brand One Relationship at a Time. In chapter 4, Dallas and Jim discuss the impact of moving the pricing process forward. And don't worry, there's plenty of sports analogies in this one. 

The first four chapters are available at theearnitbook.com.

Mergers and acquisitions are complicated. Dallas Wells talks with Brett Werner with TS Bank to discuss strategy and tactics to make the process a little smoother. Learn how Warren Buffet has influenced TS Bank M&A strategy.

To help you sort through the mountains of useful information that was shared at BankOnPurpose 2016, Jim and Dallas give highlights.

You may have heard of the 80/20 rule, but what about Zipf's Law? Dallas and Jess talk about how these mathematical principles apply to banking and the lending team. 

We all fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy from time to time, "This movie is terrible, but I've already spent an hour watching so I might as well watch the next hour." Actually, you should just stop the movie and spend the next hour on something you really want to do!

Dallas and Jess talk about how the same concept can apply for bankers around pricing decisions. 

We're going to be discussing the book that Dallas and Jim have spent a great deal of time on these past few months.

The book we've been co-writing, along with PrecisionLender CEO Carl Ryden is called Earn It: Building Your Bank's Brand One Relationship at a Time.

If you're just now hearing about the book, we're releasing it sections, a month at a time. After starting with the intro and Chapter 1 in March, we released Chapters 2 and 3 just last week.

It's all available at theearnitbook.com. 

Dallas and Jess explain the concept of customer success, how it works for PrecisionLender, and why it is so important in the Saas business. But, the economics (low margin but high volume, high cost of customer acquisition, losses in year 1, importance of lifetime value and need to minimize churn) also apply to banking, so bankers should take some of those same concepts and apply them to their business.

Dallas Wells is joined by Matt Davis, COO of Paragon Bank, to discuss Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). 

In Matt's article for banking.com, he laid out 8 big types of risk that an effective ERM platform should cover. Its one thing to talk about ERM, but is quite another to actually bring all of those very different risks under one umbrella. Matt and Dallas go over what some of the struggles Paragon Bank has either found directly or heard from other banks in managing risks that are often in a silo with their own department?

When your bank crosses the $10 billion mark, you are no longer considered a community bank, you are now a midsized institution. That new label brings with it an enhanced supervisory approach from Dodd-Frank regulations.

There has been a lot written about the impact of these new regulations, but Dallas Wells was lucky enough to talk with Al Dominick from Bank Director about what’s currently happening as well as what to expect moving forward.

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We're changing the name of our podcast to The Purposeful Banker. Where aiming at giving you better, broader insights, more guests and basically taking it up a notch.

Employees are the lifeblood of any company. They embody your company to your customers and the public, and they turn the ideas and strategies into real results.

Hiring employees can be tough. But hiring the BEST employees is even harder. In this episode, Dallas and Jess talk about how to find and keep superstar employees. 

Lenders typically have two sets of negotiations for every deal. First they have to successfully negotiate and win a deal with their borrower, and then they have to negotiate internally to get the deal booked. This means navigating the often difficult waters of credit and loan ops, including pricing approval, credit approval, document prep, and closing.

Negotiating with borrowers is where the rubber meets the road in pricing. It is also something that very few lenders are trained to do - instead they have to learn by trial and error.

The first year at any new job can be tough, and lending is no different. Jess chat with Dallas about the top 5 things he wishes he knew his first year of commercial banking.

How do you differentiate between what your customer wants and needs?

What do you do when a person says they want something, but their actions prove otherwise?

Dallas and Jess talk about our own approach to handling client feedback and how your bank can use the same approach to look at the services you receive and offer.

How can banks better incorporate the loan portfolio into ALCO discussions? How has regulators' focus on interest rate risk impacted bankers? What are some resources for bankers that want to learn more about ALCO and interest rate risk? Dallas and Jess speak with Darnell Canada, Managing Director at Darling Consulting Group, to answer those questions and more.

Earl Worley has been with KS bank for over 20 years and is ow the COO. Join Phil Buckley and Rollie Tillman as they find out from Earl how he views commercial lending, it's impact on the bank's health and what keeps the COO happy.

Banks struggle with lending when they try to be "all things to all people" and go about selling without a clear focus and strategy. They need to know which products and customers are profitable for them, and where they can provide real value outside of just the lowest rate. Then, spend their sales time and resources working those deals instead of spinning their wheels on low margin "commoditized" loans just for the sake of volume.