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Fidelity Bank isn’t just growing its physical footprint in Wichita, as the bank is among a number of local institutions increasing its commercial lending amid merger activity that is shaking up local market share.

While you can read much more about Fidelity’s $51-million expansion plans for its downtown headquarters in the cover story of this week’s Wichita Business Journal, a look at this week’s list of the area’s largest commercial lenders shows that Fidelity increased the total of those loans by $89 million from 2017 to 2018.

“Commercial lending is absolutely the growth engine for Fidelity Bank as we go forward,” says its president, Aaron Bastian. “We’ve made that a priority over the last decade or so, and we’re really starting to see the rewards of all that effort.”

Part of those efforts, he says, has been intentionally building up its team of commercial lending experts, while also having them set their sights on new avenues of potential growth.

That includes having created early this year a new division Fidelity calls Business 360, which is geared toward providing comprehensive lending and financial services to smaller businesses in the market.

At the same time, Bastian says, the overall growth continues to be propelled by strong demand from the commercial real-estate sector, along with good business growth from the bank’s manufacturing clients.

And it wasn’t growth that the bank left behind in 2018.

“The period of January to April in 2019 was the fastest growth we had seen in over a year,” Bastian says.

The $667 million in commercial and industrial loans Fidelity reported for 2018 helped it maintain the No. 3 spot on the list year over year, though it did cut into the previous gap between it and Emprise Bank, which remains at No. 2.

Intrust Bank retained the No. 1 spot on the list by a wide margin, after growing its commercial loan total from $2.68 billion to $2.95 billion year over year.

That was part of a 13.3-percent increase in the total amount lent by all the banks that reported numbers to the WBJ in both 2017 and 2018.

That increase comes as recent mergers led to the biggest shakeups on the new rankings.

American State Bank vaulted from No. 11 to No. 4 on the back of the 2018 merger with Rose Hill Bank.

Simmons Bank jumped from No. 12 to No. 8 on this year’s list after it and Bank SNB began operating as a single in June 2018 following their merger in 2017.

But organic growth still played a role in changing up this year’s Top 10.

That included the strong commercial lending growth — $219.77 million to $331.38 million year over year — reported by CrossFirst Bank that helped it move up two spots on the list to No. 7.

Tom McGrath, managing director for real estate banking, says CrossFirst, like Fidelity, has improved its own position in recent years through intentional hiring related to commercial lending.

As those team members have brought in their own connections, it has combined with existing customer relationships to help drive continued growth.

While all the industries it serves are performing well, McGrath says projects related to both health care and hospitality have made those sectors particularly strong for the bank.

And, despite the ever-present question in the industry of when and how interest rates might move this year, McGrath says 2019 is still shaping up to be another solid year for CrossFirst.

“We think the market is still really good,” he says. “We’ve got a really good pipeline (of projects) built in right now.”

Read more here.