U.S. Bank, after adding bankers to serve the businesses across Dallas and Houston, is now focused on more expansion throughout the Southeast, one of the business banking executives said.
In the forthcoming 6 months, U.S. Bank looks forward to hiring at least 12 bankers across a couple of Southeast states where it does not have branches, remarked Dee O’Dell, head of business for banking sales at the Minneapolis-based lender. He did not elaborate; however, that group goes on to include Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, as well as South Carolina.
The super-regional bank has in recent times added teams of bankers across markets where it is witnessing greater growth opportunity, which includes a second team in Charlotte, North Carolina; another second in Las Vegas; and a fourth team in Chicago, said O’Dell during a recent interview. In his unit, there are around 250 people who have been hired into new roles in 2025 alone.
In Houston, where the $695 billion-asset bank went on to announce recently that it added a business banking team, there are four people who have been hired and the lender plans to bring on a couple more, said O’Dell.
In the business banking segment of U.S. Bank, which goes on to serve companies that generate anywhere between $2.5 million and $50 million in yearly revenue, around 1,200 employees throughout the country serve almost 75,000 clients.
Apparently, the consumer and business banking segment almost makes up 32% of the overall revenue of the lender, which was around $21.3 billion year-to-date as of September 30, 2025.
U.S. Bank offers those commercial clients varied kinds of credit when it comes to their capital needs, which include the likes of owner-occupied real estate loans, conventional financing, and Small Business Administration loans.
Clients in that size range often go on to not just have their primary business, but they are also looking for ways to diversify, said O’Dell. They not just want to own the building that they are in, but they may also want to own some other buildings too, and so they have the ability to go ahead and offer capital for them, which, by the way, is not just for their core business but also for investment in real estate.
Bankers also look forward to connecting clients with certain other U.S. Bank services like credit cards, treasury management, merchant processing, and foreign exchange, as well as wealth management. Amid a very complex and highly competitive spectrum, the lender has gone on to sharpen the efforts to offer and also roll out service to clients in a much more complete way, added O’Dell.
He further said that their approach has been to integrate all of that together so that there is some kind of value that comes from having all of that in one place.
To zero in on where the businesses could go ahead and gain the most advantages, the bank has developed, along with a fintech that cannot be named, a proprietary diagnostic tool for the companies. The questionnaire goes on to evaluate the business requirements and also the money movement, diagnoses the efficiency level in those functions, and also has a team that reviews results along with the business clients.
According to O’Dell, the idea is that rather than trying to sell any one of those products, they are approaching it in a much more consultative as well as a holistic way, as this helps their clients see how they can be more efficient, eradicate the risk of fraud, save time across their day, and also do other things like that.
That diagnostic effort has indeed sort of bolstered the success rate of the bank in serving the new clients since it was introduced almost a couple of years back.
Sometimes the bankers are going to meet with a company that they do not bank with today. And if the question is whether one needs any banking services, the answer might as well be no, as everything is fine, said O’Dell. However, if one can get them to engage and have a conversation and fill out the basic template questionnaire, they can go back and offer insights. And often, it does open up a conversation where companies do not even tend to realize that the things that they are doing, or rather not doing, could lead to so much better efficiency.
Another much newer internal tool aggregates the data to give bankers a viewpoint of companies or prospects in the markets that they serve, enabling them to sort as per the sales size, industry type, or even ownership of property, so they can better target the clients on the basis of their potential needs.
Interestingly, the SBA lending may as well be a prime option for some of those businesses, and that is indeed an area of lending that the U.S. Bank looks forward to growing further, as it can serve as an entry point for the company into the bank.
It is well to be noted that the U.S. Bank has doubled its SBA lending over the last couple of years, said O’Dell. In fiscal 2025, the bank went on to total $871.2 million in SBA 7(a) loans, which was up 23% from the last fiscal year, it confirmed in October 2025.
As per O’Dell, they have been able to make use of that program in order to help a number of companies. Individuals would get capital they would not otherwise get, and because of the way that they approach that and also their client selection in that, the loss ratio that they have had in that space has been pretty attractive to their shareholders.
Also, the SBA lending can be really ideal when it comes to some succession situations, O’Dell said. The segment of businesses that O’Dell oversees has a major strength of owners who are nearing the end of their respective careers, and hence the bank also looks to jump on the choice to get involved in those moments.
In cases where the business owner does not have a child who is wanting to take over, they may as well look to sell to another company or private equity firm of similar nature. Or if there is someone in the company who is pretty much interested in acquiring it but doesn’t have the capital to do so, the bank can make use of an SBA lending in order to help with that sort of a pursuit.
O’Dell confirms that they do see immense opportunities in order to help the next generation of business owners to acquire businesses and also the present generation, who are at the end of their careers, to go ahead and exit as well as monetize what they have invested in and go on to have this sense that their legacy is going to continue.