How Origin Bank Maintains A “Living” Strategy with ClearPoint

In our recent customer interview webinar, Ted Jackson talked with Regina McNeil, Executive VP of Strategic Planning and Market Analytics at Origin Bank, about the bank’s strategy evolution over the past 10 years.

Origin Bank has always viewed its strategy as a “living” document and has reimagined it multiple times in pursuit of excellence. ClearPoint Strategy made it easy for them to pivot each time and manage their strategy at a higher level, aligning their activities with their overall vision.

Here’s a recap of their strategy changes and how they’ve successfully managed to build a culture that facilitates evolution.

See the full recording of the Origin interview here!

A Strategy Built On Pillars

Since 2016, Origin Bank has structured its strategy around pillars.

The Origin team views pillars as higher than strategic objectives. They are the strategic themes that they feel will help them continue to be successful as a financial organization.

With pillars, the economic landscape doesn't always matter. “There are still things you can do that are going to set you up to be successful,” says Regina.

Even with pillars in place, the strategy is still flexible if they need to make a change at any point. And that’s exactly what they’ve done over the last decade – make changes to accommodate new thinking and new circumstances.

As the above shows, for the most part their pillars have remained pretty consistent, with some refinement along the way.

For instance, the switch from being a high-performing bank to a focus on corporate delivery occurred at the time of their IPO in 2018. “That's one example that shows how easy it is to adapt and adjust these, but still remain true to who you are.”

How Pillars Drive Strategy Conversations

With the pillar approach, Origin Bank was able to move from a strategy that was more departmental and had a lot of tactical to-do lists into an idea mapping strategic plan that would help them drive higher-level thinking about their strategy. It also encouraged more forward-thinking.

“We also wanted our strategy to be much more data-driven. Taking this concept and being able to build it into ClearPoint gave us the ability to connect these data points that we were looking for with our strategy.”

Now, all departments use the same pillars and executives have a voice at the table with regard to the strategic plan.

All executives participate in identifying objectives for a particular year. According to Regina, this approach elevated their thinking and gave leaders the opportunity to dial in to what they needed to do but still retain the capability to adjust activities during the year.

COVID was a perfect example of that flexibility. “Very early in 2020 we realized we had to pivot on a lot of things. But we were still able to maintain our foundational pillars because, regardless of what was going on, these were still the things that we needed to accomplish at the end of the day. We just had to adjust our methods and our objectives and goals, and how we were going to accomplish them.”

Origin’s Use Of Pillars Inside ClearPoint

Origin’s seven pillars are set up as major goals within ClearPoint. Each pillar has objectives within it. At that point they add more detailed information, identifying the high-level initiatives they need to achieve.

“One of the places where we stumbled early on was trying to build too much into it,” says Regina. “We were getting so granular in building tasks and action items and things within the software.

“We really use ClearPoint as a tool to help us keep things organized and aligned, and allow our executives to have a say in it. So we did build out more granular pieces underneath our pillars, but we kept them high-level. We didn't really get into tasks.”

A Strategic Evolution: Elite Financial Performance

Around 2022, Origin began rethinking its strategy. While they had previously constructed three-year plans, they realized they don't necessarily always complete them. Rather, they tend to focus on the current year, taking the future into consideration. They also realized they were starting to layer in a lot of data and KPIs, leading to “analysis paralysis.”

“Eventually, we had over 150 KPIs. We were spending too much time reviewing data and not really using that information to make decisions.”

After further discussion, they had an honest assessment of where they wanted the bank to be in the coming years: To ensure long-term independence, they needed to move from average performance to extraordinary financial performance.

“Our organization has been built by focusing on our unique culture and by heavily investing in our employees, and so that still had to remain a piece of this. We just added another piece to the puzzle, bringing in the elite financial performance.

Another Strategy Change: “Optimize Origin”

At the beginning of 2025, one of Origin's driving focuses was to deliver elite financial performance and use that to enhance its award-winning culture. It was then that the term “Optimize Origin” was coined. According to Regina, it describes a “collective commitment from our leadership to not only invest in people and systems to create more data-driven insights but also align it with our decision-making process to drive sustainable high performance.”

They dialed into the higher-level financial pieces that were important to driving elite performance, and ultimately boiled their seven big picture goals into a simpler message (pictured below). They also reevaluated the vast number of KPIs in their plan.

But that wasn’t all.

“We've always had monthly executive meetings where we talk about strategy and the strategic plan,” she says. “But we were not forcing ourselves to be more forward-thinking. We continued to allow ourselves to talk more about what we had been doing versus what we needed to do to make sure we got where we wanted to go.”

As a management team, they knew they needed to change the way they communicated.

“We created a safe space in meetings for healthy conversation. We recognized that we needed to be very honest with ourselves, with one another, and sometimes hard conversations are necessary. But through the guidance of our CEO, we really had a safe space to have these conversations.”

Regina acknowledges that CEO leadership in this area is crucial. HR can’t simply deliver a message on its own that communication, culture, and teamwork are really important; leadership must take the reins. Giving everyone a voice is key.

“It starts at the top. If your CEO is not bought into this, or is not comfortable with it, it's going to be an uphill battle for sure. Our CEO recognized that this [approach] was going to create the roadmap we needed to achieve our goal: to become a high-performing organization.”

Watch the Replay

If you missed the live session or want to rewatch specific sections, click here to watch the full recording.

ClearPoint Strategy is proud to support teams like Origin Bank who are committed to strategic excellence, transparency, and results.

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