“Sometimes customers' plans don't go the way they think they will do and they need a bit of extra support, and that's the team I'm in.”
The team Ian Craig refers to is Commercial Customer Support at The Cumberland. As a senior commercial manager, his role is not to drum up business but to step in when things aren’t going so well.
He says: “My job is to provide support to commercial customers where they might be in some financial difficulty."
Those difficulties can be what life throws at us - such as a partner becoming ill, which impacts a family business’s ability to trade - or the effect of COVID in shutting down the hospitality industry in 2020.
Ian cites the examples of a guesthouse where improvements to the business were greater than the owners had anticipated - and then COVID hit. The key then was quickly establishing a relationship with the customer.
He says: “We get to understand each other, we get to understand their challenges, what they are looking for, and then we come to a solution whereby there is an action plan developed between the two of us.
"In this case it was extending the interest-only period for another 12 months and extending the overall loan by 12 months, so they had more ability to build up cash reserves for the business again.”
Ian joined The Cumberland in February, having been recruited by Head of Commercial, Scott McKerracher.
He says: “It was a very turbulent time in 2020 and 2021 for the organisation and the pandemic had a major impact on many of our customers, even those in relatively solid positions. The Cumberland have handled the pandemic with a more empathetic approach.”
This approach reflects The Cumberland's ethos of providing a banking experience that's kinder to people. Ian says that can sometimes mean helping customers see that what they are doing isn’t working anymore.
“There comes a point where I have been able to say to customers - look, is this actually what you want to do?”
Coming out of the pandemic, Ian is optimistic about the hospitality market after a good 12 months but there are the “head winds” of the cost of living crisis and interest rates to contend with.
He adds: “We've been supporting the tourism-led hospitality market for over 20 years. We've just got to be mindful of the economics of what's happening and make sure we support our customers where needed.”