It’s 4 pm on a Friday, and you’re facing a dilemma. It’s a little last-minute. Do you send that text message or not?
You finally decide to press send, but you quickly follow up your request with another message: “But I hate to interrupt your Charleston trip!”
The response is quick: “No worries, I’m always happy to help!”
You shoot back a quick thank you, and in a few minutes your phone vibrates again.
“You should be able to see your account now!” the message reads.
No, it’s not your colleague on the phone; it’s your banker, who’s been helping you all week to set up your online account.
What’s that? You’ve never had an ongoing text thread with your banker before? (Do you even know your banker’s name?) It’s definitely not the norm. But when you join the Encore Bank community, that’s the kind of interaction you can expect: something personal, something neighborly, something unexpected. That’s the whole reason a branch of Encore Bank came to the iQ just last year.
A Personal Connection
For Leigha Smith, SVP and market president for Encore Bank in Winston-Salem, personal connection–and not just those made over text–captures a lot of what makes Encore Bank different from just about all the other banks out there.
Winston-Salem’s branch of the Encore Bank opened in the iQ in March of 2023, and it all started with a friendly LinkedIn message.
But before Smith took on the job of building the Winston-Salem branch from the ground up, she was happily retired–very happily retired.
Smith had worked for Wells Fargo in Winston-Salem for 33 years, working her way up to a senior position, then she retired, planning to spend time with her family. About a year into retirement, she got bored one rainy afternoon.
“It’s a funny thing, but I never used LinkedIn when I was working, but it was a rainy day, and so I thought, let’s go see what all my buddies are doing,” Smith explains.
That’s when she noticed that a former colleague had just posted about his new position as the Carolinas executive for Encore Bank, so Smith sent him a message.
“I said, ‘That’s super-cool, congratulations! I’ve never heard of Encore. When your head gets above water, call me and let me know about your bank,’” Smith remembers.
Two days later, Smith got a call: a recruitment call. While Smith wasn’t ready to go back to work, her colleague was persistent. She listened, she met Encore’s CEO, and before she knew it, she was signing on to lead the creation of Encore Bank’s new Winston-Salem branch.
“It was too neat of a story to pass up, the opportunity to build your own bank branch from the ground up,” Smith says. “A chance to serve clients in the ways you always wanted to.”
And what made it “too neat to pass up?” The chance to do banking differently.
The Origins of Encore Bank
The original Encore Bank is located in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was started in 2019 when its founders, eager to build something different together, bought a small bank called Capital Bank in Little Rock. From that single bank, the branches spread.
“When they look for a market leader to build out a team, they want people who they can trust,” Smith says. “The founders knew some folks in Dallas, and the Dallas people knew some folks in San Antonio. The people in San Antonio knew people in South Carolina, and so on. That’s how we’ve blossomed.”
Blossomed they have. Encore Bank now has branches in seven states and 17 markets.
“They wanted to build a boutique commercial bank, a customer-centric bank,” Smith says.
What does that mean? It means a bank where concierge treatment is the norm for all customers, not just the VIPs. It means a bank where the goal is to make everything about banking easier for their clients.
That’s what caught Smith off guard, a chance to do banking differently, to bring back some of the aspects of old school banking, where you had a personal relationship with your banker.
“With banks of old, your banker was also a neighbor or someone you’d run into on a regular business at a restaurant or the store,” Smith says. “That’s something that’s missing in modern banking. But it doesn’t have to be.”
Smith was so impressed with Encore Bank’s dedication to their mission that she came out of retirement to take the job. Whether recruiting team members or sharing with a prospective client, she uses her own story to validate how special she thinks the company is.
When Smith started developing the kind of bank branch that she wanted to run, she started by hand-picking her team and finding people who shared her passion for putting the personal back into banking–for companies and individuals.
What does banking with that personal, relational approach actually look like? What difference does it make? At Encore Bank, you can see it in a couple of different ways.
What Banking Is Like with Encore Bank
Remember that text exchange from earlier? That exemplifies one of the ways that Encore Bank seeks to give their clients the white-glove treatment. With Encore, your communications with them are always personal, with a banker you know and who knows you. You’re never calling an answering service or contacting them through a menu of a million options. You have a personal number for your banker, and that person is your point of contact.
“We have an 800 number because the federal government requires us to, but I don’t even know what the number is,” Smith says. “I could find it, if needed, but to really get back to grassroots banking, we make it a priority to be personally connected. If I’m your banker at Encore, I know you and I know your company. I want to be your one and only contact on my team, and when you need something, you call me, not some 800 number.”
The personal level of communication is what you’ll notice first, but close on the heels of that, you’ll notice another difference as soon as you step foot in the bank.
Encore Bank is located on the second floor of Bailey South in the iQ, just above Barcelona Burger. When you walk in the door, a real, live human being greets you at the door (and, occasionally, Smith’s Boykin Spaniel, Cocco) and ushers you into a space that looks less like a bank and more like a swanky living room.
That’s on purpose. Gone are the tellers and the lines and the traditional, stodgy bank designs. It’s a space that’s designed to be open, comfortable, a place where you would love to spend some time getting to know your banker. There’s comfortable seating, colorful art, and beautiful lighting. When’s the last time you entered a bank with a faux hide rug?
“We also have the best view of Bailey Park from our patio,” Smith says.
She may be right. Right above the entrance to Barcelona Burger, Encore’s outdoor space overlooks the lower lawn of Bailey Park and provides a good view of most of the iQ’s North District. It’s a great place to hang out, have a conversation, or even just people-watch.
Their goal is to make banking feel easy, regardless of if you’re a large company, a small business, or an individual. To make that happen, there’s a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes.
“I think it’s easy to do business with us,” Smith says. “We try not to make anything difficult. If it is difficult, we try to make it difficult on our end, and then we figure out how to make it easier all the way around.”
For one example of making banking easier, Encore Bank sets up agreements so that clients can use any ATM in the U.S. with no service charge fees. No service charge fees!
It also means that Encore Bank embraces innovative technology that helps make banking smoother, something that clients never see but reap the benefits of. Their focus on being on the cutting-edge of technology in their field is one of the reasons that the Winston-Salem branch decided to locate in the iQ.
“The Innovation Quarter has a real connection with the kind of innovation that we’re pursuing as a bank,” Smith says, “but there’s also activity and development and revitalization, and we wanted to be a part of that.”
One way that Encore embraces innovative technology is by partnering with dozens of financial technology companies to create better banking experiences. These tech partners help develop or improve banking technologies that allow people to bank the way that they want, something that became extremely important after the pandemic.
“Now you and I, we’re going to get on our computer or phone, or we’re going to go to the ATM or physically come to the branch, but in the background, there are partnerships going on that allow you to choose how you want to bank,” Smith says.
Two of these partnerships, for example, are with digital platforms that enhance the client’s digital banking experience. Through its partnerships with Q2, Encore Bank provides a mobile app that allows clients to bank wherever and whenever they want. Another partnership with Qualia, a real estate closing platform, works in the background of real estate transactions, ensuring that closings are secure, which makes the client’s experience smoother and faster.
Through these kinds of innovative technology, Encore Bank improves banking experiences for their clients with more security and flexibility.
When a Banker Is a Neighbor
For the Encore team, banking is a way to serve their community, to make it better. But it’s not the only way that the bank operates like a neighbor.
“We do a lot of work in the community, trying to give back,” Smith says.
That takes a lot of forms, partnering with organizations such as LEAD Girls of NC, Crosby Scholars Forsyth, and Heart Math Tutoring, or participating in fundraising events and running donation drives.
One of the team’s passions is financial education, and they will hold events for people of all ages–from middle school and high school students to young and older adults–to help them understand how money works and grows, how to budget, and introduce the tools at their disposal.
Encore Bank in the iQ picks these partnerships the same way that it does just about everything else: through personal connections.
“Our team members or even sometimes our customers will bring ideas and partnerships to us, saying, ‘Hey, I’ve been a part of this. Why don’t you join us?’” Smith says. “We have a meeting every week where our team can talk about those opportunities and determine what we want to participate in.”
Whatever the Encore team participates in, the heart is the same: to serve the greater Winston-Salem community the way they serve their clients, as if each of them was a VIP. Who doesn’t like some concierge treatment?
To learn more about Encore Bank and their physical neighbors in Bailey South, check out this story on the iQ website.
