Wayne Bank’s marketing leader Kristen Lancia shares what a full rebrand really takes, how to communicate through acquisitions, and why great leaders teach people how to think, not what to think.
If you started your banking career behind the teller line, you already know there’s no better education in what a bank actually means to its customers. Kristen Lancia started exactly there at Wayne Bank 14 years ago. Today she leads the marketing department she built from scratch, and along the way she’s guided the bank through three acquisitions and a full rebrand, all while the bank celebrates its 155th year.
That’s exactly the kind of perspective we love on Bound by Banking, so we sat down with Kristen to talk about leading a bank through its biggest moments of change. Rebrands, acquisitions, mentoring, and yes, AI.
If you can’t watch the full episode, no worries. Here’s a recap of the biggest takeaways from our conversation.
A Rebrand Is a Culture Project Wearing a New Logo
Wayne Bank launched its rebrand publicly on June 1st of last year, so I asked Kristen the question every marketer who’s been through one wants answered: what does nobody tell you until you’re in the thick of it?
Her answer was that a rebrand isn’t really a design project at all. Going in, you think of logos, colors, and signage. But what you actually get is an organizational and culture change project that marketing happens to be leading. As Kristen put it, logos don’t build brands. Employees do.
That distinction matters because a rebrand asks hundreds of employees, many of whom have been with the bank for decades, to buy in and start telling a new story about who the bank is. Wayne Bank spent years on that groundwork. They partnered with a brand agency, ran employee surveys, and held focus groups with customers and non-customers across all of their markets to discover the story they wanted to tell.
The message that made it land internally: we’re not changing who we are, we’re changing how we show up in the world. The brand needed to reflect who the bank had become. One that makes every day better for employees, customers, communities, and shareholders.
Kristen was candid that sharing the rebrand was one of the most anxiety-inducing experiences of her career. But a year later, employees exceeded her wildest expectations. The bank now runs two company stores for employee merch and just launched a limited edition summer collection. When your employees are excited to rep the brand outside of work hours, that’s when you know the rebrand took hold.
One more insight worth sitting with: launch day feels like the finish line, but it’s actually the starting line. That’s when the brand becomes real and becomes your North Star. Every decision afterward gets measured against one question: is this true to who we are?
You Cannot Over-Communicate During an Acquisition
Wayne Bank has been through three acquisitions, so I asked Kristen what she’s gotten better at with each one and what stays hard no matter how many times you do it.
Her answer, in one word: communication. And since marketing leads communication, marketing is pivotal to whether an acquisition succeeds.
The word “acquisition” triggers fear of the unknown for everyone involved. Employees wonder if their jobs will change. Customers wonder if their accounts will still work. Communities wonder if the new bank will keep supporting the charities the old bank always did. Kristen’s take is that marketing’s role isn’t just to provide information, it’s to provide confidence, so people feel secure in the change.
Her hard-won rules: communicate way earlier than you think you need to, communicate more often than feels necessary, and keep it as simple as possible.
She also made a point that stuck with me. Banking carries an emotional attachment most industries don’t. Your bank helped you buy your first home. It’s where you got lollipops as a kid, and then it helped send those same kids to college. Some customers have banked at the same institution for 40 years, and their parents and grandparents did too. That’s generations of trust, and you can’t expect people to instantly celebrate when it changes hands.
That’s why Wayne Bank has never approached an acquisition as “we’re here to replace you.” The message is always “we’re here to build on what’s already made this community special,” backed up by hiring local vendors, supporting local businesses, and investing in the new communities. Trust is earned, not transferred.
Teach People How to Think, Not What to Think
Kristen’s LinkedIn makes it clear she loves mentoring, and she confirmed it’s her favorite part of the job. So I asked what she actively tries to pass down that doesn’t get enough attention.
After roughly 30 years of working under all kinds of managers, she’s landed on this: really great leaders teach people how to think, not what to think. Instead of showing her team how she would solve a problem, she teaches them to think through it using their own experience and skills, because odds are they’ll land on a better solution than she would have.
She even shared a tactic she uses openly with her team. When someone asks a question she suspects they already know the answer to, she doesn’t respond right away. Nine times out of ten, they figure it out themselves, and they walk away more confident because they did.
Is it hard? Absolutely, especially when you have the answer and a deadline is looming. But the payoff is a team of confident decision-makers instead of people waiting for approval. Kristen built Wayne Bank’s marketing department from scratch with no one to hand her the answers, and that painful, figure-it-out-yourself experience made her the leader she is today. Now she’s deliberately passing that confidence on.
Her other point: there’s no point in having a team if one person overrules everything. The magic happens when everyone feels safe to speak up, and in her words, she loves it when her team tells her she’s wrong.
Give AI the Grunt Work, Keep the Work You Love
The last question we had for Kristen was what has AI changed most for her, and what will she never hand off?
Kristen described a love-hate relationship most marketers will recognize. She uses AI heavily for the tasks that eat time without feeding creativity: data analysis, reporting, first drafts when she doesn’t know where to start, and final polish when the wording just won’t come together. She works mostly with ChatGPT and Copilot (the tool her organization uses), and thinks of AI as an extension of the team. A super entry-level data analyst you hand the grunt work to.
Her rule for making it useful: you have to train it, and keep training it. She’s uploaded a ton of data to teach it the Wayne Bank brand, its history, and its voice, so the output actually sounds like the bank.
What she’ll never hand off is strategy. No AI-generated marketing plans, ever. That’s the work she loves and the work she believes she should be doing. Years ago, she asked a manager how to find more time to just strategize and think, and the manager literally laughed and said “let me know when you figure it out.” AI is what finally gave her that time. The two-hour reporting task becomes a two-minute Copilot prompt, and the hours saved go to strategy, creativity, and the passion projects that require emotion and care.
That’s the framework worth stealing: use AI for what you don’t enjoy, and keep the work that made you fall in love with the job in the first place.
Watch the Full Conversation
This only scratches the surface of what Kristen shared. Watch the full episode of Bound by Banking for the complete conversation, including more on Wayne Bank’s rebrand journey, acquisition communication, and building a marketing team that thinks for itself.