Natalie Flanders started her banking career at First Horizon as an intern. During her senior year in college, she took classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays to be able to work full days on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. "I started my time here in 2009, which was a pretty terrible time to get started in banking. But it weirdly turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I learned so much by starting in the middle of a financial crisis," she said.
Flanders spent her first three years at the bank in investor relations, and by her fourth year she wanted to take on a new challenge. She met with then-CFO BJ Losch, who recommended that she join the bank's rotational program, where she would spend six months working in different departments to see what might interest her. She joined the Treasury team, and worked with the head of the department to run the bank's first ever stress testing process.
She spent the next six months in accounting. When it was time to rotate to a new department, the head of Treasury announced that he was retiring, and Flanders was asked by the new head to stay on.
Flanders spent the next eight years in Treasury, working in a variety of roles including as a securities portfolio manager, a liquidity manager and an asset liability manager. "I think banking is one of the industries that sometimes it's hard to remember that if you toggle on one thing, something on the other side goes in a different direction. Whatever you're doing is either increasing liquidity or reducing capital, so our job is to manage those risks appropriately. And sometimes I think that it's hard for people to visualize that Treasury is the place where you can get that kind of instruction," she explained.
In October 2020, she was promoted to vice president of corporate and development strategy. In 2022, while the First Horizon and TD Bank merger was still in the works, Flanders was asked to run asset liability until TD ostensibly took over.
But in May 2023, First Horizon and TD Bank terminated the merger, and Flanders was promoted to senior vice president of investor relations. Messaging was critical during this time because investor and analyst engagement had been minimal while the acquisition was pending. Flanders and her team worked round the clock for four weeks to pull together an investor day, a feat that usually takes six to eight months to put together. "I started drinking coffee for the first time in my life," she said.
Since then, Flanders has led a proactive investor outreach program, facilitating 325 meetings between the executive team and investors during the past year. She has also started an internship program for the CFO team to rebuild its talent pipeline, which had been put on pause for 15 months because of the merger. She holds seminars on such topics as the fundamentals of banking: how the bank makes money, how it manages risk and how it balances liquidity and capital. "I want people to understand the bigger picture — what we're doing and why it matters," she said.
