Bank Marketing Strategy
If you’ve ever sat across from someone in banking who actually gets it, like really gets it, you know how rare that is. That’s exactly the kind of conversation I got to have with Ryan McCormick and Jason Lavender from TFNB Your Bank for Life down in the Waco, Texas area.
Ryan is the Marketing Manager, self-described keeper of the “touchy feely things” and protector of the brand. He also pulls off the dude sweater very nicely if I might add. Jason is the Executive Vice President and as we called him, the “wearer of many hats”. Jason oversees strategy, deposit acquisition, marketing, and pretty much anything else that needs overseeing. He came up in banking in the early 90s after attending Baylor, and spent years building and scaling companies before exiting several of them, and eventually found his way back into the banking world when TFNB’s CEO, a 30-year mentor and friend, called him up at just the right moment. The stars aligned for him to come back into the banking world. Oh, and they just crossed the $1 billion asset mark. Not bad for the oldest charter in Central Texas. We got into it pretty quickly, and the first thing I wanted to talk about was something I think a lot of marketing folks in banking wrestle with:
How do you have the branding conversation about your bank with people who only want to talk about numbers?
Ryan’s answer was straightforward, and honestly kind of beautiful in its simplicity. He starts by making branding personal. One of his go-to moves is asking employees for family photos to use in content. Because at the end of the day, the employees are the brand. When people in your community see your team living their lives, showing up at little league games, spending time with their families, that’s what builds the connection. It stops being an abstract marketing concept and starts being something your own team believes in and owns.
Jason layered onto that by being pretty candid about something a lot of banks don’t want to admit: the old retail banking playbook is played out. The “free checking” offers, the $200 bonuses buried in 18-step terms and conditions, the endless loss leaders. He doesn’t think that stuff moves the needle anymore. TFNB made a deliberate decision to step away from that approach entirely and lean into community-first branding instead. Is it harder to track? Sure. But they drove nearly $600,000 in organic local deposits over about 24 months just by being intentional about it and getting their whole team aligned. Sometimes the proof is in the overall growth, not the individual campaign metrics.
From there we got talking about what banks should be preparing for now that’s not getting enough attention.
That led us into something that’s on everybody’s mind right now, AI, but the conversation went somewhere a little more interesting than the usual talking points.
Ryan’s take was a bit of a reality check. He’s not anti-AI by any stretch, but he’s thinking about what happens when everyone drinks from the same well. If every bank is using the same tools to generate the same content in the same voice, you end up with an echo chamber. Worse, he pointed out that AI is wired to keep you engaged, which means it’s going to tell you what you want to hear. If you’re a one-person marketing department leaning entirely on ChatGPT, you’re probably getting your ego stroked more than you’re getting honest feedback.
His takeaway: learn to use it as a tool, not as the answer.
Jason took that thread and ran with it. He’s actually more bullish on AI overall. He thinks adoption is still accelerating, not plateauing. But his big emphasis was on learning how to prompt. Knowing what to ask, how to ask it, and how to push back on generic outputs is a skill in itself, and probably more valuable right now than just knowing which platform to use.
But then Jason zoomed way out and got to what he thinks is the bigger, less-talked-about issue: modernization. Not just AI, but the whole framework. Payment evolution, stablecoin, data lakes, owning your own customer data instead of letting your core banking vendor sit on top of it. His point was that community banking has always been a little slow to change, but the speed of change right now is different. And banks that aren’t building frameworks to address all of it are going to find themselves behind in a hurry.
By the time we got to the last question, I felt like we’d been building into it the whole conversation.
How do you keep innovating at banks without losing sight of the fundamentals?
Ryan made a distinction that really landed for me. There’s a difference between innovation that makes your customers’ lives easier and innovation for the sake of chasing the next shiny thing. One of those has a purpose. The other is just noise. And when you’ve been around for 136 years, you don’t need to chase anything. You own something most banks can’t buy: history. Competitors can run better ads, spend more money, even do some things better. But you can’t manufacture a track record of actually showing up for a community over more than a century.
Jason put a finer point on it with a line I haven’t stopped thinking about since: “We will know we are as big as we want to be when we can no longer be who we are.”
That’s the guardrail. Growth is great, and they’re clearly committed to it, but the moment that growth starts requiring them to compromise their culture, their values, or the way they serve their communities, that’s where the line is. He also pointed out something worth noting: while most banks are closing branches and consolidating, TFNB is still building locations. Because being physically close to customers is part of who they are. They’re not trading high touch for high tech. They’re doing both, best-in-class app, and Ryan McCormick’s personal cell number if you need it.
He wrapped it up with something that stuck: people confuse innovation with identity. You can keep your identity and still innovate. In fact, you have to. If you’re not moving forward, you’re going backward. The key is making sure you’re evolving in a way that protects who you are, not changes it.
Honestly, this one was a good reminder that the banks getting it right aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the flashiest tech. They’re the ones who know exactly who they are and refuse to let anything talk them out of it.
Thanks to Ryan and Jason for joining us. If you haven’t already, make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss the next episode of Bound by Banking.
