How to Increase Bank Profits in Challenging Times

How do you increase your  bank’s profits, and replace PPP revenue, when your desperate competitors are doing crazy things, and it has never looked harder to create profit within your bank? Well …

Here’s the reality 

There are circumstances outside of your control that you can’t do anything about. But there are things within your control that you can do a lot about—by just being very systematic, organized, and strategic about doing the right things. 

Let’s face it, when I started in banking, I took on the job of the guy before me. I started as a commercial and agricultural banker. And so I watched what the guy before me did, and I did what he did, without any understanding of whether what he did was optimized or not. 

Well, I hate to break the bad news to you: everyone in your organization has that same problem. They’re all doing the job of the person who came before them. Fascinating research appeared in BusinessWeek magazine, where they asked 6000 employees, “Do you perform in the top 10%?” And 90%, on average, of all employees, said they performed in the top 10%. 

Something’s wrong with that equation 

And what needs to be done is to correct that perception. We need to help people understand how they tie to profit on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. They mean well, they’re all day long doing that four-letter word, “busy,” but they don’t understand how they tie to profit. They don’t understand who the most profitable customers are. They don’t know how to secure the most profitable customers. They don’t know how to get premium pricing from those most profitable customers, and they don’t know how to get the entire customer relationship. 

Now, whose fault is that? Well, before you start blaming yourself, listen: it’s not about blame. Because guilt and shame are just permission to do it again. However, it’s time to shift those results. And the only way to make sure that you actually increase the profit of your bank isn’t to put it in your budget and say, “There, we have it in the budget, we should be hitting it now. We’ll give them incentive pay for getting it done.” 

We know that doesn’t work. That’s been tried many times, and it especially doesn’t work during difficult times. Now is the time we have to get savvier about what we do. Now is the time that we have to be far more powerful by doing the research and understanding the data of what it is that brings in those safest, most profitable accounts at premium pricing. And then we just need to get busy doing those things. 

Let’s face it

We don’t live on Planet Earth just to make a profit for our banks. But, in our jobs, that is one of the most important things we do because profit solves a lot of problems. And we can solve many of the things that go wrong within our banks by figuring out the revenue system—not investing in marketing—and doubling the profit that you bring in from every one of your employees. 

In my Breakthrough Banking Blueprint book, I talk about the plan to make sure everyone is tied to the bank’s profit on a regular basis. It’s worth reading by your entire executive team to ensure that you get everyone in line for 2022.

– Roxanne Emmerich

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.

Want to find the secrets that can double your bank’s profit, get you to top-of-peer performance, and stay there? Get your copy of Breakthrough Banking Blueprint here.