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The Cleveland-based lender was among a handful of deposit-rich regional banks that used excess liquidity for a buying spree of short-term mortgage bonds issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
October 22 -
When regional banking companies begin reporting in earnest on Wednesday, their financial results are expected to confirm two things: Loan demand remained anemic, and declines in yields on the securities taking up more and more room on banks' balance sheets outpaced the decline in deposit costs.
October 15 -
Executives with some of the country's largest banks said Monday they see signs that lending markets are thawing, though consumers and businesses remain reluctant to borrow.
September 13 -
The layoffs haunt one of them at night. Another still doesn't utter the word "banker" when strangers ask what he does. One misses the intensity of the hard times. Still another is relieved it's over.
July 27 -
KeyCorp's chairman and chief executive, Henry Meyer, said the Cleveland lender — having just hired a high-profile strategic planner — has the strength to be a buyer of other banks as the recession eases, not a takeover target like some market watchers have speculated.
July 6 -
A concern is that the laggards keep falling behind and face temptation to get aggressive, perhaps introducing new risk to balance sheets already roughed up by the recession.
February 16 -
Bank of America's and Citigroup's succession messes have resembled reality shows this year, but many regional banking companies are ripe for minidramas, too, with chief executives poised to turn over en masse.
November 10 - WIB PH
Recessions have been surprisingly good to Beth Mooney, and she's doing all she can to make sure this one works out well, too. Mooney got into banking in the mid-1970s downturn, scoring the only job she could find out of college: as a secretary at a Texas bank.
October 1
Beth E. Mooney will become chairman and chief executive of KeyCorp next year, succeeding Henry Meyer 3rd, who plans to retire, the company said Thursday.
Mooney, the well-regarded vice chair and head of community banking at the Cleveland company, would be the first woman CEO of a large U.S. banking firm, though women run the stateside retail bank arms of Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC Holdings PLC.
Mooney — who helped Key end eight consecutive quarters of losses in June — was named president and chief operating officer effective immediately and will assume Meyer's chairman and CEO titles when he steps down in May.
Key has just started recovering from big bets on toxic homebuilder loans ahead of the credit crisis.
The retirement of the 60-year-old Meyer — who became CEO in 2001 — was not unexpected given his age and the strain of the last two years, a period he described in a July interview as "by far the most difficult" of his 38 years in banking.
He is among several aging regional bank executives that industry watchers
Meyer began his career in the 1970s at Society Corp. and helped oversee its merger with Keycorp in the mid-1990s, establishing one of the country's first super-regional banks. He drew brutal criticism from shareholders as the company lost nearly $3 billion combined in 2008 and 2009. They publicly questioned everything from his competence to the size of his paycheck, which remained high even as Key accepted $2.5 billion of bailout money it has yet to return.
"When we were getting bashed it was like, 'Bankers are bad people' and they are not," Meyer
Mooney, 55, is a natural successor, as her profile has risen in recent years.
She described herself as tough taskmaster in an interview with U.S. Banker in 2009, likening her management style to a "velvet hammer."
She is known to set tight deadlines for tough projects, but she said she tries to keep things light.
"I will say: 'I don't demand much, do I?" she said in the interview. "I just try and soften things up with a humor and acknowledgement that I'm intense — that I want the details."
Mooney — who was viewed as one of at least three potential in-house successor to Meyer — has the kind of diverse resume that bank boards love in a CEO. She has been everything from a bank secretary to commercial banker to a chief financial officer (at the former AmSouth Bancorp.)
She is battled-tested, too: she restructured bad commercial loans for Citibank during the savings-and-loan crisis, and steered Key's retail and commercial banking arm back to profitability a quarter earlier than the parent. The entire company reported profits in the second and third quarters.
Her tenure in the community bank put her ahead of two other potential heirs apparent: Christopher M. Gorman, 49, executive vice president and head of Key's national bank, and Thomas C. Stevens, 60, vice chair and chief administrative officer.
Both have been at Key longer, but Gorman was at a disadvantage because he's only run the national bank — which includes the investment bank and corporate bank — since March. Stevens lacks the intense business line and financial management experience of Mooney — two criteria that are considered necessary for CEOs.
Mooney joined Key in 2006 with the task of overhauling an old, sprawling network of 1,030 branches that stretch from Maine to Alaska. It has been an expensive and slow job that the company never backed away from even as it lost nearly $3 billion in 2008 and 2009 on bad construction loans in California and other states. Key opened and remodeled branches through the recession despite laying off 2,600 hundred people and sharply cutting costs.
She faces several challenges. Chief among them: Key has yet to repay its Troubled Asset Relief Program aid, which could become a competitive disadvantage as the disparity widens between large banks that have and those that haven't. That wedge was magnified this week as regulators said they would stress test all large banks to determine if they can raise their dividends.
Key also needs to fend off increasingly aggressive market share grabs in the Midwest and other regions from Huntington Bancshares Inc. and U.S. Bancorp.
