In 2013, leaders of First Tennessee Bank, Memphis, embarked on an ambitious project with a simple question: What percentage of all products and services it offered were actually profitable?
Simple question, but after an all-hands effort, the bank came to a gut-wrenching conclusion:
Fewer than half its products actually produced a profit.
“We had a baseline of less than 50% of our products that were profitable, and we wanted to improve that,” explains William Losch, chief financial officer, during a recent interview with Banking Exchange.
