The Future of Banking with Corey Neil of The Bank of Tampa
Corey Neil serves as President and Chief Operating Officer at The Bank of Tampa. He has been with the bank for more than 17 years serving in various roles and has more than 25 years of banking experience, all of which have been spent in Tampa Bay. Prior to joining The Bank of Tampa in 2003, Corey was employed by SunTrust Bank.
In this interview, Mr. Neil discusses his views on the future of work, the state of banking, and pragmatic business decisions every leader should evaluate, both in times of uncertainty and stability.
Q: How has the banking industry fared during the pandemic as compared to other industries?
A: In March, the financial services industry felt significant pain because the Federal Reserve cut interest rates from about 1.50% to zero just after the financial markets had negatively reacted to the pandemic. Banking is a thin margin business, so that's why as banks grow they try to get the scale to offset their overhead with net interest margin. The interest rate cut was painful, yet most banks are sustainable because they are used to dealing with rate volatility. The tough part going forward is we now need to prepare for future uncertain credit losses that we don't see coming yet. As we talk today, our credit metrics at The Bank of Tampa are the best they've ever been, our allowance for loan loss reserve is as healthy as it's ever been, and our strategy is to do as much as possible to put more into that reserve. The concern is that the real pain may start when a borrower calls us to tell us they are unable to make their loan payment. Unfortunately, that type of problem lags the economy and doesn’t appear until sometime down the road.
Q: You just mentioned a significant challenge - is that the most significant challenge The Bank of Tampa has faced since the shutdowns began?
A: Long range, yes, that's it in a nutshell. However, the immediate challenge in the early days of the pandemic was executing the Payroll Protection Program (PPP). The program was very well-founded and purposeful in its intent, but its execution was the most challenging thing I've faced in my professional career. I don’t believe any bank or banker had any valuable experience coming into it. We had to learn and react quickly because there had never been a program like it - a program that was issued by the federal government yet offered through the banks.
The first challenge we faced was the urgency and fear that the program was going to run out of money. As bankers, we felt we had to participate in the program. As for our clients, they were virtually banging down the door saying they needed the money, or they would have to lay off or fire many employees. The second challenge, in addition to the ever-changing direction from the government, was the program’s requirement to loan money based on payroll records. I've been a banker for 25 years, and I've never once lent money based on payroll records—we would typically need financial statements, balance sheets, and income statements. Statements of payroll records have no viability in terms of how to lend money, so we were educating ourselves on the meaning and validity of the records we were obtaining in real-time. Further, it was our responsibility to properly follow the procedures and preserve the reasons we granted the loans because of the government guarantees behind them. The intersection of urgency and lack of familiarity caused us to have to exercise decision-making on the fly and make the best decisions based on what we knew at the moment. I simply cannot foresee another time in my career where I will have the opportunity to learn, develop and lead as much as I did in that 45-day window—it was a remarkable experience.
Q: How do you envision the future of work for both your client-facing teams, as well as your “back of the house” team members?
A: From the start of the pandemic, we decided that as long as we were able to preserve the safety of our client-facing teams in terms of separation and social distancing in our banking offices, we wanted them to be in-person - visibility to our clients is very important to us. Even though they may not be able just to walk in the door, we wanted our clients to know that if they called to make an appointment, their team would be there ready to serve. Accessibility for our clients is such an inherent part of our culture, I don't see a dramatic change going forward. However, there has been tremendous advancement in how our client-facing employees go about doing their jobs, including using video calls to engage and the use of DocuSign to execute documents. Previously, we had dabbled in using these technologies, but that was something we were able to advance immediately and push forward in a meaningful way. These technologies will forever change how everyone in our bank performs their role.
As it relates to the support mechanisms of our bank, we learned how to mobilize and have support employees work remotely almost immediately. We believe people can work effectively from home, depending on their role. We have done an evaluation regarding which teams we expect to return to an office environment, which could permanently work remotely, and which could operate in a hybrid environment using hotel-workspaces in our offices. Prior to the pandemic, we may have had five of our 265 full-time employees working in a remote or hybrid functionality. When we return to whatever the normal environment will be on the back end of the pandemic, those numbers will shift dramatically—we will have approximately 30 people permanently remote, maybe another 50 in some form of hybrid, and then we will have our original core back in our offices full-time. The pandemic really opened our minds to options we may not have previously considered. It has changed our outlook on the real estate and physical office space we will require, as well as which technology we will need to invest in to be more functional when working remotely. It will definitely change how we will do business going forward.
Q: What has been The Bank of Tampa’s most impactful innovation?
A: Our most impactful innovation did not actually occur during the pandemic, but it's almost like we planned for it. Our single greatest investment in technology in the last several years was a total upgrade to our phone system. The reason it’s significant is because it's culturally important to us that our clients are able to reach us by phone—so much so, we almost want them to have to work to get to a voicemail. We totally overhauled and upgraded our phone system in order to preserve reachability at the highest level. When the pandemic hit, we had the ability to forward our phones to our cell phones, or to take a desk phone and plug it in at home. Because our clients were able to get the same level of experience when calling The Bank of Tampa at the beginning of the pandemic, the new phone system contributed to enabling us to easily go remote. A new phone system may be considered “retro” with all the technology sitting on our desks, but it’s the innovation that has meant the most to our client experience. We believe our clients want to get a live voice on the other end of the line.
Q: How have your management style or practices changed in the current environment?
A: I love being in person and face-to-face, so I have struggled being without that interaction. If I have the opportunity to bring a group together in one room, stand in front of them and interact with them, that is always going to be my first choice. The pandemic has pushed us to conference calls and to Webex, which means I'm not able to be as engaged with people as I am when I am able to interact with them one-on-one. I've had to adapt and try to make the same impact virtually. To accomplish that, I’ve increased my frequency of outbound efforts to make sure the person at the other end of the phone or video call feels a connection in any way possible. Also, if I get to see someone through an impromptu run-in, it’s important to make it feel special. I'm not traveling to our offices like I normally would, so if I have the chance to interact for some reason, I’m sure to invest extra time to ask what's been going on in their life. I had always believed in “communicate, communicate, communicate,” because there’s no substitute for that, now but it's been put to the test.
Because I think it’s a major point of leadership, we’ve had to expedite decision-making. We don't have the luxury of quick collaborative gatherings as we did pre-COVID, so we've had to make decisions faster as a result of it. For me, that's probably something I needed to speed up anyway, so this has allowed me the platform to test and experiment with that. Frankly, it’s been amazing to look at the “silver linings” of this whole experience. The current environment has validated the role of community banking in a marketplace that over time has questioned whether community banking was always going to be necessary. The ability to connect with your banker one-on-one to get a PPP loan, and the ability, in a time of need, to know that you can get someone on the other end of the phone if you can't walk into an office and see them. That is the model of community banking. This difficult time has been a validation of why community banks exist and why they will continue to exist in the future.
Q: What are your two favorite books - one personal, one professional?
A: I'm not really much of a self-help book reader–that is just not what I naturally look to pick up. However, I believe I can answer the question with just one book because it’s a novel that also happens to be my favorite professional book: “Atlas Shrugged” spans the political and economic theory I appreciate, and because I'm a banker, it falls into my profession. I'm a true fan of the book and love reading all 1,200 or so pages of it.
Q: What is a fun fact people don't know about you?
A: Because I played tennis as a kid, I am fairly proficient in juggling, and there is a whole lot of standing around on a tennis court. Tennis balls are perfect for juggling, so I taught myself how between games. Interestingly enough, I took a trip last summer to Costa Rica to teach vacation Bible school. Because I didn’t have the time to take a crash course in Spanish before I left, the language gap was significant. It truly hurt my enjoyment, because I couldn't communicate. However, I was able to make a great connection when I taught one of the kids how to juggle. Because we couldn't speak, it was just motions and small words here and there, but it still seemed pretty impactful to the boy. I always hope people don’t think of me as a circus clown when I juggle, but at least I can say it helped me forge a terrific bond while on a mission trip.
This interview was conducted by the team at Stonehill. Stonehill is a strategy and innovation firm that helps businesses to identify opportunity, implement change, and accelerate growth. Our team consists of an innovative blend of creative, strategy, technology, and change management experts that allows us to unite the functional silos of business in the common objective of creating differentiated customer experiences.