Byline Bank CEO Alberto Paracchini sometimes works from an unlikely place: one of the bank’s 50-plus branches, specifically in the back offices of the handful of branches near his house in the greater Chicago area.

The $9.65 billion-asset lender is headquartered in Chicago’s financial district. If he’s not heading into the office, he prefers his local branches over his home office.

But when he shows up to work at one of those branches, he said, “I’m just a guy.” His presence doesn’t bring extra pressure on branch employees, he said.

“There’s way more important things than preparing to see me,” he said.

Workplace culture starts at the top, and keeping employees happy benefits clients and business, Paracchini said. It’s something he’s focused on as his institution has grown from a $2.4 billion-asset privately held community bank 13 years ago to the size it is today.

Fostering a positive workplace culture is “collectively a huge team effort,” he said. “This is one person, and this is not just the [human resources] team, but it starts at the very top with the support and direction that we get from our board.”

The product of a family of bankers, Paracchini had absolutely “zero interest” in becoming a banker earlier in life. His dad was a banker. His siblings were bankers. Studying political science and Spanish in college, he was “heading in a direction that, by design,” would not lead to a banking career, he said.

But the temporary job he took at a bank after college snowballed into a decades-long career. Now, the institution he helped build is heading toward the $10 billion-asset milestone that’ll impact both its revenue, with the Durbin Amendment’s interchange fee cap, and its oversight, as it will be subject to the eyes of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for the first time.

Paracchini sat down with Banking Dive to discuss what’s changing and what’s staying the same as Byline Bank grows.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

BANKING DIVE: Heading toward $10 billion in assets, what stands out on the road ahead for Byline?

ALBERTO PARACCHINI: To us, getting to $5 billion was an important milestone, and getting to $7 billion was another important milestone.

Getting to $10 billion is just another milestone, and we need to be prepared to make sure that we not only comply, but that we meet or exceed the expectations that our regulators have of us, that our board has of us, to make sure that we're prepared to meet those expectations and then continue to execute our strategy until we get to the next milestone along the journey.

We’ll celebrate crossing $10 billion for a short period of time, and then we'll put our heads down again and continue to focus on the important things – executing our strategy and taking advantage of the opportunities that we have in our market.

With $10 billion on the horizon, when does preparation for that size begin?

We’ve always known that as an organization, we have opportunities to grow in the market. We always want our risk management, our controls to be on par, if not slightly ahead of, where the business is today.

We started [preparing for] $10 billion when we were $2 to $2.5 billion smaller than we are today. We wanted to make sure that by the time we’re in a position where crossing $10 billion is imminent, we’re well, well, on our way to not only meeting but being ahead of expectations.

Did you ever feel the need to pump the brakes on growth?

Years ago, we asked ourselves, “Is there an optimal way to cross $10 billion?”

If you talk to some of my colleagues in the industry, they will say, “Oh, you need, $2 billion more, $3 billion more right before you cross.” In other words, you need to find an M&A opportunity that you can execute so that you can cross over and have more assets to support your ability to cover the expenses that you’ll need. That's one line of thinking.

Other banks would say, “We’re going to manage and constrain our growth to stay right under $10 billion until we find an opportunity that would comfortably get us beyond $10 billion.” Others still would say, “We are going to execute our strategy, and we are going to cross this organically, and we're just going to continue to do what we do and continue to grow. It may take us a little bit longer to grow into our expense base, but that's the way that we're going to do it.”

Those are some of the things that we heard from others who had crossed this threshold. And then we actually studied the matter to see what the data showed – there was no one way that was the perfect way to cross that threshold.

Our conclusion then was – is – we’re just going to continue to stay focused on executing our strategy and growing organically, which has been our primary driver of growth. We're going to continue to look at M&A opportunities like we have, which has been essentially consolidating smaller banks over time. We're going to focus on things that we can control, and we're going to proceed accordingly.

Byline has grown through acquisition multiple times, including with the purchase of First Security Bancorp last year and Inland Bancorp in 2023. You said you’re open to more deals. What are the biggest benefits to M&A, from your perspective?

Through M&A, you can grow your deposit base. That is super important, and is a big reason why we find M&A attractive.

There’s also the ability to access talent. In 2018, we were starting to build our commercial and industrial business. That’s a long process. If you’re hiring bankers, sometimes one at a time, that's going to be a deliberate process. We had the opportunity to acquire this institution that brought with it 27 bankers, and a really good lower-middle-market-focused commercial banking business that dramatically accelerated our growth and our ability to have a presence in that space.

That simply accelerated, probably by five years, our ability to have that type of presence in a really short period of time. We’re an institution that, in order to sustain our growth, we know we're going to need more talent. We're always looking for talented bankers to join the company, and certainly M&A is a way to accomplish that.