“I always love my bank relationship review. It’s where they tell me what I’m doing wrong and what they can’t do to help while pushing only what they want to sell me. I’d rather talk to my ex-wife about carpet samples.”
-CEO, $1B Metals Company
For one top 5 bank website, the word relationship is used 319 times. On that same website, they identified exactly 2 customer needs they solved for. The rest was product gobbledygook. Maybe it’s just us…but that doesn’t seem very “relationship-like”. Feels more about them than you candidly. But that’s just a website. Or is it?
“My banker of 6 years called me asking for a meeting to discuss F/X hedging. When I explained that we only do business in the USD, he said he had to align with the bank’s ‘blitz’ goals where they sell a featured product to everyone all at once. Regardless of any actual need or problem in the business mind you.”
-CFO, Publicly traded consumer goods company
Banks are all about you and your needs–unless they don’t like your needs. Your needs get to close to a covenant limitation or don’t align with a product they need to sell? And heaven forbid your needs involve actual risk-taking. Heresy! Over the years the over-regulated banks are so paralyzed with an inability to take real lending risk and find themselves operating a long-term business model that seems to be a bit “inwardly focused”. Despite sales overtures of building relationship and being a real advisor to your company, I think we all understand at this point the fine print of real world execution offers a different customer experience. Covenants are built more to their business models than your needs, products are sold rather than solutions delivered, partnership extends only to the extent of the words in the credit policy.
“I want a lending relationship that moves beyond the language in their credit policy and works to really build capital solutions for my company.”
-CFO, publicly traded R&D company
It’s rare, but it can happen. No, not making the best of the banking choices but choosing a lender for a large part of your capital needs with a different business model. The GE-like industrial finance companies are gone forever, but having access to capital through a lender with extensive project and capex financing experience unbound by the same regulations, opens the door to a funding relationship that you may have thought is now extinct among capital providers. These lenders don’t jam you into credit boxes, they build real solutions with more flexibility in tax, asset, accounting structure and deliver to a wider range of credit situations.
Reimagine possibility.
At First National, we are an out-of-the-box complement to your bank group for financing the assets and projects that power your growth. Our unique business model and funding structure allow us to offer capital that moves with you: powering growth in good times and still bringing solutions in more challenging situations. Our company offers a different story than the mass of me-too lenders calling your company, so reimagine what’s possible…and get the deal done.
Ben Frank
Chief Revenue Officer
First National Capital Corporation
