Every bank claims to care about small business customers, but few have resolved the fundamental organizational question: does the SMB segment belong to retail or commercial banking? The answer shapes everything — product design, relationship management, credit appetite, technology investment, and ultimately whether the customer feels understood or forgotten.

This panel brings together practitioners with different operating models to debate what works, what doesn’t, and what structural changes are needed. We’ll explore how internal incentive misalignment drives SMB attrition, why “just add a small business tab to the consumer app” isn’t a strategy, and how banks that have reorganized around SMB as a distinct segment are outperforming those that haven’t.