Fallon Meyer, Senior Vice President & Market President, Encore Bank
In an interview with Invest:, Fallon Meyer, senior vice president and market president at Encore Bank, discussed what is driving demand for services and how technology is changing operations. “Our goal is to give clients the ability to bank the way they want to bank,” Meyer said.
Which sectors are driving demand for your services, and how are you approaching lending in this cycle?
The mix of clients we are bringing on is diverse. It ranges from mom-and-pop-owned companies to businesses with a couple of hundred employees. We do a lot with professional services, manufacturing, and specialized segments — law firms, architecture firms, accounting firms — but I cannot say it is one particular industry. It is broad and diverse across the board. Most of that has to do with our outstanding bankers and partners. We have worked all of our careers to establish networks of customers. Those customers believe in what we are doing and introduce us to other people, but there isn’t a size limit on referrals. We want people we bank to introduce us to others. Word of mouth is a strong part of our culture.
Part of that customer diversity is also because some banks have shifted their focus upstream to larger customers or larger areas. They have not abandoned markets, but they may not service the outlying areas of Charlotte or places like York County in South Carolina or Monroe County in North Carolina the way they planned to or even used to. Another factor is turnover. Banking is about people, and if you have had the same banker for 10 years and that person retires or moves on, sometimes that becomes a catalyst to consider changing banks. We want to be consistent in our approach, with veteran bankers and low turnover, so we can win business when clients are looking for a more stable, relationship-based experience.
We are also referral-based, as I mentioned earlier. Referrals from current clients are critical, and sometimes they cross county lines and business segments. Every time we think we are getting into one or two segments, it widens, because relationships do not stay neatly inside one category.
How is technology changing how you operate, and where are you investing?
We fundamentally think banking is changing, like a lot of industries. For us, that means we do not build brick-and-mortar branches all over a market. In our opinion, that isn’t how people bank as much anymore. We build one office in every city. We are currently in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina. We make it a centralized place that is easy to get to or describe to someone in a sentence or less. But people are banking with technology — their phones and laptops — and less in branches. Most banks don’t have decision-makers in branches anyway, so with our model, local decision-making is also important.
We take the money we would typically invest in a branch network and invest it in technology. We do some of that in a proprietary way by developing systems internally, but more importantly, we partner with over two dozen financial technology companies. That lets us plug and play with the latest and greatest tools, rather than getting stuck with a legacy system we have spent millions on and cannot move away from. Our client experience through technology is strong, and we feel like we function as well as a big bank in that regard because we have made the investment.
Technology also matters on the fraud side. Fraudsters stay ahead, and having good technology to combat that is essential. Our goal is to give clients the ability to bank the way they want to bank — some may never come into a branch — while still delivering a relationship-driven experience, backed up by outstanding technology and tools to help them run their business.
