Smart Org Changes That Could Boost Your Bank’s Trajectory

In a landscape of increased competition, mergers and acquisitions, and new technologies, many community bankers believe that reorganization—whether company-wide or in specific areas of operations—is vital to success.

“We want community banks to survive and thrive,” says Clayton Legear, president and CEO of $740 million-asset Merchants & Marine Bank in Pascagoula, Miss. “It’s imperative to design companies and organizations the right way so that community banks can keep running.”

These five community banks tell us how rethinking their org charts has made all the difference.

Reevaluation following acquisition

Efficiency is a key motivator for an org chart reevaluation. OakStar Bank in Springfield, Mo., has moved to centralize internal support services to accommodate both its organic growth and several acquisitions. 

In 2022, $2.7 billion-asset OakStar brought its acquired banks under a single charter. “When we started bringing new organizations together, some of the skill sets were repetitive,” explains the community bank’s president, Jimmy Stilley. “We looked at whether we could support the institutions that we bring in with our current policies and procedures.”

Tompkins Community Bank in Ithaca, N.Y., faced a similar problem to OakStar. The $8 billion-asset community bank recently consolidated four community bank charters into one. “We wanted to be more efficient in leveraging talent across our team,” says Stacie Mastin, senior VP and director of HR.

The two community banks took two similar but distinct approaches to their dilemmas. At OakStar, executives went directly to their teams for feedback, asking if and where they were having difficulty navigating the organization and if that difficulty stemmed from communication or policies. 

After these conversations, OakStar decided to stand up a shared services department for the entire bank. “We’ve got skill sets and capacities throughout the bank,” says Stilley. “One market has a specialty that another market doesn’t. Where do we share and not share resources?”

OakStar mapped out the new organization layer by layer, surveying each position for specific tasks and percentage of time allocated to a task. Branch managers, for example, mapped out the tasks of universal bankers. 

The community bank compiled the data into a spreadsheet showing where there were resources, synergies and gaps. “The data told us where we needed to get a lot more organized,” says Stilley. “Instead of everybody doing this in every market, we can make sure we have enough resources in shared services to support the bank as a whole.”

Tompkins Community Bank, on the other hand, centralized internal support services into what the bank calls Centers of Excellence. “Instead of four managers managing the same function, we have reorganized into one manager across four markets,” says Mastin, adding that four small business lending departments in four markets, each with their own manager, could result in four different strategies. 

“By consolidating and taking people who are natural leaders in that space and giving them oversight across four markets, it has helped to drive our strategy in small business lending,” she says. “We’re leveraging talent better than we were before.”

The outcome for OakStar, Stilley reports, has also been tremendous. “The big thing is that it has produced capacity,” he says. “We had people that could take on more, but we weren’t organized enough to know what to have them take on.”

Keeping the customer at the center

Customer experience is as much a goal of reorganization as is efficiency, and new positions and delegations have helped Origin Bank in Ruston, La., prioritize it. Lance Hall, president and CEO, emphasizes that customer focus has dictated the approximately $10 billion-asset bank’s structure. 

Each of Origin Bank’s varied geographical markets—from urban areas of Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston to north Louisiana, south Alabama, Florida and Mississippi—has a market president to lead local operations and keep a pulse on the community. “Empowered, intelligent people close to the customer create a better experience,” says Hall. 

The community bank also recently created the role of chief experience officer. “We work in an industry that is super commoditized,” says Ryan Kilpatrick, EVP and chief brand and communications officer. “To compete, we [focus on how we can] be more responsive, deliver faster [and] make customers feel a certain way.’” 

The chief experience officer works as an internal consultant within the bank. “[He] is the customer champion inside the organization,” says Kilpatrick. “He’s finding ways that he can break down the silos that he finds.”

Ingrained culture in each department

Tompkins Community Bank has worked to embed cultural and development roles within each department. Mastin explains that the bank completely restructured its HR department, dividing it into one side led by a culture manager and another led by a manager of data and analytics. 

While there’s a lot of buzz around new, culture-building titles such as chief culture officer, many banks, like Tompkins and Origin, are opting to embed these responsibilities as widely as they can in the organization. 

“It’s a great testament to the vision and practice of Origin that today we don’t have the position of director of culture strategies,” says Kilpatrick, who previously held that title at Origin. “It permeates through the company, and there is ownership through the departments as to what the culture is.”

Hall emphasizes that Origin’s focus on culture is central to the bank’s business strategy. “Culture is a differentiator when it’s connected to strategy,” he says. “We said, ‘How do we create a culture that’s so strong that it attracts banking teams to us, so we can grow organically?’”

Origin maintains a culture council that meets quarterly through teleconference calls. The council is made up of employees from different markets and with different roles. “It’s important to get a broad range of employees,” says Hall. 

Similarly, in January 2024, Tompkins Community Bank created three employee experience teams—each consisting of three people—assigned to commercial banking, shared services, and wealth management and insurance. “It’s been a great success,” Mastin confirms. “The employee experience teams have been able to hone their understanding of that one area of their business. They’re much more prepared to answer and coach managers and understand the unique challenges and development needs of that employee base.”

Meanwhile, the HR operations and data analytics team at Tompkins has created a dashboard that helps managers make personnel decisions. “This makes sure that the same filters are applied across the different lines of business,” Mastin explains. “We’re using a consistent lens to evaluate and assess employees. It provides a much better line into performance metrics.” 

More tech, more job opportunities

New technology—and the additional titles that come with it—can also spur a company-wide org chart evaluation. EagleBank, an $11 billion-asset bank in Bethesda, Md., added digital banking to its repertoire, prompting a comprehensive organizational assessment. 

“We looked at our business across the organization and studied how we go to market, what will be the role of customer care and how do we ensure that employees are trained to respond,” says Karen Buck, EVP and chief administrative officer. 

And then, there was the introduction of new tech-related titles. “Ten years ago, there were no data scientists in any bank,” Buck points out. “Now lots of banks have a data scientist.”

Origin Bank has even added a robotics and intelligence process automation analyst. “We want to improve the customer experience and create efficiencies,” says Kilpatrick.

These new titles are just the tip of the iceberg. Increasingly, more decisions are becoming data-driven decisions. “Technology changes everyone’s role as they look at data to support decision-making,” says Valerie Utsey, ICBA’s EVP and chief people officer. “Risk management roles are expanding to address technological vulnerabilities resulting in increased fraud. Similarly, marketing roles are evolving to encompass the entire digital landscape.”

According to Utsey, implementing new technology must go hand-in-hand with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. “AI could span multiple departments,” she says. “Make roles clear and overcommunicate what the new role’s objective is and its impact to the broader organization, and, most of all, benefits to the customer.”

Speak up about changes

As they restructure, community bankers recognize the importance of employee engagement and communication throughout the organization. 

“At the end of the day, we want our people to want to come to work,” says OakStar’s Stilley. “For the past several years, we’ve focused on culture. We want to create an environment where we serve one another and have a good time.”

Stilley has found that it’s crucial for employees to understand the bank’s larger goals and strategies. OakStar holds regular meetings at a variety of levels, both in-person and through a virtual event platform. 

“We have begun going through a five-year strategic plan. We’re telling the team why we’re trying to achieve these goals,” he says. “We find that the team is better prepared and more engaged when we do a better job of providing the why behind what we are doing and where we’re going.” 

---