Still, Hough ex-pects to see one customer leave at the end of the year and to have another merge with a company he has no current relationship with. He notes that he has successfully targeted de novo, or new, banks to replace lost business.
David Puntney, Independent Forms Services, Joliet, Ill., is also dependent on this vertical niche—90 percent of the distributorship's business is with financial customers. "The mergers have hurts us, even though our accounts were mostly on the buying end of the deal," Puntney said. "You lose 20 percent to 25 percent of the volume when you go from two accounts to one." In the late 1990s, his firm had no growth and was struggling to replace lost accounts. A revitalized market over the past three years has restored Independent Forms' growth curve, he said.