Skip to main content

Commercial Banking Leaders: Becoming a Smarter Bank Requires Smarter Pricing

Author Jason Carr

Cornerstone Advisors’ Smarter Bank Report 2025 lays out a roadmap for banks that want to stay competitive through 2030. It’s built around five pillars: hyper-efficient, data-driven, nimble, differentiated, and opportunistic.

If you lead a commercial bank, this report offers a candid look at the structural and strategic shifts needed to compete in an unpredictable market that’s moving faster, getting leaner, and demanding more from every relationship. But one of the most critical levers for performance—opportunity and relationship pricing—often gets overlooked.

In commercial banking, pricing isn’t just about setting rates. It’s about:

  • Understanding the full contextual value of opportunities and relationships
  • Balancing risk and return across credit, deposits, treasury management, and other fee-based services
  • Equipping your bankers to negotiate with confidence and consistency
  • Making sure your deals align with your strategic goals

Getting this wrong can not only mean the difference between winning and losing relationships—not to mention optimizing or eroding margins—but over time, it can lead to a fundamental loss of opportunities to compete due to poor experiences and reputational damage.

And yet, many banks are still relying on spreadsheets or outdated tools that don’t support collaboration, transparency, or real-time decision-making—and that don’t align with the five pillars that Cornerstone Advisors outlines in their report. 

Breaking Down the Pillars

Let’s take a quick look at each of them in this context:

Hyper-efficient: 51% of bank executives cite efficiency and cost management as a top concern. Yet many still operate with pricing tools that slow down deal cycles and limit visibility because they require manual population, generate confusing outputs based on static assumptions, and/or are not integrated with their tech ecosystem. Q2 PrecisionLender offers the ability to quickly and easily model pricing, assess profitability, and act on integrated coaching—all with easily configurable assumptions including API-based dynamics and CRM and LOS integration, empowering strategic agility and results like these:

  • 50% reduction in time spent on pricing and structuring (top 10 global bank)
  • 30 times increase in CRM usage post-integration, reducing rekeying and manual work (regional bank)

Data-driven: More than 50% of banks say siloed data prevents them from making real-time decisions, and only 6% of bank executives say they have a “very effective” data strategy. Q2 PrecisionLender helps banks move from gut instinct to data-backed decisions by bringing together and leveraging often disparate portfolio, pipeline, pricing, and profitability insights into a single repository with in-the-moment coaching during pricing, as well as an array of analytics options. This drives impactful returns, such as:

  • 7 bps average spread improvement in bilateral deals (top 10 global bank)
  • 51% increase in cross-sell revenue per relationship and 97% commercial deposit growth in the first two years on the platform (regional bank)

Nimble: Traditional planning cycles don’t cut it anymore. Banks need to pivot quickly. Q2 PrecisionLender enables real-time scenario modeling, flexible profitability assumptions, and agile pricing adjustments across business lines and credit, capital, and cost frameworks. This means as market conditions change in a very unpredictable environment, strategy can be deployed at scale in a nimble way, and growth can be sustained in a variety of forms:

  • 26 bps growth in net interest margin and nearly doubled total origination fees in the first six months on the platform during a global pandemic (regional bank)

Differentiated: Without clear differentiation, banks compete on pricing alone. Q2 PrecisionLender supports relationship-level pricing that reflects the full value of the client and the proposed solution set, and real-time coaching to drive behaviors that align with bank culture, playbook, and strategy. Without these insights, teams are left with assumptions, anecdotes, and circular references—and, therefore, blind hope. The outcome is exceptional results like these, based on FDIC numbers calculated year-over-year, Q4 2023 to Q4 2024:

•    39% higher deposit growth
•    Three times higher commercial loan growth 
•    10 bps higher NIM
•    14.9% lower nonperforming loans rate

Opportunistic: 31% of banks want to be active acquirers, but many lack scalable pricing infrastructure. Q2 PrecisionLender helps banks standardize pricing practices across regions and identify and act on profitable opportunities faster. Getting teams aligned around what you do and don’t want, where to get it or how to avoid it, and what it's worth—all during arguably the most strategic window of the commercial deal cycle—means faster M&A ROI.

If you want to become a smarter commercial bank, pricing can’t be an afterthought. It needs to be part of your strategy for efficiency, growth, and differentiation.

The Smarter Bank Report is a great place to start, and, in conjunction, take a hard look at how you’re pricing opportunities and relationships today, and whether it’s helping or hurting your ability to compete.