It’s one thing to be a community banker when times are good and the garden is blooming. It’s quite another when outside forces, like a sluggish economy, razor-thin margins and regulatory reform threaten the fruits of your labor.
Our Community Bank Heroes each nurture a belief in investment from the bottom up to foster long-term economic stability in the communities in which they serve. Often, that’s what they experienced in their working career, having worked their way up from entry-level positions. Others have come into the community bank environment from much larger institutions.
Some have engaged their own personal heritages to help those on the way up. Many have used their experience in the wider financial world to bring increased vigor to deserving nonprofit organizations, which otherwise would have had to depend on far more fungible forms of fundraising.
Some give valued financial advice to customers for whom such input can lead to the right decisions on the most essential financial-life situations. In today’s environment of private-sector financial management, in which the client is often on his or her own while the financial manager makes the transaction decisions and rakes in the fees, the right level of knowledgeable guidance – within the bounds of regulatory propriety in the current banking environment – can be a make or break upstream strategy, affecting downstream situations far beyond the present.
The catchword in many of the nomination forms we received for this year’s Community Bank Heroes is “relationship.” In corporate language, the word “relationship” is often a synonym for “size of bank balance.” Once the numbers get to a certain point, customers may get all sorts of solicitations for which many may have no use.
Community bankers – whether they work for big banks or small ones – know that the word “relationship” begins face-to-face. Yes, they want to maximize the level of service they can provide for the customers at the top of the ladder, but they also look for pockets of need, even in communities considered to be affluent on the outside. They look for today’s dirt-dry garden that with a bit of cultivation could flourish in the next growing season, or the next generation.
Just as in the investment world, early funding can produce the best results downstream, community bankers look for the best avenues in which to nurture growth and to stop economic deterioration. Their children’s financial-literacy programs serve as the most healthy example of “get ’em while they’re young,” while their utilitarian drives for adult and elderly communities provide a basis of support that no federal program could match on such a personal basis.
As the economy’s tectonic plates shift, the strength of the gardens on top are becoming ever more critical to everyday people. And if you didn’t figure it out yet, we’ve met those everyday people, and they are us.
