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Editor-in-Chief Naomi Snyder is in charge of the editorial coverage at Bank Director. She oversees the magazine and the editorial team’s efforts on the Bank Director website, newsletter and special projects. She has more than two decades of experience in business journalism and spent 15 years as a newspaper reporter. She has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan.
Cash4truckers.com* sounds like something you’d see on a roadside billboard, not a message coming from a community bank. In fact, the domain name is owned by Triumph Business Capital, a subsidiary of a $1.7 billion asset community banking company named Triumph Bancorp in Dallas, Texas.
“You’d have no idea it was a bank,’’ Triumph Bancorp Vice Chairman and CEO Aaron Graft said about the web site at a recent Bank Director conference. “We don’t wait for a customer to show up in one of our primary markets.”
Triumph Business Capital, then known as Advance Business Capital, was founded in 2004 and sold to a group of Dallas area investors in 2012 led by Graft. Triumph has very little presence in the Dallas market where it is headquartered but has 40 percent of its loan portfolio in specialty finance nationwide. It is doing something unusual for a community bank. It’s trying to compete in the realm of factoring and asset-based lending for small businesses, including construction, transportation and trucking businesses as small as one guy with his one truck. Triumph will buy an invoice from a trucker, for example, charging 1.5 or 2 percent of the size of the invoice. That has helped the bank achieve an adjusted net interest margin of 5.61 percent, 203 basis points higher than the average for banks $1 billion to $10 billion in asset size, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
The trucker gets the cash and Triumph pursues collection from the customer who received the shipment. So the credit risk is analyzing whether or not the customer, not the trucker, will pay the bill. The trucker also gets additional services including discount fuel cards as well as having someone else manage invoices while they’re on the road.
Not a lot of banks want to get into this business. Larger companies are able to finance their working capital needs through the likes of big banks such as CIT Group. Small businesses take just as much work as the big companies to finance, but the loans are smaller. Many small banks don’t want to invest in that type of lending because it requires so much expertise to manage and keep track of the loans.
This is where Triumph comes in. “We are willing to serve the smaller end of the market because we think they need it more and because we think that’s where the opportunity is,” says Graft.
It’s a strategy born in an age of slow growth and low interest rates, where banks are scrambling to grow loan portfolios and profits. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency recently warned in its semi-annual risk report that growing competitive pressures have led to lowering underwriting quality and increased credit risk.
Graft says he’s dealing with the risk inherent in his strategy by bulking up his specialty finance staffing and expertise. As an example, more than 100 people work in factoring with a loan book of about $150 million. The bank reviews invoices for fraud, hoping to catch people submitting false invoices. Graft says he’s dealing with regulatory risk by communicating the bank’s strategy to regulators, to serve both as a community bank and as a national specialty finance company. The bank’s subsidiaries offer business-related services such as treasury management and insurance, as well as branch banking through Triumph Community Bank in the Chicago area. Triumph also announced plans in March to purchase a bank based in Lamar, Colorado, with $759 million in assets and 17 branches, which will make Triumph a $2.5 billion asset holding company.
“It’s a little outside the box,’’ says stock analyst Brad Milsaps of Sandler O’Neill + Partners, who covers the bank. He says Triumph is growing by buying community banks to acquire deposits and use those deposits to lend nationally. The bank’s return on assets was 1.20 percent in the first quarter, up from 1.10 percent in the same quarter a year ago, but some of that was the impact of bargain purchase gains from acquisitions, Milsaps says. “They’ve got the operational controls and experience in that business to hopefully mitigate the risk,’’ he says. “If you don’t have the systems and people in place in that space, you’ll get burned very, very quickly.”
*Note: Triumph owns cash4ftruckers.com but has begun redirecting viewers to invoicefactoring.com. Cashfortruckers.com has a similar name but is owned by a different company.
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Editor-in-Chief Naomi Snyder is in charge of the editorial coverage at Bank Director. She oversees the magazine and the editorial team’s efforts on the Bank Director website, newsletter and special projects. She has more than two decades of experience in business journalism and spent 15 years as a newspaper reporter. She has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan.
