Independent Banker - January 2025 - 54

growth and several acquisitions.
In 2022, $2.7 billion-asset OakStar
brought its acquired banks under
a single charter. " When we started
bringing new organizations together,
some of the skill sets were repetitive, "
explains the community bank's
president, Jimmy Stilley. " We looked
at whether we could support the
institutions that we bring in with our
current policies and procedures. "
Tompkins Community Bank
in Ithaca, N.Y., faced a similar
problem to OakStar. The $8 billionasset
community bank recently
consolidated four community bank
charters into one. " We wanted to be
more effi cient in leveraging talent
across our team, " says Stacie Mastin,
senior VP and director of HR.
The two community banks took
two similar but distinct approaches
to their dilemmas. At OakStar,
executives went directly to their teams
for feedback, asking if and where
they were having diffi culty navigating
the organization and if that diffi culty
stemmed from communication
or policies.
After these conversations, OakStar
decided to stand up a shared services
department for the entire bank.
" We've got skill sets and capacities
throughout the bank, " says Stilley.
" One market has a specialty that
another market doesn't. Where do we
share and not share resources? "
OakStar mapped out the new
organization layer by layer, surveying
each position for specifi c tasks
and percentage of time allocated
to a task. Branch managers, for
example, mapped out the tasks of
universal bankers.
The community bank compiled
the data into a spreadsheet showing
where there were resources, synergies
and gaps. " The data told us where we
needed to get a lot more organized, "
says Stilley. " Instead of everybody
doing this in every market, we can
make sure we have enough resources
in shared services to support the bank
as a whole. "
Tompkins Community Bank, on
the other hand, centralized internal
support services into what the bank
calls Centers of Excellence. " Instead
of four managers managing the same
function, we have reorganized into
one manager across four markets, "
says Mastin, adding that four small
business lending departments
in four markets, each with their
own manager, could result in four
diff erent strategies.
" By consolidating and taking people
who are natural leaders in that space
and giving them oversight across four
markets, it has helped to drive our
strategy in small business lending, "
she says. " We're leveraging talent
better than we were before. "
The outcome for OakStar, Stilley
reports, has also been tremendous.
" The big thing is that it has produced
capacity, " he says. " We had people
that could take on more, but we
weren't organized enough to know
what to have them take on. "
Keeping the customer
at the center
Customer experience is as much a goal
of reorganization as is effi ciency, and
new positions and delegations have
helped Origin Bank in Ruston, La.,
''By consolidating
and taking people
who are natural
leaders in [a
specialized] space
and giving them
oversight across
four markets, it has
helped to drive our
strategy in small
business lending.''
ΓFG35<7 @3FG
54 /// ICBA Independent Banker // January 2025
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Independent Banker - January 2025

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