Are Your Relationship Managers Still Pricing on a Hunch?

Six months ago, commercial banking executives had a plan. Deposits would keep growing, deposit costs would come down, and loan production would climb as all that liquidity looked for a home. By mid-2026, the picture had already shifted enough that Q2's own market analysts had to stop and recalibrate.

“A couple of items seem to have definitely changed since year end,” said Anna-Fay Lohn, a senior strategic business advisor at Q2 who authors the monthly Commercial Loan and Deposit Pricing Market Update, in a recent episode of The Purposeful Banker podcast.

That’s the environment commercial bankers are pricing in right now: one where the assumptions built into a January plan can look outdated by July. And it raises a question that came up repeatedly at Q2’s CONNECT 26 customer conference in a session called “Commercial Banking Signals You Can Act On.” When the ground moves this fast, how do you make sure your relationship managers (RMs) and your executives aren’t the last to know?

The real problem: pricing by instinct

For a long time, the honest answer has been that they often are. RMs pricing a deal and executives managing a portfolio have historically had to lean on hallway conversations, gut instinct, and whatever anecdotes happened to reach them—pricing by rumor and anecdote, not by data.

The cost of that gap shows up quickly once you start measuring it. At CONNECT 26, one bank leader described just how fast spreads had moved. Average loan spreads declined 25 basis points in 6 to 12 months, putting pressure on term liquidity premium (TLP) staying high.

Without a way to see that shift as it happens, a banker has no way to know whether a given deal is in line with the market, ahead of it, or quietly giving away margin.

Multiply that across a portfolio, and the same blind spot shows up as limited visibility into performance versus peers, missed opportunities on fees and cross-sell, and wide, often unexplained variance from one RM, region, or team to the next with no easy way to diagnose why. That’s the gap Q2 Market Insights was built to close.

What Market Insights does

Market Insights compares an RM’s proposed pricing to Q2 PrecisionLender’s proprietary market and competitive data set—in the moment for RMs pricing a deal, and at the portfolio level for executives setting strategy.

The coaching happens inside Q2 PrecisionLender itself, delivered through an AI assistant via three core skills.

Spread Guidance shows an RM exactly where a loan’s spread or rate falls within the market (which quartile it lands in) and offers a specific, actionable suggestion that can be applied with one click.

Fee Guidance does the same for initial and unused line-of-credit fees, benchmarking them against market averages and suggesting adjustments before the deal is booked.

Cross-Sell and Deposits surfaces deposit data for similar customers and ranks the top three cross-sell opportunities by projected annualized revenue.

Above the individual deal, Market Matrices give managers a view into banker pricing proposals relative to market, which is useful for coaching an RM or evaluating a proposal without waiting for the next portfolio review. Optional performance analysis and standard reports benchmark the full portfolio and pipeline against current market, broken out by product, region, and rate type. Executive Reporting turns that same analysis into presentation-ready material for leadership.

None of this works without data flowing in both directions. Banks contribute their own pricing data—at minimum monthly—and in return draw on the full pooled data set, a give-to-get model that’s the reason this intelligence stays current instead of arriving once a year in a static report.

The market moves faster than once a year

The gap between an annual snapshot and reality can open fast. At year-end 2025, banks were planning around deposit growth and deposit cost reduction for 2026. By mid-year, Lohn’s data showed something different. Deposit balances were “essentially flat,” and the rate paid on those deposits was “pretty darn flat since year end.” The reason wasn’t inertia. As Lohn put it, “That tells us that competition is very strong for deposits.” Banks wanted costs to fall, but the market wouldn’t let them.

The same six months also surfaced a divergence most banks wouldn’t see without segment-level benchmarking. Community banks, Lohn noted, “actually have been able to add basis points to the spread on fixed-rate loans,” recovering roughly 30 of a 40-basis-point marketwide move. Meanwhile, “the broader market, the Regional+ has barely been able to scrape out five, six, seven, eight basis points.” A single national number would have hidden that gap entirely, which is exactly why Q2 Market Insights’ customer-defined markets and quarterly-refreshed matrices are built around peer- and segment-aware comparisons, not one blended average.

Four real diagnoses

The clearest case for this kind of visibility came from four anonymized bank examples touched on at CONNECT 26, each one following the same pattern of diagnose, find the root cause, act, then measure and iterate.

False confidence

One bank was confident it had a strong competitive position on renewals. “ 'We know what you’re going to find,' ” they told Gita Thollesson, Q2 principal strategic business advisor. “ 'You’re going to find that we’re above market. We’re getting premium pricing on our renewals, whereas we have to sharpen our pencil on new deals.' ”

The data showed the opposite. The bank’s renewals were “essentially just being rubber stamped.” Eighteen percent of the portfolio had migrated to a worse risk grade, yet only one in three of those loans got a corresponding pricing increase. It was a fixable workflow gap—the same kind of automated outlier flag Market Insights’ performance analysis is designed to catch before it becomes a portfolio-wide pattern.

The perceived compromise

A second bank assumed fee income and spread were a trade-off. RMs figured if they didn’t collect a fee, they’d made it up on spread. The data said otherwise. RMs who missed fees were also underpricing spreads. It wasn’t a structural trade-off; it was a performance gap that Fee Guidance is built to surface at the point of pricing rather than after a quarter of missed revenue has already gone out the door.

Avoiding the discussion

A third case zeroed in on individual RM behavior. Some bankers collected an unused line fee on every qualifying revolver; a large group of others simply never did. As Thollesson put it, “These RMs didn’t even know how to have that conversation with their customers.”

The same pattern showed up on pricing and win rates. The RMs who negotiated the strongest relative pricing also won the most volume, while others used price cuts as a substitute for a harder conversation. The configurable fee defaults and one-click spread suggestions from the AI assistant in Market Insights exist precisely to close that kind of skill gap across a team without singling anyone out.

Coaching a team, not just a deal

Visibility changes how banks manage people, not just deals. Another bank leader at CONNECT 26 said the bank started publishing stack rankings by name to provide both motivation and consequences.

That kind of accountability only works when the underlying numbers are trusted, but it starts with data—the same market matrices and performance reporting that let a manager have the difficult conversation with evidence instead of a hunch.

What to watch, and what to do about it

Looking ahead to the second half of 2026, Lohn advises RMs to keep an eye on spread as a proxy for revenue, and if it isn’t meeting bank and banker goals, look for “what non-credit revenue sources can be brought to bear, cross-sell, depth of services, other fee income, etc., to shore up that revenue gap.” One number to watch above all others: “The roll-on spread of their portfolios. … The roll-on spread is my personal favorite.”

Tracking that number by hand, across every loan and every RM, every month, isn’t realistic for most banks. It’s exactly what Market Insights’ performance analysis automates, and Lohn’s fallback plan, leaning on cross-sell and fee income when spread comes up short, is exactly what the Cross-Sell and Deposits skill is built to surface before the opportunity is missed.

Markets move faster than an annual report, RM behavior varies more than most executives realize, and neither problem gets solved by instinct. Market Insights exists to replace both with market-based guidance for every RM pricing a deal and every executive managing the portfolio behind it.

Ready to see it in action? Request a Market Insights demo.