When Christina Choi, a Hanmi Bank SBA district manager, was picked for a key leadership role in the bank's conversion to a new commercial loan system, her boss knew she was perfect for the job.
"She's relentless in trying to learn things, but she's also very good about sharing her knowledge and teaching people who work for her," said Anna Chung, chief community lending officer at Hanmi, an $8 billion bank based in Los Angeles. "She was very good at understanding her area, which is credit, but then when the people in our closing or loan documentation section were struggling because they weren't as capable in understanding the system itself, she literally learned that area and helped them out."
Choi said that as she represented the bank's Small Business Administration -guaranteed lending department for the loan system conversion, she needed to work with commercial lending, credit administration and compliance departments to ensure that the bank's SBA and commercial loan processes could coexist within the new system. That conversion—creating the bank's first shared central depository for origination and approvals for the $6 billion commercial loan portfolio—began in 2024 and is now in its second phase.
Choi also led Hanmi's creation of an SBA online application system—the bank's first online loan application—which expanded its SBA lending coverage nationwide late last year.
Through both the loan system conversion and the SBA online application project, Choi showed emerging leadership skills, Chung said: Intelligence, plus a passion to work with people on her staff to accomplish a greater goal, even when the work is thankless.
"She's always the one who catches on and understands faster than anybody else," Chung said. "I see a lot of potential because she never stops at doing her thing only; she looks at the whole department."
Choi, who joined Hanmi in 2015, said she has learned as a manager to recognize the different needs of individuals and the varied pathways for leading those individuals.
"Every person has different capacities; they have different things that are important to them, that they dislike, that they like. Learning to understand that and to be flexible and accommodate that while still achieving the work goals that we need to achieve—that was the biggest lesson," Choi said.
She also feels fulfilled by her work in helping small businesses and learning about their industries—something she didn't expect when she started in banking 18 years ago, Choi said. One of her first small business loan customers still stays in touch.
"He's so thankful; he wants to expand and purchase more businesses; he has family members who want to get into it now. And that ended up touching me more than I realized," she said. "I didn't realize how much giving somebody a loan could help them with setting off their career and achieving dreams that they had."
