President, Key Commercial Bank and KeyBank Real Estate Capital
In 2016, as it was finalizing its acquisition of First Niagara Financial Group, KeyCorp announced that it would invest $16.5 billion in affordable housing and other community development initiatives through the end of 2021.
The Cleveland company ended up fulfilling that commitment more than a year ahead of schedule, thanks in large part to the commercial real estate team led by Angela Mago.
By the end of 2020, the community development lending and investment arm within the CRE unit had accounted for about $12 billion of the initial $16.5 billion commitment. Last year alone, it financed about $3.7 billion of loans for affordable housing, enough for KeyCorp to rank among the nation’s top three affordable housing lenders for 2020.
In her role as president of Key Commercial Bank and KeyBank Real Estate Capital, Mago oversees middle-market and commercial real estate lending at the $179 billion-asset KeyCorp. She is one of the 13 senior executives reporting directly to Chairman, President and CEO Chris Gorman.
Though the pandemic depressed commercial real estate lending — CRE loans declined by 2.5% last year to $14.7 billion — the two major divisions that Mago leads still reported a 3% increase in revenue compared with 2019, to $1.4 billion.
Much of the revenue came from administering loans made through the Paycheck Protection Program, the federal government’s pandemic aid aimed at helping small businesses with payroll costs and expenses. Key processed over 43,000 applications for $8 billion in funds last year, of which $3.2 billion came from Mago’s commercial bank unit.
As one of KeyCorp’s most senior executives, Mago has made it a priority to hire more women and minorities on her team. Last year, 45% of her new hires across her middle market and commercial real estate segments were women or people of color.
In that vein, she launched a partnership last year with the Real Estate Executive Council, a professional trade group for minority men and women in commercial real estate, with a goal of developing “our black emerging leaders and a pipeline of diverse talent for real estate and Key more broadly.”
She also took part in a “thought leadership” session with Ibram X. Kendi, the author of the New York Times best-seller “How to Be an Antiracist.”
“Sometimes opening doors to advance diversity means actively seeking out expertise,” Mago said.
Alan Kline contributed to this story.
