Nick Payne

Senior Vice President, Siena Lending Group

40 Under 40 Category: Business Development

Biography:

Nick Payne is a senior vice president based in Siena Lending Group’s Chicago office. He is responsible for originating, structuring, and executing senior capital solutions for middle and lower-middle market companies in the Midwest region. Prior to joining Siena Lending Group in 2015, Nick was a vice president of originations for Nations Equipment Finance, sourcing opportunities requiring senior term debt, collateralized by the company’s capital equipment assets.

Nick started his career at Morgan Stanley in New York City before moving to the asset manager and commodity specialist, Van Eck Global.

Currently, he is a candidate for the Level 2 SFNET Exam. He lives in downtown Chicago with his wife and son (3). Nick currently serves as the Treasurer for the Secured Finance Network, Midwest Chapter.

Is there a piece of professional advice that you would give yourself if you could go back in time?

If you ever stop learning, find a new role with the company that you’re working for or find a new place to work. For me, this resonated in the same silo that houses my healthy fear of complacency. In the past, if I haven’t felt challenged, I’ve tried to find a challenge. That could have been: positioning myself for a promotion, studying for the SFNET/GMAT or some other continuing education, or moving to another firm to continue advancing in my career.

What role has mentoring played in your career?

Mentoring has been paramount for me in my career. The fact is, no matter where someone is in their profession, or where they’re going, someone else has been there before. Leveraging their experiences can provide one with the necessary confidence to execute and awareness to avoid familiar pitfalls. The genesis of my career in finance was the result of much consultation from a college mentor. In my current role with Siena, my mentor is our CEO, David Grende. I’ve learned so much in such a short period of time from mentors – if you pay attention it’s like getting the cliff notes version on how to be good at what you do or how to make the right decision when given a set of options. Mentoring is so important to me that, as a board member for the Midwest chapter of the SFNET, it’s my intent to formalize a structure for a mentoring program for our members.

How do you think the commercial finance industry can attract more young professionals?

Continue to innovate. Wall Street’s biggest competitor for top young talent is Silicon Valley, and has been for over 20 years. Attracting talent to any industry requires the hiring institutions to take an interest in what matters most to their target audience and engage them. So how do you engage a young professional this day in age? I think you must offer one or more of the following: flexibility, education, creativity (liberties), ownership in work product, opportunity to make a tangible impact. Moreover, young professionals want to work for a person or organization that is inspiring to them. This could mean many things and it’s ultimately up to the leadership at an institution to determine what it means for their employees (or target employees). But this perhaps highlights the most important attribute required to bring in young talent – quality of management. Put simply, young professionals want to work for someone whom they like – someone that they can identify with. Having a meaningful relationship with a superior can be an extremely motivating factor. Lastly, and although it’s cliché, having a robust social media presence has proven time and time again to be the most popular medium for connecting with young professionals. This is a relatively underdeveloped platform in our industry, but I can see that changing in the next 10 years as human resource departments become more comfortable with the regulatory framework and continue homing in on recruiting the next generation.

How did you wind up in the industry? We know most kids don’t say “I want to be in commercial finance when I grow up.”

After taking some time off from the industry, I returned to finance but in a different area than with what I was familiar. Having spent years in securities, I had frequently wanted to know what it felt like to make a meaningful impact on my client’s business, something that was hard to do in sales on such a large platform. Lending was a way for me to explore that. The decisions that we make at Siena (or the hundreds of other lenders in the marketplace) have a result. It’s our hope that the result has a positive and fulfilling effect on the current state and future operations of all the businesses that we are fortunate enough to partner with.