- Key insight: Employees respond powerfully when management goes beyond listening and acts on the concerns they raise.
- Expert quote: “Even the best strategies can fail if the organizational culture does not support them,” said Michael Castine, co-leader of the global financial services practice at the talent advisory firm ZRG.
- What’s at stake: A healthy culture is a key determining factor in a bank’s overall success, according to both bankers and outside experts.
Organizational culture is hard to quantify, and bankers struggle to define it, yet most recognize that a healthy culture is essential to an institution’s well-being.
The saying “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is often attributed to the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker. Though it’s doubtful Drucker ever said those words, the statement is still dead-on accurate, according to Michael Castine, co-leader of the global financial services practice at the Rochelle Park, New Jersey-based talent advisory firm ZRG.
“Even the best strategies can fail if the organizational culture does not support them,” Castine told American Banker. “The culture shapes how employees behave and collaborate and advance the objective.”
In a
“As a bank supervisor, it is my view that aligning culture with mission is one of the most important areas of focus,” Triplett wrote.
What follows is a look at three banks that have prioritized culture and reaped financial rewards. Two of the three landed on American Banker’s list of the Best Banks to Work For 2025.
Ensuring employees feel heard
Culture has been top of mind at Peapack-Gladstone Financial as the Bedminster, New Jersey-based company continues to
The $7.4 billion-asset Peapack is the parent company of Peapack Private Bank & Trust, which ranks 48th on American Banker’s Best Banks to Work For 2025 list.
Peapack’s New York expansion involved hiring dozens of bankers, most of whom had worked previously for either Signature Bank or First Republic Bank. Both of those banks failed during the
It “was for all intents and purposes like acquiring a business,” Brydget Falk-Drigan, Peapack’s chief human resources officer, told American Banker. “We increased our population by 30% over an 18-to-24-month time frame.”
“That’s pretty significant,” Falk-Drigan added. “You have to meld the cultures, but [the new employees] come from different places. Companies do things differently. They have different processes, different systems. Trying to make them one isn’t always easy.”
For Peapack, a big part of the solution came down to clear communication.
Both Signature and First Republic were known for providing high levels of customer service, so the bankers that Peapack onboarded were compatible with its own single-point-of-contact, white-glove ethos, Falk-Drigan said. At the same time, Peapack CEO Douglas Kennedy and other senior leaders worked overtime to ensure the newcomers felt welcomed and listened to.
“I think when people see that, that they’re not just talking to the CEO and it’s not going anywhere, but they’re talking to the CEO or another senior leader, and there’s action that comes as a result of that, they feel heard,” Falk-Drigan said. “When they feel heard, they feel supported. When they feel supported, it creates a culture of caring, that their voice matters, and they’re adding value at the end of the day.”
“The sincerity and the genuineness gets felt through the whole organization,” Falk-Drigan said.
As a result of its New York hiring strategy, Peapack’s compensation and benefits costs, which totaled $108.7 million through the first nine months of 2025, have increased by more than 60% from the same period in 2022. But the rest of the balance sheet is beginning to catch up.
In a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Peapack disclosed that its teams in Gotham and on Long Island have brought 850 client relationships into the bank, along with $1.75 billion of deposits and nearly $1 billion of loans.
Assets under management inside the company’s core wealth management business are also up sharply, reaching $12.9 billion on Sept. 30, 2025.
Peapack’s New York expansion has yielded nearly $2 billion in new deposits, “which drives intermediate-term franchise value,” Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Chris Marinac wrote Friday in a research note.
Maintaining culture following a merger
Pinnacle Financial Partners, which ranks fourth on this year’s list of the Best Banks to Work For, faces its own set of culture-related issues in the midst of its merger with the Columbus, Georgia-based Synovus Financial.
Investors and analysts have voiced concerns about the durability of Pinnacle’s distinctive corporate environment, questioning whether it can continue thriving once the deal is completed in early 2026.
That model is widely thought to have helped Nashville-based Pinnacle to achieve strong financial results. The $56 billion-asset company grew loans, deposits, revenue and tangible book value per share at double-digit compound annual growth rates between 2020 and 2024.
Now, many observers worry that Pinnacle’s pre-merger emphasis on skillful recruiting and generous incentive compensation will be watered down inside a much larger, $110 billion-asset-plus institution, putting its ability to continue generating the same kind of growth in doubt.
In response, Synovus CEO Kevin Blair, who will lead the merged company, and Pinnacle CEO Terry Turner, who’s slated to become chairman, have pledged to preserve the Pinnacle recruiting and pay models.
Commenting at a
“Pinnacle runs a very unique incentive plan where everyone in the company, every associate, is incented based on how the company does at the top of the house, both from revenue growth as well as earnings-per-share growth,” Blair said. “I love the idea.”
Blair and Pinnacle CEO Terry Turner are scheduled to hold a second “fireside chat” next month at the Goldman Sachs U.S. Financial Services Conference in New York.
The importance of a values statement
For most companies, the most basic expression of their culture comes through a values statement.
Virtually all banks have such statements, but their significance runs much deeper than a mere check-the-box exercise, BankIowa Marketing Director Josh Fleming told American Banker.
The $821 million-asset BankIowa’s purpose, vision and values statement envisions a “people-centered” organization that inspires growth and serves as the bank of choice for clients and career choice for team members.
The values statement has had a meaningful impact on the bank’s performance since it was rolled out in 2020, according to Fleming.
The 104-year-old Cedar Rapids-based company is enjoying one of its best years in 2025. Net income totaled $5 million during the first half of the year, pushing the bank’s return on assets past 1.2%. Five years earlier, BankIowa’s full-year net income totaled $6.5 million, with a return on assets of 0.93%.
BankIowa “really is one of those places where the purpose, vision and values statement truly aligns with how we conduct ourselves,” Fleming said. “Our retention rate has improved significantly since the rollout of our purpose, vision and values. Our benefits have grown, as well. No one is leaving BankIowa for lack of benefits.”
In a similar way, Peapack’s leaders regularly reinforce the company’s five foundational behaviors.
Those core principles, which include putting clients first, competing to win and operating as one team, are undergirded by a more specific set of what Peapack terms “private banking behaviors.” Chief among them, perhaps, is flexibility. “Don’t start with no,” is how Falk-Drigan puts it.
“We’ve got the whole organization mobilized around this construct of ‘Don’t start with no, keep an open mind and look for an alternative solution,'” Falk-Drigan said. “That has really permeated its way through the business. It didn’t start off that way, but the more you reinforce and talk about these behaviors, the more important it is.”