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In this Spotlight on Community Banks article, we spoke with Aaron P. Graft, Founder, Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Triumph Financial, Inc. Aaron discusses the company’s evolution from a small community bank focused on commercial finance to a financial and technology company focused on serving the $400B transportation market.
Triumph Financial is a financial and technology company focused on payments, factoring and banking. Through its brands, TriumphPay and Triumph, it uses technology and innovation to reduce friction in cash flow management and increase the speed of payments for the trucking industry. Its TBK Bank brand provides consumer, business and commercial banking solutions, including a full range of lending products.
Triumph Financial has been listed on Nasdaq since 2014 and trades under the symbol “TFIN”.
How has your mission evolved over the last decade?
At Triumph Financial, our focus has narrowed as our mission has expanded over the last decade. Our mission is more than the money and is best expressed through our brand purpose – “Helping People Triumph.”
We began as a community bank, building a regional banking franchise with a commercial finance engine. Our goal was to create outsized returns for our investors. In 2012, we acquired a small factoring business that has since grown into one of the largest transportation factoring companies in the country. In that business, we found success by providing working capital financing solutions to small and medium-sized trucking companies, a group often underserved or ignored by the banking industry at large. As we grew the factoring business, we recognized the industry’s immense inefficiencies around getting tens of thousands of truckers paid. In response, we developed a payments network, TriumphPay, which reduced those inefficiencies by connecting the freight brokers, shippers, factors and carriers through a reliable, trusted network.
Today, we continue operating our community bank business, providing excellent products and services to consumer, business and commercial clients across 64 branches in six states. Our clients are the lifeblood of their local economies, and we are committed to serving them even as we drive more investment and focus on creating the payments network for trucking.
Learn more about Triumph Financial’s brands and values
How important is community involvement at Triumph Financial? What are some of the ways you’re working to better the communities you serve?
At Triumph Financial, we recognize that if we want our communities to be better places to live, work and play, then our team members, who are a part of those communities, need to be involved in their communities through civic and philanthropic organizations. We encourage this by offering team members 24 hours of paid time away from work each year to volunteer at philanthropic organizations that are important to them as individuals.
In 2022, Triumph Financial team members served a total of 7,095 volunteer hours. We hosted our fourth annual “Investing in Change Challenge,” a month-long volunteer initiative where team members serve in their communities. During the challenge, team members logged 1,340 hours of service to 161 organizations.
Team members across all our brands regularly teach financial literacy classes in their communities in partnership with local schools, correctional facilities, community groups and other non-profit organizations. In 2022, our team members performed 300 volunteer hours explicitly focused on financial literacy training. Triumph Financial also donated over $30,000 to financial literacy efforts such as Junior Achievement.
Each year, Triumph Financial commits to donating at least 1% of the organization’s net earnings to our communities, amounting to over $1,000,000 in 2022.
Learn more about Triumph Financials’ philanthropic efforts
What’s been the biggest surprise during your 9 years as a publicly traded company?
The chain of events that led Triumph Financial from a community bank focused on commercial finance to a financial and technology company focused on serving transportation finance feels like a whirlwind at times. From the acquisition of our factoring company in 2012, to the recognition of the inefficiencies that still exist in the 21st century in this $400 billion transportation market we serve, to the TriumphPay solution we built to remedy those challenges, we provide financial solutions to more truckers, trucking companies, freight brokers, 3PLs and factors than anyone else in the country. The scale we have reached in only a few years’ time in our payments business is extraordinary.
But the biggest surprise has been the quality of the relationships we’ve built with our customers over the last near-decade. Whether that customer is a single owner/operator trucker driving down the highway looking for working capital finance, or a large fleet that also needs equipment and insurance services; whether it’s a mom-and-pop business at the corner of First and Main that requires a stable, local financial partner familiar with their community and their business, or a factoring company or freight broker in need of a way to create efficiencies and mitigate fraud; the ability to help these people triumph has been exceptionally rewarding.
Aaron Graft (pictured) at Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square. Photography courtesy of Nasdaq, Inc.
Who is the ideal Triumph Financial customer? How do you build customer loyalty?
Due to the complexity of our operations, our ideal customer varies by our different segments. In our banking segment, our ideal customer is a small to the medium-sized business owner looking for a full banking relationship with an institution that will ride side-by-side with them through the cycles. In our factoring segment, an ideal customer is a trucking fleet, whether one truck or one thousand trucks, that needs working capital finance, insurance, equipment finance and cash management services. And finally, an ideal customer in our payments segment is a freight broker or factor looking to mitigate fraud, create efficiencies and automate processes in the presentment, audit, payment and cash application of invoices.
Despite these very different businesses, we build customer loyalty the same way. We listen. We are responsive. We are innovative. We like to solve complex problems and demonstrate the value we bring to each customer, all while keeping our core values top of mind. While we have grown to be one of the more profitable financial institutions in the country, our mission remains more than the money and we are here to help our customers, communities and team member’s triumph!
Connect with Triumph Financial:
About Aaron Graft:
Mr. Graft is the Founder, Vice Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Triumph Financial, Inc. (Nasdaq: TFIN). Additionally, he serves as the Vice Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and Public Information Officer of TBK Bank, SSB, is the Chairman of Triumph Financial Services LLC, and is the Vice Chairman of Triumph Insurance Group, Inc. Mr. Graft also serves as the Vice Chairman of The Bank of the West of Thomas, Oklahoma. Before establishing Triumph Financial, Mr. Graft served as the Founder and President of Triumph Land and Capital Management, LLC, where he oversaw several multi-family and commercial real estate projects in receivership and led the acquisition of multiple pools of distressed debt secured by multi-family projects. Before Triumph, Mr. Graft worked for Fulbright & Jaworski, LLP (now Norton Rose Fulbright LLP), focusing on distressed loan workouts. Mr. Graft received a Bachelor of Arts, Cum Laude, and a Juris Doctorate, Cum Laude, from Baylor University. He also serves on the Baylor University Hankamer School of Business Advisory Board. In 2017, Mr. Graft received the EY Entrepreneur of The Year® Award in the Business & Financial Services category in the Southwest Region.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
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