# How a 21-Person Team Grew Commercial Loan Originations 100% While Only Adding 15% Headcount
_Published: 2026-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00_

How Greenfield Savings Bank doubled commercial loan originations with only 15% more staff, using nCino and Admin+ to automate its pipeline.

_Greenfield Savings Bank replaced antiquated manual processes with nCino and used additional platform support through the nCino Admin+ program to support platform adoption and optimization._

At many banks, a commercial loan officer's day fills up with a task no client ever sees: figuring out where a deal stands and guiding it through approval to closing. At Greenfield Savings Bank, a $1.5 billion community bank, that used to mean digging through spreadsheets or tracking down a colleague. Implementing nCino changed that. Greenfield Bank implemented nCino within it’s commercial lending business line to streamline processes and bring added efficiencies. But with a lean team that had no dedicated IT bench, the bank knew it needed extra support. The bank engaged the nCino Admin+ program and found the support it needed to maximize it's nCino capabilities. With the manual work off the table the bank's loan officers were able to dedicate time to the part of the job that matters most: the clients. The growth followed. Commercial origination volume roughly doubled over two years, without a matching jump in headcount.

Ian Vukovich serves as Commercial Portfolio Manager and Vice President at Greenfield Savings Bank, and as the bank's sole nCino administrator, he supports a 21-person commercial banking team. He's had a front-row view of what changed when the bank stopped running its pipeline on spreadsheets.

## From Flat Volume to Faster Growth

Before nCino, Greenfield Savings Bank experienced flat commercial loan origination volume for years. The bank managed its commercial pipeline largely through spreadsheets, with manual handoffs between loan officers, credit, and operations at nearly every step. Loan officers spent their time tracking where a deal sat and how to move it forward, calling on colleagues or digging through spreadsheets to find the status of loans in flight.

It’s a common pattern in growing commercial teams: the people responsible for bringing in and serving clients spend valuable time on internal status-checking instead. Greenfield Savings Bank went live on nCino in April 2023, and the shift in where loan officers spent their time was immediate.

> _"With nCino, that manual work is automated in our pipeline. That enables our commercial loan officers to be focused on the clients, which is where we want them, in the community, as a community bank."_

Momentum built quickly once the team had a full year on the nCino Platform. Origination volume jumped to $140 million in the first full year live, then reached $210 million in the second — roughly 100% growth over two years, achieved with only about a 15% increase in headcount. According to Vukovich, the growth came from removing the manual work. With the tracking automated, a lean team could spend more time where it matters most: with clients.

## Investing in People, Not Just Process

Vukovich has never framed automation to his team as a threat to their jobs. Instead, he presents it as a path to better ones and he’s intentional in how he communicates change to staff accustomed to doing things in a certain way. Most people want to learn, grow, and progress in their careers, and sharing where the bank is headed with nCino gives them concrete opportunities to do exactly that.

That philosophy has already yielded a tangible result. As automation took on more of the manual reporting and tracking work involved in annual credit reviews, Greenfield Savings Bank established a new role, annual review manager, and filled it through an internal promotion. Automation protected headcount, but it also created room for people to grow into new roles.

## Where Admin+ Made the Difference

While the bank was seeing uplift from the nCino platform, running and maintaining a technology platform with a lean team and no dedicated technical staff can be challenging. Greenfield wanted to ensure they were getting the most of their nCino capabilities and Admin+ closed that gap.

> _"Admin+ was really the magic for Greenfield Savings Bank. What Admin+ enabled us to do was to focus on where the technology meets the business and the employees, rather than just the technology. We're not focused on what objects we have to update or where a piece of data lives in the platform. We can call on our Admin+ partners to help us with that. That gives us the opportunity to focus on our clients, our team members, and really the business at large."_

For Vukovich, that support translates directly into his own capacity to focus on continuous improvement, the small, steady changes that accumulate over time rather than a single large-scale overhaul.

> _"Efficiency in the human experience feels like, oh, that was easier today than it was yesterday. Admin+ allows me to make those enhancements, whether small or large, that allow us to realize that."_

## Measuring What Matters

Greenfield Savings Bank keeps its KPIs simple by design, watching a selection of numbers closely and acting on them quickly. The main KPI is loan volume: The Greenfield Savings Bank team looks at the pipeline and specifically the committed pipeline and ensures that loans aren’t stalling in stages, checking stage time in nCino so a loan doesn't sit more than a week or two without an update, an action, or a nudge from team members. Loan status no longer requires manually checking spreadsheets and inboxes because nCino offers a built-in view the whole team can act on. That matters even more at an institution where, as Vukovich puts it, "the feedback loops are very tight."

## Trusting the Data

Institutions growing at a rapid pace need the underlying data in their system to be reliable and readily accessible. Vukovich, who describes himself as "passionate about clean data," and has made that a personal focus of his role.

> _"We're only as good as the data we have at our fingertips. Being able to bring data in from our core provider into nCino nightly, I bring about 600,000 data points in every night, that puts it right at our fingertips every day when we're doing our work. I have the full deposit and lending relationship pulling into my credit memo, and the credit analyst only has to review and check that information. It's rare that it has any adjustments that need to be made."_

Before nCino, producing that same overview required manual work or coordinating with IT for a custom report and a working session just to answer a single question. The data was reliable, but it was slow to get. Now the process is self-service, and far faster.

That same data discipline extends to how the bank competes for deals. Vukovich periodically reviews loan officers' originated portfolios, calculates a weighted interest rate by collateral type, and shares those benchmarks back across the team. The data shows that officers carrying larger deals tend to run slightly lower rates, though everyone lands in a similar range, which tells the team where its pricing sits across the marketplace. When a deal comes down to a very close margin, the team already knows how its pricing stacks up, and Vukovich credits that insight with helping the bank win those competitive deals in its market.

## Growth Without Losing the Community Bank Identity

When asked about the future of banking over the next five years, Vukovich doesn’t predict community banks giving way to automation. Instead, he anticipates a divergence in the industry and identifies the challenge that comes with it.

> _"There's going to be continued consolidation, and continued investment in technology, especially AI. I think we'll see a separation — large-scale commercial banks becoming much more automated and technology-focused, and community banks staying focused on the individuals they serve and providing personalized service. There's a tremendous amount of value in that personal experience."_

In articulating that challenge, Vukovich effectively describes what Greenfield Savings Bank is already putting into practice: merging the technology, automation, and efficiencies every bank is striving for with the personalized experience of being able to talk to an individual.

A 21-person commercial team doubled its origination volume, not by working twice as hard, but by directing its time towards the parts of the job that a spreadsheet, or an unsupported platform, never could.

**Running commercial lending with a lean team? **Schedule a demo to see how nCino and Admin+ support could work at an institution like yours.

---

[View sitemap](https://www.ncino.com/api/markdown/sitemap)