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by Chad W. Maze (Author)
You already know more than you think. The question is whether anyone has shown you how to use it.
Banking the Business: Where Retail Banking Ends and Business Banking Begins is the book for the banker who is good at what they do, and knows they are standing at the edge of something bigger. Whether you are a retail branch banker exploring the move into business lending, a new commercial lender in your first two years, or a universal banker expected to hold consumer and commercial conversations with equal confidence, this book was written for you.
The transition from retail to commercial banking is not just a skills upgrade. It is a fundamental reorientation, from products to custom-built solutions, from transaction to relationship, from asking whether a borrower qualifies to asking whether the deal makes sense. The instincts that made you effective in retail banking are real and worth building on. What this book gives you is the framework that makes them work in a commercial context.
Organized in three parts, Banking the Business covers the mindset shift the transition requires, the financial statement literacy every commercial lender must develop, and the full arc of how a commercial deal comes together, from the first conversation to the loan structure to the lender's mindset that holds it all in place. Along the way, you'll be introduced to the 5 Cs and a G - a complete six-lens credit framework that includes the element most training programs skip entirely, and to the discipline of Story Before Structure, the practice that separates bankers who process deals from bankers who understand them.
Six practical appendices go beyond the chapters: a three-version story workshop that shows what a complete credit story actually looks like, a practitioner's glossary of commercial banking terms, the ten most common mistakes retail bankers make in the transition, a full business banking conversation guide from first meeting to first loan request, a DSCR quick reference with worked examples and stress test scenarios, and a loan structure guide covering every primary instrument.
This is not a textbook. It is a practitioner's introduction to how commercial bankers think, written by someone who has hired, developed, and evaluated commercial lenders for more than thirty years.
When you finish, you will not be a fully formed commercial banker. You will be a banker who is ready to become one. That is a different and more useful thing.
Part of the Discipline of Banking(TM) Series.
