By: Prince Varma
Part 2
Two additional tactics that you should incorporate into your relationship management penetration strategy include:
- Conducting relationship reviews in addition to loan reviews; and
- Identifying and proactively monitoring changes in client behavior.
Relationship reviews
Relationship reviews are a comprehensive and thorough examination of the client’s business and should be the foundation for your relationship management process. They seek to provide both the client and the relationship manager with a roadmap for the upcoming 14- to 16-month period by identifying specific goals and concerns, as well as constructing a snapshot of the client today. The purpose of a relationship review is to understand the broader direction. Bluntly put, an annual loan review is not a penetration activity. Its primary focus is to verify the ongoing credit worthiness of an existing deal in the books. More details will come about this topic in a future blog.
Monitoring changes in behavior
Monitoring changes in client behavior through the use of “activity thresholding” is quickly becoming a mainstay in the financial industry. The idea isn’t new; however, the application of the concept to penetration is. Instead of having changes in credit score trigger an alert related to risk management and mitigation, we would instead look at thresholds related to line usage, number of deposit transactions, changes in average deposit amount and credit card transactions.
These kinds of client behaviors and activities provide insight into what is occurring within a clients business and as such, allow us to provide recommendations for products and services that are meaningful and appropriate.
