regulations. And if you actually tried to manage according to the regulatory
measurements, your bank would fail. You bring that up to the regulators and
they laugh. There’s just this whole slew of things, some of which contradict
themselves. Some of them were created when lawmakers added them onto
banking legislation because they looked good, or else to fit a particular
situation at the time.
DW: You’re talking about regulations that keep banks out of certain
businesses?
RP: Right, as well as those that mandate certain loan mixes, how you
approach a market, that type of thing.
DW: Preservation of asset ratios and so forth?
RP: You got it. We took a slightly different approach. We decided we had to
figure out what our real market constraint was. Using TOC, we found it had
to do with service levels and how we were solving problems for our
customers, not with the specific products we were offering. So we ended up
gearing the whole bank toward solving problems for our customers. Part of
the solution—the injection that broke the conflict—was the creation of
personal banking for everybody, not just for wealthy people. Banks normally
assume it’s not worth spending time with you if you have only $100,000
when they can spend that time with a guy who’s got $10 million. We
discovered that a guy who only has $100,000 isn’t really going to spend a lot
of time with you anyway; he’s just not there very often. So we stopped
worrying about that and began focusing on how to better manage our
customer relationships across the board. People ended up coming to our
bankers anytime they had a financial problem. If we couldn’t solve it for
them, then at least we could refer them to someone else, and we could give
them good advice because we didn’t have an ax to grind. All we asked is that
they let us manage their cash flow. Most people gave us everything in that
regard, plus all their loans.
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