About a year and a half ago, Citizens Financial Group’s Don McCree got an unusual inquiry from a commercial client. The business was reshaping its board of directors and wanted to know if Citizens could share any insights into the process.
Having built a new board when it spun off from the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2015, Citizens executives sat down with representatives of the client and talked about how the bank had chosen its new directors.
McCree, the head of commercial banking at the $155.4 billion-asset Citizens, shared that anecdote as one example of how bankers are increasingly called upon to help their clients solve their nonfinancial business problems. Speaking Thursday in Chicago to an audience of chief financial officers from various industries, he said that they — like bankers — have seen their roles and responsibilities broaden, too.
“In its purest form, I think midsized [companies’] CFOs have transitioned from financial reporting functions to drivers of business across an enterprise,” he told American Banker ahead of his remarks. “I think what that means for bankers is, bankers need to be broader in the way they think about servicing their clients.”
Both groups share many challenges, he said. Recruiting and keeping millennial talent are among them. McCree said that he has fielded many questions on that subject and has sometimes brought together Citizens’ bankers and even human resources professionals to chat with clients about best practices.
Another example of where bankers and CFOs can help their clients is analyzing data across industries, businesses and geographies.
“Every company is asking themselves, how can we use the information that’s available to us in the myriad of forms and how can we use that to make ourselves more efficient?” he said in the interview.
One way that Citizens might do that for its clients is by analyzing the data in its cash management business, or in other words, its clients’ receivables and payables. The bank can examine how effectively clients utilize their working capital, benchmark it against their peers, and offer advice as to where a client might have room for improvement, he said.
McCree spoke about those themes at the CFO Rising Midwest Summit. In recent years, the Providence, R.I.-based Citizens has been expanding in its Northeastern, Midwestern and other markets and has been working to raise its profile. That expansion has included strategic acquisitions of nonbanks such as
Another key piece of Citizens’ strategy in recent years has been forging partnerships with fintechs. One of those is
Beyond simply teaming up with a fintech to offer a product or service, McCree said there are lessons in those partnerships that bankers can share with their clients.
“What I encourage companies to think about when they’re talking about partnering is to really be articulate about the problem that they’re trying to solve,” he said. “Partnering for the sake of partnering is not particularly forward-thinking, but partnering to more quickly provide a service or solve a problem is absolutely the way we try to approach it.”
