Eager to get the “massive flywheel” spinning faster, Citizens is stepping up efforts to serve clients across business, private banking and wealth in a unified way.

Mark Valentino, president of business banking at Citizens, said the division has made recent product, technology and geographic investments that are aimed at accelerating growth – and, in many cases, build off of other units of the bank.  

The $233.8 billion-asset lender’s business banking division serves customers from startup to $50 million in annual revenue, Valentino said. As customers grow, that unit makes connections to Citizens’ commercial banking division, which can serve clients’ capital markets needs, for example. 

Citizens executives see particular growth potential with the lower middle market to upper business banking segment. “We don't see a lot of the industry focusing on that customer base, or at least not doing it well,” Valentino said in a recent interview.

To capitalize on that, the Providence, Rhode Island-based lender has added bankers in New York City, to serve metro New York and New Jersey, and in south Florida, where Citizens has a small branch network, Valentino said.

The bank has circled northern and southern California, too, he said, noting changes in the regional banking landscape in that state, with the loss of First Republic and Silicon Valley Bank, and Union Bank’s acquisition by U.S. Bank.

New York, Florida and California are all targeted geographic areas in Citizens’ private-banking push, and that’s intentional. Serving customers in more than one aspect of their life is a key part of the bank’s growth aim. 

“A lot of these private-banking customers also own businesses or are connected to businesses,” Valentino said. “There's really a large commercial and business banking need amongst these customers, and so we've actually added relationship manager bankers in all of those geographies as part of our growth strategy.” 

Valentino declined to specify how many bankers have been hired recently or how many more the bank seeks to add, but said the lender has added “several bankers” in those expansion markets to go after business clients with $5 million to $50 million in annual revenue. 

“We see a huge gap there amongst a lot of commercial banks that play a little bit higher and lose that segment in the mix between consumer and commercial,” Valentino said. 

Business banking accounts for about 12% of the lender’s $185.6 billion in deposits, as of June 30, according to a second-quarter earnings presentation. The lender has said it plans to close between 100 and 120 supermarket locations and open 50 to 60 stand-alone branches nearby, as part of a branch optimization effort.  

Citizens, of course, isn’t alone in trying to broaden relationships with clients. While many banks have similar capabilities, the regional lender’s size is an advantage over larger rivals, Valentino contended. He pointed to private, wealth, commercial and business bankers working out of the same buildings in some locations, he said. 

“Connection points between everyone at our bank [are] really solid,” he said. “We can go out and present as one very quickly, when we’re talking about our customer base.”

Connectivity across the bank has to be strong, including having “a healthy business banking group and a branch network, because that’s where a lot of the business starts,” before growing with customers over time, Valentino said. 

Citizens is working to weave the private bank’s model of service into other units of the bank, since the high level of service shouldn’t just be for private-bank customers, he said.

“We’re actually taking a lot of the learnings from all of the new people we’ve hired and what we’ve built, and we're saying, how do we streamline these and accelerate these learnings into all parts of our bank?” Valentino said. “Innovation and differentiation doesn’t have to come through products and services alone; it can also come through having customer experience as your brand.”

Having the technology capabilities business customers need is crucial, too, and the bank’s new mobile app launched this year features upgrades to business banking components. Valentino said more improvements will be made over the next year.

Within the app, the bank seeks to make the connection between personal and business accounts more transparent, he said, since many customers have both types of accounts with the lender.

And as business customers log into their online or mobile banking, “how do we make the jobs to be done for them much more transparent, clear and easy to accomplish?” Valentino said.

The bank declined to detail the size of its investment in product or technology upgrades. 

“A big portion of our focus, both over the last few years and over the next couple of years, is to really make online banking a place where business owners can live and breathe and conduct more than just their banking business, but actually do things like run payroll,” he said. 

The lender has partnered with payroll firm Gusto and aims to integrate that as a solution within online banking, he said.