Your Lenders Have Two Jobs. One of Them Always Loses.
Why banks keep asking one person to originate and to service, and what it costs.
By Brad Hawley, Principal | 6 min read
As banks grow, they staff finance, operations, compliance, IT, marketing and credit. Every one of those functions gets people whose whole job is that function. Then the commercial side gets a lender, and that one person is expected to find the relationship, structure the credit, shepherd it through committee, service the portfolio, chase the annual reviews and handle the exceptions. Six jobs, one seat, one incentive plan.
Make no mistake, banks do do sell. I have just met very few bankers who enjoy saying so. But that is what it is. Does your bank have producers? Lenders who are measured on new relationships? They are in a sales role. A bank is a professional services vendor whose product is a commodity, which makes the person the entire differentiator.
Everyone Else Split the Job Decades Ago
Look at the parts of banking that already separated these roles. Mortgage has loan officers and processors. Insurance has producers and account managers. Treasury management has sales officers who do nothing but sell and implementation teams who do nothing but implement. Even inside your own bank, nobody asks the treasury sales officer to also run the onboarding.
So why is commercial the one place where it is all still one person?
Why Banks Have Been Slow to Split It
There are real reasons, and they are not stupid ones. They are just expensive:
The Relationship Argument
The borrower should have one banker. That is genuinely true and it is the usual reason given. But one point of contact is not the same as one person doing every task, and conflating the two is how the argument keeps winning.
Credit Complexity
The lender has to understand the credit to sell it honestly, so the thinking goes that the same person must own it end to end. Credit fluency and credit administration are different work, and only one of them has to happen at the borrower’s kitchen table.
The Maintenance Always Wins
An annual review has a date on it. A prospect does not. When a lender is behind, the work with a deadline gets done and the calling gets postponed, every time, in every bank. This is the whole problem in one sentence.
Perception Problem
Calling still reads as beneath the job to a lot of bankers, so it is rarely trained, rarely measured, and quietly treated as something you do once the real work is finished.
How Most Banks Actually Grow Today
Referrals from existing borrowers, centers of influence, the chamber, the board, and whoever walks into the lobby. The strongest producers work their own network hard. Which means growth is a function of who your lenders already know, and stops the day that list is exhausted.
It works until you want to grow faster than your lenders’ address books.
Building a pipeline from nothing takes organization, persistence and the ability to diagnose a problem the owner has not articulated yet. It is a discipline. It is also the first thing to disappear from a calendar that has thirty annual reviews on it.
The Bandwidth Problem
Every other industry understands that selling is a job by itself, particularly once there is a real pipeline to maintain. Asking the person who delivers the service to also generate it creates a gap that nobody notices until growth flattens.
A lender carrying a hundred million dollars in relationships does not have the bandwidth to do both jobs well. When they try, and nearly all of them try, one side gives. It is always the calling side, because the portfolio side has dates on it.
Hunters
Find new relationships. Open new doors. Build the pipeline.
Gatherers
Service the portfolio. Run the reviews. Deepen what is already there.
The Case for Change
Banks should do what mortgage, insurance and treasury already did: build a sales team. Or at minimum staff a portfolio manager behind the producers, so the calling stops being the thing that gets postponed. Find people who can service what exists and open new ones.
These are hunters and gatherers, and a bank gets a far stronger bridge to its market by staffing both rather than hoping for one person who is genuinely good at each. Those people exist. They are rare, they know it, and they are priced accordingly.
The banks that separate these roles first get a decisive advantage, and not only in loan growth. They can enter a new market, or a new segment, without waiting to find the one unicorn who can do everything. They can also hire a genuine producer without asking them to spend half their week on annual reviews, which is the fastest way to lose the producer you just paid to recruit.
Which Half of the Job Are You Hiring For?
Producer and portfolio manager are two different profiles, and the modeling meeting settles which one your seat actually needs before anyone is called. Talnted builds the ranked list either way, and you see it first.
Get in TouchKey Takeaways
✓ Mortgage, insurance and treasury all separated origination from service. Commercial did not.
✓ Your producers are already in a sales role. They just do not call it that.
✓ Annual reviews have dates. Prospects do not. The work with a deadline always wins.
✓ No lender has the bandwidth to service a full portfolio and build a pipeline at full capacity.
✓ Banks that staff hunters and gatherers separately can grow without waiting for a unicorn.