Team Spotlight: Justin Delgado, Chief Lending Officer
Justin Delgado has been to a lot of grand openings in the Salt Lake Valley. Not to mention groundbreakings and plenty of site visits, too. When a company is building something with First Utah Bank’s support, he tries to be there for all of it—including the ribbon cuttings.
“We’re really in it from the ground up,” says Delgado, Chief Lending Officer at First Utah Bank. “It’s a fun part of my job because I get to see projects through from start to finish and everything that goes into it.”
For Delgado, community banking has always meant being genuinely immersed in what clients are building, not just processing a loan and moving on. That investment in the work, and in the people doing it alongside him, is what’s kept him at First Utah Bank for over 13 years.
A Path of Redirection
The road to banking isn’t always a straight line. Delgado was studying accounting when a college counselor’s scheduling error forced him to switch to a finance major. After an injury, he missed a hiring window for a position that would have led to a career in wealth management. A couple of pivots later, he went on to get his master’s degree instead. Sometimes the best things in life come when things don’t go as planned.
As Chief Lending Officer, he now works with loan officers on deal structure and pricing and focuses on building the kind of team that can do for clients what he spent years doing himself.
“When I was a loan officer, the most rewarding part was working with small businesses, especially family-owned, and helping them take that step into building something they’d always dreamed of,” he says. “Now I get to see loan officers working their way up, gaining the confidence to go do the same thing.”
The Human Side of Banking
In Delgado’s view, what makes a strong commercial lender isn’t something you study for. It requires relatability and the capacity to connect with business owners across different backgrounds and industries.
Everything else you develop over time, learning what to see in a company’s financials, understanding how different industries operate, and finding creative paths for borrowers that don’t fit a standard structure.
“You can’t really learn all that from a book,” he says. “You have to walk into a hundred different companies and address each and every one of their unique problems with their own tailored solutions.”
Small business owners are entrepreneurial by nature, always thinking about how to grow and what to do next. Having a banking expert to think through those ideas matters. It helps them pursue the right paths and sidestep ones that don’t make sense long term. “Not a lot of business owners are experts in banking. So having someone you can call who is an expert and will help you talk through those ideas can be really beneficial to a company.”
A good loan officer can hold a credible conversation across nine or ten different industries. At a larger bank, that kind of embedded knowledge gets distributed across departments. Here, loan officers stay in it for the long term, developing a deep understanding of their client’s business and what it needs in order to succeed.
No Such Thing as Off the Clock
When Delgado leaves work every afternoon to pick up his daughter, life doesn’t slow down. With three kids under eight, his evenings and weekends are filled with aquarium visits, swim lessons, and standing in line for whatever viral food trend his kids are currently obsessed with. (Most recently it was mystery dumplings.)
Having kids has also shaped how he thinks about running a team. Delgado is deliberate about protecting his loan officers’ time away or at home. “You can overwork yourself, chasing commissions and working on loans, and forget that you need a break. Protecting that balance for my team—that’s my job.”
After 13 years, what keeps him here at First Utah Bank is the people—from his team to the bank’s owners and executive leadership. “They do the right thing for their employees 100% of the time, not just when it’s beneficial to them. They’ve always been that way here, and you can feel it at every level of the company.”
That way of doing business moves through the organization and shows up in how the bank interacts with its customers. Every client and every business matters, regardless of size. When something goes wrong, the question isn’t who to blame but how to fix it. For Delgado, his purpose is to be a part of that ethos, where he’s actively Redefining Possible for his team and their clients.
“My goal is pretty simple, which is to make this the best place I can every day.”