Inside the Banking Playbook: Lessons From Acquire or Be Acquired 2025

Growth is easy. Profitable, sustainable growth? That’s the real challenge.

In today’s banking landscape, the pressure is relentless—meet regulatory demands, expand market share, embrace AI, diversify assets, and somehow still deliver a world-class client experience. But here’s the hard truth: none of it matters if your teams aren’t aligned.

At Acquire or Be Acquired 2025, this reality came into sharp focus. C-suite bankers, fintech founders, and industry strategists gathered to dissect the future of banking—not just where the industry is heading, but how to get there, together.

And the biggest takeaway? A goal without a plan is just a wish.

The smartest leaders in the room weren’t just chasing growth; they were engineering it, making sure every product, tech stack, and team was working in sync. Because in banking, scaling without strategy is just an expensive way to fail.

Sever (department walls) or be severed

In many ways, banks have operated much like the Lumon departments in Apple TV’s Severance. Siloed by function, using resources only known to their team, aware that other departments exist, but too assumptive of their functions, and squeamish to collaborate.

As innovation speeds up, it is important for leadership to slow down in 2025 to ensure the right pieces are in place. To accomplish this, unity across departments – not just across personnel, but also in resources – will help the organization speak a common language to be precisely aligned across objectives.

The tone for this was set on AOBA’s first full day, as Wealth Access’ David Benskin illustrated the benefits of alignment from WSFS’s Chief Wealth Officer, Jamie Hopkins, “When we unified our data across divisions, we didn’t just improve internal processes – we transformed the client experience.”

Key themes from conference presentations

Start your growth journey with your existing customer base

Deposits are necessary for capital deployment, but without leveraging deposit relationships effectively, you’re leaving profits on the table. As White Clay studies have shown, the average Treasury relationship is three times more profitable than deposits. Now, think at scale about what an emphasis on cross-selling can do for a balance sheet when considering solutions such as Merchant, Equipment Finance, and well-utilized Line of Credit.

Unlocking value with the power of AI

Panels explored how artificial intelligence can streamline credit assessments and uncover growth opportunities in untapped markets. The industry’s trust in AI is entirely within bank-built and verified vendors models, rather than your mainstream GPTs, for obvious reasons around sourcing to provide regulators. In terms of efficiency, trusted bank models do a fantastic job of upholding credit culture, as well as maintain the tone of bankers when automating their communications.

As Wintrust’s Sarah Grooms highlighted in an AI-centric session, 66% of bank CEOs are in favor of AI, which is a number that is anticipated to grow in the coming years. While on the verified vendor side, Microsoft’s Falguni Desai inspired the audience to unlock AI as a growth engine, which was complemented well by nCino’s Chris Gufford, who compared this time to the concerns around cloud banking in 2015 – soon AI will be commonplace across the industry. 

Evolving asset classes

If your growth strategy involves new product lines, consider this strategy. Lift-out groups are becoming a popular option for banks to consider, rather than training an entirely new division. Both First Financial Bank and Wintrust explained the benefits of building a new division (Equipment Finance) by recruitment, which enabled a quick Time-to-Market advantage. The same concept was discussed on the event floor by CRE-concentrated banks moving into C&I, as well as consumer-focused credit unions moving into commercial lending.

Shifting from CRE to C&I (& business banking)

As many community banks pivot from Commercial Real Estate (CRE) more into Commercial and Industrial (C&I) lending, understanding the nuances of this shift is critical. Unlike CRE, where loans are backed by tangible assets, C&I loans rely on cash flow analysis and a comprehensive understanding of the borrower’s industry. Because of this nuance in C&I, high-touch/high-value customer relationships matter more than ever. The pivot from CRE is not superglued to C&I; it’s more about the concept of diversifying offerings across different risk buckets, and becoming stickier across a customer's holistic financial needs – from cash management, to working capital, and even into their wealth planning.

Preparing for credit cycles

Panelists emphasized the importance of proactively preparing for economic downturns, as the initial shock can be destabilizing. As the economy has held its collectively breath for the last three years as a recession looms, met by a new administration with pro-M&A policies, banks must be intentional in their planning to maintain profitability and ensure that any M&A conversations that cross their desk are entered into voluntarily, and not due to an unfortunate position they’ve found themselves in from lack of planning.

Preparing for the next credit cycle: Actionable takeaways for bank leaders

On the final day of AOBA 2025, fittingly on the main stage, and culminating the lessons shared throughout the event, this panel explored strategies to deploy as bank leader in preparation for the next credit cycle. In essence, banks must be proactive in their approach to planning for a shock to the system, and it takes alignment across all divisions to execute.

John Behringer (RSM)

• Tariffs and sustained inflation will play an impact in the consumer market. As fintech continue to scoop-up consumer customers from banks, it’s important for banks to not lose focus of the consumers who drive the economy.
• Understanding C&I customers—and their customers—is essential for building safe portfolios, especially during inflation and tariff pressures that may keep rates higher for longer.

Mac Thompson (White Clay)

• Define clear balance sheet goals and focus on becoming the primary lender to capitalize on cross-selling opportunities, as in some cases more than 50% of your customers often bank elsewhere. In a downturn, you do not want to be the secondary bank.
• Efficiency, not just growth, can be a sustainable strategy for banks. Some banks may thrive by maintaining profitability rather than scaling operations.

Joe Erdhardt (Teslar Software)

• Specific to C&I, DSCR tends to be a leading indicator, but banks, broadly-speaking, do not track DSCR aside from a simple pass/fail basis. Closely following the numeric performance of leading metrics is a must for risk mitigation and performance tracking.
• Unlike CRE, which involves tangible assets, C&I lending relies on understanding the borrower cash flow and overall business health. C&I requires higher-touch involvement with the customers, so knowing what the customer does and specifically how your solutions will support their growth is crucial.

Practical applications for relationship-focused banking

Use industry data to cross-sell

Understanding the specific challenges and opportunities within an industry can help banks offer tailored solutions. But, as specialized divisions emerge to achieve growth goals, two things must remain a priority.

• Training must be provided across all product offerings to link customer personas to the bank’s solutions. Do not find your bank in the trap of disqualifying opportunities in one division, say C&I, that are better suited for Equipment Finance, just because the persona doesn’t fit one division’s offerings.
• Culture must be established and maintained to optimize the point made above regarding collaborative cross-selling opportunities to create lifelong customers.

Proactively manage risk

Leveraging internal risk metrics and 3rd party data to plan for shocks, mitigating those headwinds, and avoiding concentrations is paramount to sustained success. Rewinding to the bank failures of 2023, concentrations were likely identified, but the shock potential was largely ignored, causing the less-fun variety of March Madness.

• On a minimum monthly basis, tracking risky sectors and then measuring primary and secondary exposures to those borrowers will provide valuable runway for defensive measures as a new credit cycle approaches.
• Echoing risk exposures from second-line defense to lenders creates difficult, but valuable, conversations with borrowers, allowing bankers to work as true advisors.

Why IBISWorld is part of the path forward

To begin your own evaluation for growth, begin by asking “What kind of bank are you, and what kind of bank do you want to be?” For some, maintaining profitability as a $1 billion bank is the goal. For others, scaling requires smarter asset management.

Whether your plan is to find the most efficient way to operate at your current size, or grow through acquisition, entering new markets, or new product offerings, IBISWorld provides detailed reports on feasibly every industry at the national and state level (1,500 US Industries, and 30,000 more at the State & County level) with direct application in all the key functions of the business relationship lifecycle – origination, credit approvals, and portfolio risk monitoring.

Meeting Preparation Questions, Risk Ratings, Early Warning System for Risk tracking, an AI Tool for immediate answers across all industries, and dozens more banking tools – all capable of API integrations into the critical systems where banks spend their time.

Currently supporting more than 500 of North America’s Banks & Credit Unions, as well as hundreds more fintechs who compete in the space, IBISWorld’s data is used to set market strategy and power growth, while maintaining credit and risk culture – effectively providing the power of three resources in one. Talk about efficiency! Here’s how:

Speak your customer’s language

Businesses, particularly small and mid-market businesses, look to their bankers as a center of influence, expecting bankers to know as much about their business–if not more–than themselves as the operator. Understanding industry trends, competitive pressures, and regulatory challenges enables bankers to have more informed conversations with clients.

• Risk of inaction: Your bank will be viewed as a service rather than an asset, and if the opportunity arises for a better rate elsewhere, you’ll likely lose a customer to the lender that cared more.
• Opportunity: A seat at the business’ table for key strategic decisions, which fosters conversation around opportunities, thus opening cross-selling channels to deepen the relationship.

Identify opportunities and risks

From tariffs to inflationary pressures, IBISWorld’s data can help bankers anticipate how external factors impact their clients, allowing for proactive risk planning.

• Risk of inaction: Concentrations go unchecked, and shocks go unmeasured. Historically speaking, banks that have waited for the credit cycle to turn before taking action are the banks that only exist in history books.
• Opportunity: Macroeconomic risks are inevitable, but planning for them instills confidence from back office to front-line. Further, proper planning aids in the prediction of charge-offs, mitigating the risk of those borrowers before they become distressed.

Support credit decision-making

70 IRS-sourced ratios (Cash Conversion, Current, DSCR, etc), broken down by business size, makes benchmarking industry versus borrower seamless. Further, with a trusted Risk scoring system that banks use to varying degrees (1 = Lowest Risk, 9 = Highest Risk), decisions can be made using common language.

• Risk of inaction: Lack of standardization in credit approvals creates a glut of inefficiencies, ranging from varying memo lengths to inconsistent conclusions based on sourcing.
• Opportunity: In its simplest form, banks begin using Risk scoring with the “Stoplight System” of Red/Yellow/Green decisioning buckets, to the most complex integration and delivery of IBISWorld risk metrics into models and scorecards, 3rd party risk metrics aid in accurate credit decisions.

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