It’s not an easy time for community banking. Each day, we must balance changing interest rates, increasing fees, new technology demands, and mounting customer expectations, which leaves us wondering what’s left for innovation. But if we just stay the course without growing and adapting, we endanger our core accounts, heightening the potential that our customers will leave us for banks that offer the new products and solutions that meet their emerging needs. We must stay relevant!
To borrow a phrase from Disney CEO Bob Iger, in today’s environment, “The riskiest thing we can do is just maintain the status quo.” Community banks must evolve to remain competitive. We have to consider what new products we can offer to create a safe, secure, and engaging user experience, and at the same time, identify those that align with our bank’s vision and business goals. At our bank, we’ve found that answer in payments.
For instance, we recently moved into larger markets, and realized to capitalize on technology advances and the changing landscape, we needed a more robust treasury management platform. Business customers want easy, secure ways to manage their money and process payments, collect receivables, pay vendors, protect assets with Positive Pay, and more. Many apps claim to provide these services, but we know our customers prefer to work with us, their trusted bank, so we jumped at the chance to offer what they needed.
With the support of Rhena Leitermann, our treasury management department manager, and her newly formed team, we canvassed our customers, learned where they were seeking solutions, and upgraded our business technology platform. Now, we provide more administrative controls, multi-user actions, multi-level approvals, alerts, and advanced reporting capabilities. Our new system also deepens line of sight into activities for audit reviews and helps our customers manage their overall cash flow. In the future, we also plan to integrate FedNow capabilities to support just-in-time payments.
Yet, this offers just one example of how we intend to evolve our payments portfolio to meet the growing demands of our customers in the future. We are committed to changing, precisely because we know their needs are shifting as well.
And at the end of the day, that’s what community banking is all about. No matter what has emerged as the technology of today, we focus on meeting our customers and communities where they are and anticipating what’s next. We change to meet market needs, but we remember that “market” starts with our people, our customers. Because in a relationship-first banking model, the relationship is the key to evolution.
