Dave Crittendon serves as executive vice president, director, private bank at UMB Bank. Learn how his competitive drive helps him push his team to reach their goals.

Tell me about your role leading UMB’s Private Bank team.

As director of UMB’s Private Bank, I believe my job has four main functions all starting with the letter E:

  1. Equip our private bankers with products and services that serve our high-net-worth clients.
  2. Ensure we deliver concierge-like service to our clients.
  3. Encourage our associates to use internal and external partners to help our clients reach their goals.
  4. Empower the team to grow the business.

I am pretty competitive, so I want to push my team to always think of new ideas and different ways that we can support our clients and build impactful relationships. I’ve enjoyed wearing many different hats throughout my career and I rely on my past experiences to help shape how I lead today. I think it is important I relate to my team professionally and personally and share how I handled situations they are facing every day.

How do you use your competitive drive to grow the business?

My competitive drive allows me to step back and look at a team and the business holistically. Then I can brainstorm with others about how we can improve and build something even stronger as we move forward. When I started last year, I quickly encouraged our teams to reexamine the products we offered and our client education process. By examining these two facets, our team was able to build a more robust business and help our clients create strong financial plans.

I’ve had the privilege of building businesses throughout my career and at UMB, this is the fastest I have doubled the business. I love working with entrepreneurs and UMB is very entrepreneurial. Our associates are always looking for ways to push the envelope and grow our business, which makes this a fun and exciting place to work.

Do you have any goals you want to achieve?

I joined UMB a little over a year ago and my goal is to leave my team and business better than I found it. Since our team recently doubled our business in a year, I want to keep pushing us to grow and hit $1 billion in portfolio mortgages by the end of the year.

At UMB, we work hard, are open to new ideas and are always try new things, which makes achieving goals even more rewarding. For the rest of 2020, I want to keep pushing my team to grow in their skill sets. I want my team to feel appreciated and that they are heard as they bring forth new ideas to propel our business and deliver the best service to our clients.

After we hit our $1 billion goal, we will enter a new phase of our business that will challenge us to keep finding innovative ways to serve our clients. This is an exhilarating goal for me because it means we can constantly reassess what we are offering and how we are building relationships, which in turn will keep us on our toes to be best we can be.

Is there anything special you keep on your desk to keep you grounded?

I work in our Denver office when we aren’t working from home. On my desk, I have a family photo from about 10 years ago. We took a cruise together and one night for dinner, we all had to dress up. The kids were complaining about having to wear fancy clothes, but this posed family photo is one of my favorite memories. Even with the complaining, we had a great time on this vacation. I love being able to look over on my desk and see it every day, I definitely miss it while I’m working from home.

Tell us about your family and how you spend your free time.

I’ve been lucky to be married to my wonderful wife for 30 years. We have three sons and a beautiful granddaughter.

While my sons were young, they loved to play water polo, they even competed at the Junior Olympic level! The water polo team had six players in the field and three of them were my kids, which always made the games exciting to watch. They were also competitive swimmers and did relays together. The relay team had four athletes and three were mine!

Now, we enjoy golfing together. Maybe one day they will get back into water sports!

Get started on the next step of your financial journey. UMB Private Bank can handle your day-to-day banking needs and offer custom lending solutions, so you can spend your time focusing on what matters most to you.