For years, Sound Community Bank in Seattle organized its workforce around bank branches and specialists for retail lending, commercial banking and home mortgage. But in the last year, "we threw all that out the window," said Laura Lee Stewart, the bank's president and CEO since 1989.
Today, Sound Community is organized around the mantra, "the business of banking is the business of banking." That means one-time specialists are recast as "relationship managers" who are community bankers expected to have a broader knowledge of the different business lines. So, for example, a banker who used to specialize in residential mortgage lending now must also learn the bank's commercial real estate and retail divisions.
Branches are also now being staffed with "client success managers" who focus on working with repeat customers on a variety of matters.
The shift in personnel fits with Sound Community's strategy in expanding its non-mortgage lending lines of business.
"We don't want to act like a mortgage company," she said. "That is totally against our values."
Of the company's more than $900 million in assets, a bit less than 60% are residential mortgages backed by government-sponsored enterprise Fannie Mae, Stewart said. But Stewart does not want to be beholden to housing cycles — hiring mortgage loan officers when the market is hot, then dismissing them when mortgage interest rates climb.
To avoid that, Stewart has pushed Sound Community to develop a "relationship model, not a product model" – in other words, focus on these repeat customers who are using multiple lending products.
One potential area of growth is small business lending. Sound Community would like to build on relationships it developed with 1,500 small businesses the bank supplied with Paycheck Protection Program loans.
Indeed, Stewart speaks idealistically about a profession that she has spent more than 50 years in, beginning as a teller while in college.
"Banking is a noble profession," she said. "In many communities banking is a beacon of hope."
Stewart sees a socially responsible way of making banking accessible to a diverse array of clients needing financial services and young professionals looking for their first job. Still, Stewart sees "barriers to reach the C-suite" for women.
"Women can still have the burden of being assumed to have the direct responsibility of caring for both children and aging parents," she said.
That can create a bias, Stewart argued: An employer might assume a female candidate cannot log long hours or travel extensively.
Despite this, Stewart has seen progress over the last five decades and remains optimistic.
"I was at an [American Bankers Association] conference in Boston a couple of years ago and there was a line to use the restroom," she said. "It used to be, the one good thing about going to a banking conference is that there was no line to the women's bathroom."
