I bet your strategic plan does not have anything in it that says, “We want to match rates. We want to shrink our net interest margin.”

“Oh, what can we do to match the rates of our desperate competitors?”

Those words are probably not in your strategic plan, and yet the way that your plan is being executed demonstrates a reliable, predictable pattern, which basically means your people are still matching rates. So we need to address rate matching, not only from a decommoditization standpoint, but also how you handle this strategically at the same time.

I’ll tell you what—it’s really easy to do what’s normal in banking: sit behind the desks, wait for the requests, match the rates, or, on the deals that you call out on, take them through a typical sales process but then end up having to match the rates anyway.

What is it about your strategy that’s wrong? If you knew that, you’d say, “Roxanne, I’d have this fixed by now.” Well, of course. But how long can you live with not fixing the strategy that doesn’t allow you to increase your pricing?

There are many false attempts, and many people try very hard in their banks, as good bankers, to command premium pricing, and yet the job doesn’t get done. There’s always the next excuse.

“It’s the competitors.”

“It’s that nobody is loyal anymore.”

There are lots of excuses, but what are the strategies that are going to take you out of that? How are you going to approach things?

Strategy, by definition, is this: with limited resources, what do you need to do to make sure you hit an outcome? Most people only talk about the limited resources. The “doing” has everything to do with: Do you have the right sales system? Do you have the right differentiation?

Do you have the right attentiveness to the right sales system? Does everyone know how to follow it? And the proof is in the pudding, as my grandfather used to say. If you’re commanding great premium pricing, your people are doing all of those things right.

The post Stop Rate Matching: The Strategy That Protects Your Net Interest Margin [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Net interest margin. Three of my favorite words. Why? Because it is such an important component of what takes a bank to the top of its peer group.

Listen, if you’re tired of being average and competing on rate, there is a way out of that mess. I would suggest that the banks that don’t figure out a way to stop having to match rates are probably not going to maintain their independence going forward. Let’s face it, there is more competition than ever, and banks are undercutting each other on pricing. And yet, there are those who command premium pricing. What do they do? What do they know?

Why won’t they tell you their secrets? Well, you need to, in fact, know their secrets about how they position themselves, how they identify those who are likely to pay premium pricing, and how they arrange the situation such that the customer is telling them that what they bring that’s different is worth millions to them. Therefore, when they charge twenty thousand dollars extra, it is the bargain of the century, thereby taking them out of competing against competitors. The only thing they’re competing against is not having that special uniqueness the bank offers. You think it can’t be done?

Well, maybe you should hang out with the folks who are getting it done because if you cannot suspend disbelief and aren’t willing to say, “Maybe there’s something we don’t know,” I can guarantee you, you will continue to match rate. I don’t think banks can continue to do that anymore. Let’s face it, the big banks have a competitive advantage in pricing. We can’t compete in that space.

But listen, there will always be room for the community bank that’s the boutique bank, that adds tremendous value, knows that they’re worth more, and doesn’t say those lame things like, “We have good people,” and, “We’ve been around for one hundred and twenty years.” That’s not going to command more than twenty basis points more, and you can’t make it on twenty basis points more. This is the time to really bring in additional pricing. So I hope to see you discover how to do that.

I’m teaching a special class on how to do that. I hope I see you there.

The post How Top Community Banks Increase Net Interest Margin Without Competing on Rate [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Several years ago, there was a gentleman who came into our Boot Camp. He was an EVP of a bank on the West Coast, and he told me that they had hired a firm. They’d spent several hundred thousand dollars, and they’d been in meetings for five months trying to figure out how to find their next most profitable customers.

I was thinking, Are you kidding me?

I said, “Well, how is it working?”

He said, “Well, we’re not done yet. We haven’t identified them.”

Okay. So what they should have done is identify them in, like, you know, a couple of hours by following a clean process of psychographics and firmographics, and then get busy bringing them in. That is the point, isn’t it?

And so, God bless him. He came up to me, and he was just distraught. Yet I get it. I’ve been part of those organizations where you get it and you see what needs to be done, but nobody else does. So it’s like, what do you do when you know everybody around you is going the wrong direction?

Here’s what happens when that person works for a bank that’s destined to become a top five percent-performing bank. They become a puppy dog with a sock in their mouth. They don’t let go. They just keep asking questions and kind of go, “Shouldn’t we already have figured this out?”

“Shouldn’t we be calling them? What is our process for calling on them? Do we really know we have the right target? What’s our process for organizing this?”

Those are top five percenters. They don’t watch the crazy going on around them, accept it, and say, “That’s just how things are around here. It’s just me. How will I ever move this mountain?”

Every great organization that’s become a top five percenter has had somebody who grew the backbone and decided to be a stand for, “If somebody can do it, we can do it—and we’re going to do it. So get the heck out of my way. I will just annoyingly keep asking questions until we get this right because I will not accept working for a mediocre organization.”

When was the last time you ever called home and said to your significant other, “Honey, today I performed average.”

Yeah.

Okay. That doesn’t happen.

We call home because we kicked some butt, took some names, and made something happen. That’s how a top five percenter thinks. They’re unstoppable in getting what they want when they know there’s a better way of getting things done, and they’re never going to sleep until they find the best way because success leaves clues.

As my mentor taught me years ago, only study with those who have their information in order and have done it repeatedly.

The post The Fastest Way to Find Your Bank’s Next Best Customer [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Every time I meet a new bank CEO, they say something very similar to what the three thousand-plus conversations I’ve had with bank CEOs sounded like. And what they say to me is this: “Roxanne, it’s different here.”

Here, we have to match rates. Here, we have competition for pricing. That’s just how it is here.

Now, I gotta tell you, I met two gentlemen years ago when they picked me up in their SUV. They were the CEO and the president of the bank, and we were about to do their kickoff.

The one said to me, “Roxanne, everybody complains that their deposit costs are high, but I can prove to you that we have the highest deposit cost in the nation.”

At which point, I stuck my fingers in my ears like a grown-up and I said, “I’m not listening. I’m not listening. I’m not listening.”

And I had a smile on my face. I was nice about it. They said, “Why are you doing that?”

And I said, “Because if your story becomes my story, I can’t help you.”

Markets do not dictate interest rates.

Let me say it again. The market doesn’t dictate the interest rates that you charge.

You dictate those through your differentiation and your ability to sell that differentiation.

If that were not the case, then every restaurant that has something other than the Golden Arches in front of it would be charging the same price as a McDonald’s hamburger.

It just isn’t that way, and yet in banking, we believe we’re the one great commodity that no one can break through.

Here’s the really sad part. Every time I hear a CFO or a chief lending officer say that to me, I should have always shorted the stock because I know that bank will lose its independence.

They’re right.

It is a commodity until you make it not a commodity.

So yes, in fact, they’re right. And there’s a whole other mountain of evidence, and you better get on that other mountain. You better get there fast because when you look at how we’ve moved from twenty thousand banks down to four thousand banks, we know where this is going.

The only banks that will be left will be the boutique banks that can command extreme premium pricing because they are worth it.

That’s the only game in town, and it’s a game you better master—and fast.

The post Why Premium Pricing Is a Leadership Decision—Not a Market Condition [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Research shows that 70–90% of mergers fail to deliver their intended value—not because the financial analysis was wrong, but because leadership underestimated the importance of culture, alignment, and execution.

If your teams aren’t operating from a shared vision with clear accountability, even the best merger strategy can quickly unravel.

In this week’s video, discover why traditional strategic planning often falls short during mergers and acquisitions—and what high-performing community banks do differently to protect profitability while creating a stronger organization.

You’ll discover:

• Why most merger integration efforts fail despite extensive planning.
• The critical role culture and performance execution play in merger success.
• How elite banks align people, purpose, and profit to accelerate post-merger performance.

Whether your bank is preparing for an acquisition, evaluating future opportunities, or simply strengthening strategic execution, these principles can help you avoid costly mistakes and create lasting value.

Watch the video to discover how the highest-performing banks turn disruption into competitive advantage.

This week, we’re talking about what really determines the success or failure of bank mergers, and it’s not what your lawyers are telling you.

Most banks enter mergers armed with due diligence reports and legal documents, but completely unarmed when it comes to cultural alignment and performance execution—the whole reason you’re doing this. The research is sobering.

Seventy to ninety percent of mergers fail to deliver their intended value. Why? Most banks try to bolt a new organization onto a broken culture and hope for the best.

When I was in graduate school for strategic planning, I asked my professor a pointed question: “Have you ever seen this traditional strategic planning process we’re working on actually work?”

He paused and finally said, “Not really.”

That was the moment I knew we had to invent something different—something that actually drove results during disruption.

We created a strategic planning system built for high-performing banks—not project lists, but true alignment of people, purpose, and profit.

And it works.

We’ve seen clients avoid costly integration failures and emerge from mergers and acquisitions stronger, more profitable, and even more cohesive than ever before.

And you can too.

The post The Real Reason Bank Mergers Fail (It Isn’t Your Strategic Plan) appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

AI isn’t the threat. Stale thinking is.

In this video, Roxanne Emmerich takes off the gloves and exposes what no banker wants to admit: most teams are built for a world that no longer exists.

You’ll discover:

• “Transactional” roles are a death sentence in this new age
• Wisdom—not labor—is the new currency of performance
• Strategy built once a year? That’s a retirement plan, not a growth engine

If you don’t teach your people how to think in second and third orders, you’re complicit in their extinction.

This is not about getting ahead. This is about not being left behind.

Watch now. 

It’s an AI wild, wild West, and everything is happening fast. And most banks have no idea how to get aligned.

I’ve been mentioning to my bank executives to make sure that they’re getting their team prepared because we’re moving into a world of wisdom workers. So if you put something into ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever tool you’re using, but you don’t bring wisdom to it, what you get out of it is a bunch of junk. And so now, the highest performers are those with the most wisdom.

Brian Tracy used to talk about how anybody who read eight or ten—I can’t remember the exact number—books in their area of specialty would become a top one percent performer in that industry because they would become masters of the knowledge.

This is the world where you need wisdom workers.

I have to share with you—I’m quite concerned about most people who work in banks right now who are transactional thinkers and transactional executors, because most of those jobs will be much more quickly and better done by machinery in the very near future. So where are these people going to go?

It is your ethical obligation to teach your people how to remain employable in a world where they will have to become wisdom workers to be able to make that improvement.

So in this world, we have to move from being that first-order thinking to second-order thinking—people who can see around corners, anticipate what’s going wrong, people who bring wisdom and understand what are the very best ways to do it. How is it changing based on what’s happening?

It’s a different world. It’s exciting.

We’re living in a world where Saudi Arabia is coming in and investing in the United States, where interest rates are changing by the minute. Gold prices are moving in directions beyond our understanding.

Bond portfolios are going through all kinds of crazy. It’s just not the world it was.

And we’re going to need to learn to be excited by the changes and be able to be mobile, to move quickly—because hanging on to yearly strategic planning—and please tell me you don’t do yearly strategic planning but that you do quarterly planning—but anybody who’s sticking to the yearly plan will certainly become dust, because eleven or twelve months after you’ve created that thinking, the world has already changed.

In fact, the way the world’s working now, it takes about a week.

And that’s where AI—and the ability to think in second-order—will come in.

So, as executives and board members of top-performing banks, you must be leaders in helping your team know how to work with AI, develop their next-level thinking, bring wisdom into their understanding, and really elevate these people to make sure that they can run AI—not be run out by AI.

The post AI Won’t Replace Your Bank. Transactional Thinking Will. appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

They focus on products, scripts, and sales goals. The best-performing banks focus on something entirely different: becoming indispensable to their customers.

In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich shares a powerful story from her banking career that reveals why customers stop shopping rates, deepen relationships, and view their banker as a trusted advisor rather than a vendor.

In this video, you’ll discover:

• Why conversations—not products—drive meaningful cross-sales.
• How trusted advisors eliminate rate shopping and strengthen customer loyalty.
• Why cross-sales are a lagging indicator of relationship depth, not a sales tactic.

The banks winning today aren’t pushing products. They’re solving problems, creating value, and building relationships that competitors can’t easily replace.

Watch now. 

I attended my very first bank CEO conference quite a few decades ago. And you know what the theme was when people were talking about cross-sales? They said these words: “My people are still order takers.”

Fast forward a few more decades, and I can tell you now, when I talk to CEOs, the first thing they say to me is, “My people are still order takers.”

How could we not have made progress within decades on such an important piece?

Because cross-sales is a measure of trust.

When you are the only bank they’ll ever need or want, they bring the entire relationship to you, and that’s called cross-sales.

So cross-sales isn’t about sales and slugging things. Cross-sales is about being such an expert at what you do, crafting each question so beautifully as a trusted advisor, and seeing the opportunities so that at the end of this questioning process, you can say, “Based upon what you’re telling me, I think I can help you.”

“I’m going to recommend this because you told me that you had a challenge with that.”

“I’m also going to recommend this because this will fix the challenge that you mentioned about whatever.”

“I’m also going to recommend this because you had whatever.”

And then you take them through that and say, “Do you have any questions, or would you like to get started?”

That’s essentially the process.

But the key here is: Do your team members know how to ask the right questions, and do they know how to be in the listening?

Are they listening soul to soul, or are they in their head?

Are they connecting with that person in a way that makes that person feel like, “Man, I feel heard, and this feels good”?

I’ll never forget. I had a woman who came to me when I was in banking, and she had a PhD in a very challenging topic. She and her husband had two children. She far out-earned her husband, and she was a saver while he was a spender, and they were this close to divorce.

So they came in, they shared all of this with me, and they said, “How can you help us work through our money issues?”

And I took them through a process that I now teach our Trusted Advisors as I certify them. I basically teach them how to have the kind of conversation with people whereby you can make a meaningful difference in their lives.

When I left full-time banking to start this firm, she came to me and said, “I’ll never find another banker who can do what you did. You saved my marriage. You saved my savings.”

“I’m never going to find another one.”

I said, “Oh yes, you will. I’m off to teach hundreds of thousands of people how to do this.”

And now we have lots of Certified Trusted Advisors who actually bring expertise and value to their customers such that they will say, “You’re the only banker we’ll ever need.”

One Trusted Advisor said to me the other day, “Roxanne, ever since I discovered this process, none of my clients bring up rate anymore.”

Yeah. That was the point we were talking about all along.

It’s never supposed to be about rate.

If they’re talking about rate, you are a vendor, and they have proclaimed you as such.

You are never to be a vendor.

You are to be their partner and trusted advisor well beyond lip service.

That’s the game.

Cross-sales is just a number that lets us know we’re getting that job done.

The post The Power of Cross-Sales: How to Grow Relationships Without Being “Salesy” appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

It can’t.

The highest-performing banks understand that culture is not a side project. It’s a leadership responsibility. While every employee has a role in protecting and reinforcing the culture, accountability for creating and sustaining it rests squarely with the CEO and executive team.

In this week’s video, discover why culture committees often fail, why good intentions are not enough, and why top-performing organizations rely on leadership-driven systems instead of volunteer-driven initiatives.

Here are the key takeaways:

• Why every employee owns culture—but leadership owns the system

• The costly mistake banks make when they delegate culture to committees

• How top 5% organizations create sustainable culture change that drives performance

Strong cultures don’t happen by accident. They happen when leaders deliberately build systems that reinforce the right behaviors, values, and expectations every day.

Want to discover how top-performing banks engineer cultures that consistently drive growth, deposits, and profitability? Join our free upcoming masterclass, “Culture Is Not a Feeling—It’s a Performance System,” on June 11 at 1:00 PM CT.

Watch now. 

Sometimes two different ideas seem to be challenging each other. So you’ve probably heard me say everybody has a role in managing the culture of the organization, and you’ve also heard me say you can’t delegate culture.

Let me allow these distinct distinctions to play out so that you can rest through this concept. Yes, everybody needs to understand that they’re responsible for culture. So when they see somebody who’s doing something that’s not within the culture guidelines, they need to be able to say, “That’s not how we do things here at ABC Bank,” so that everybody understands they are in charge of culture.

That said, culture can’t be delegated. Basically, the CEO and the executive team are one hundred percent responsible for driving the cultural systems within the organization. Make sure they are aligned. Make sure the team members are matching the values and behaviors of the organization.

Make sure to acknowledge those who are doing it. Make sure to talk through it with people who are not doing it to let them know this is how we do things around here.

Delegating this to a culture committee—God forbid. I’ve probably talked to a hundred people now who said they were on a culture committee. And when I asked them, “How’s that going?” they said, “We meet every Tuesday, but not so well,” because culture committees don’t get it done. Cultural systems driven by the executive team and executed, perhaps, by some of these other people could make sense.

Again, always study people who have their information in order. If someone has driven and changed culture within an organization radically and sustainably, then probably just putting them on a committee is not going to get the job done. They mean well, but the world doesn’t go around with a bunch of do-gooders. The world goes around with those who bring mastery and excellence because that’s the only way to be a top five percenter—to understand what gets done by a top five percenter and how we can implement that here with perfection so that we know exactly the result we’re going to get.

Why?

Because we followed the only system proven to work.

The post Why Top-Performing Banks Never Delegate Culture appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich shares the story of a community bank that had strong service scores, happy customers, and a great reputation—yet profits were slipping. The problem wasn’t strategy. It wasn’t the market. It wasn’t the competition.

It was culture.

More specifically, a culture that avoided accountability, tolerated underperformance, and confused being “nice” with driving results.

In this video, you’ll discover:

• Why employee recognition programs, motivational speakers, and perks rarely fix performance problems
• How top-performing banks create accountability without creating fear or resistance
• The connection between culture, employee engagement, turnover, deposit growth, and profitability

The highest-performing banks don’t manage people better. They build systems that connect daily behaviors to financial outcomes. When culture becomes a performance system, profitability follows.

Want to discover how top-performing banks engineer cultures that consistently drive growth, deposits, and profitability? Join our free upcoming masterclass, “Culture Is Not a Feeling—It’s a Performance System,” on June 11 at 1:00 PM CT.

Watch now. 

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Well, mediocre culture doesn’t just eat strategy—it chews up your margins too.

Let me give you a behind-the-scenes example. One community bank had impeccable service scores and a reputation in their region for being friendly and reliable.

But behind the scenes, the numbers told a different story. They were bleeding profits, and it wasn’t because their customers weren’t happy. It was because their employees were trapped in a culture of avoidance. Managers hesitated to hold people accountable.

Performance reviews were vague. Everyone smiled in meetings, but nothing changed. And when we asked about their culture, they said, “It’s nice here.” But nice doesn’t pay the bills.

They had tried to fix it before by adding an employee recognition program, bringing in a motivational speaker, and even upgrading the break room. Not one of these things addressed the real problem: the absence of a culture that rewards performance and tells the truth about what isn’t working.

We helped them rebuild.

Understanding that performance comes after an extreme discovery experience where people understand practical ways to be more helpful to customers that never feel like sales. Only after they’re winning do we start bringing in performance metrics because, hey, listen, don’t get ahead of your skis. If someone has to be accountable to something they can’t hit, that’s a problem.

What happened?

Twelve months later, profits doubled. Voluntary turnover dropped 40 percent, and engagement scores rose. But this time, people were winning.

They were making great things happen, and they knew it.

And that’s the game worth playing.

The post Nice Doesn’t Pay the Bills: Why Culture Determines Profitability appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Your strategic plan was not built to sit in a binder. It was built to move revenue, margin, deposits, cross-sales, and culture. And now, midyear, the truth is staring every executive team in the face: some metrics are moving, some are stuck, and some are exposing the avoidance no one wants to name.

In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich delivers a blunt midyear wake-up call for community bank executives who are done tolerating soft excuses and slow execution.

You’ll discover:

• Why midyear is the most valuable diagnostic checkpoint of the year
• How elite banks stop obsessing over lagging metrics and double down where momentum already exists
• Why boards don’t reward explanations—they reward execution, traction, and measurable results

This is not the time for shame, sugarcoating, or “wait and see” leadership. It’s time to diagnose fast, adjust faster, and turn the second half of the year into a performance run your board can actually believe in.

Ready to stop explaining and start accelerating? Watch the episode now.

Watch now. 

Let’s get brutally honest for a minute. You’re halfway through the year. Halfway through the strategic plan your executive team swore they’d execute. Halfway through the revenue, margin, and culture shifts you intended to create.

And let me guess: some of your metrics are on track and some aren’t. Maybe you’re ahead in cross-sales but behind on deposit growth. Maybe net interest margin is stable but not surging. Here’s what elite banks understand.

Results rule. Excuses drool. Blaming the Fed, the market, the crazy pricing from your desperate competitors—that’s not leadership. That’s avoidance. And let’s be clear: your board didn’t sign up for adult day care. They want traction, transformation, results, and now is the time to deliver.

Midyear is not the time for shame or sugarcoating. It’s the ultimate diagnostic checkpoint. What’s working? Do more of it now.

Pour the gas on the fire. What’s not working? Diagnose fast. Adjust. Move. This is a game of acceleration, not apology.

Most executive teams obsess over where they’re behind and miss the most profitable move: doubling down where they’re ahead. That’s the mindset of the top five percenters—not, “How do we salvage the year?” but, “How legendary can we make this run?” Boards don’t reward explanation.

They reward execution.

The post Halfway Is No Excuse: The Midyear Execution Test Every Bank Must Pass appeared first on The Emmerich Group.