Lisa Oliver was in good company when she heard on a Friday morning in early March that the FDIC would be taking over Silicon Valley Bank. She was among fellow board members of the Massachusetts Bankers' Association, at a two-day strategic-planning offsite. "Obviously, we knew something pretty critical was en route, although it happened more quickly than we thought," she recalled.
Oliver and her team at The Cooperative Bank of Cape Cod had a statement out to clients by Sunday morning outlining the ways in which their bank differed from SVB.
The most reassuring news was simple to explain: The Coop is a member of Massachusetts' nearly century-old deposit insurance fund, which meant deposits were covered completely, well beyond the FDIC's $250,000 cap.
But Oliver doesn't use her bank's position of safety to ignore what she believes is a moment for soul-searching in the industry. "I'm a commercial banker by trade, I grew up in a corporate management training program in Manhattan, and it was always credit, credit, credit quality. What we haven't done well as a system is manage that same level of risk introspection on the deposit side of the house," she said.
Among the positions that could be better understood, she argued, are deposit concentration — how deposits are spread out among accounts (for example, 70% of a small bank's deposits held in just five accounts); niche clients with specific needs such as government accounts and whether banks' credit lines are in fact available when needed.
All of this would help determine what banks, big and small, should be paying for deposit accounts — a more thoughtful alternative to today's price wars. "You know, after all the years spent talking about the value of relationships, we've spent the last nine months teaching people in businesses to be rate-sensitive again," said Oliver. "Maybe the best solution is to hold flat for a bit and work through this without creating undue balance sheet pressure."
As much as Oliver would like to get the numbers just right, she will not let perfect become the enemy of good, a trap she said she fell into running the national banking business at KeyBank, her employer of more than two decades before she took over at The Coop in 2017. "I was spending so much time trying to be perfect in the setup and structure and reorganization that I wasn't thinking enough ahead to what the next step was going to be."
At The Coop, she has made more time for horizon-scanning — and encourages her team to look forward as well. And she is ready to be open about her mistakes as a way of helping women in particular realize that these are part of life for senior leaders, not deal breakers.
Oliver's strategy for promoting a diverse workforce centers on her belief that one needs to meet people where they are. "You realize how often we don't appreciate what someone has done," she said. "Seeing people for who they are and meeting them where they are has been my mantra. It's the way we interact on a consistent basis that allows people to have enough courage to keep going."
Dynamic employees are key to facing The Coop's challenges in the year ahead, said Oliver. Tellers will need to start dispensing advice as the role of physical branches evolves. Executives, no matter their qualifications in commercial lending, will need to understand technology to navigate a revolution in digital payments. Diversity, then, feeds institutional performance: "If we continue to hire the same way we've hired in the past, we won't get great leadership, we won't get innovation, we won't move forward" she stated.
