Just one week after being tapped to run Synovus' consumer banking and brand experience team in December 2021, Liz Wolverton was asked to take on a monumental task: shuttering 15% of the bank's roughly 300 branches.
Less than two years later, Wolverton carried out the branch closings, saving Synovus about $15 million a year in operating costs, according to the bank. But what Wolverton said she took the most pride in during this time was retaining more than 85% of the Synovus employees who were working at the affected branches in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee.
In the past, Wolverton said, these workers likely would have left the company, "but this was post-Covid and so the bank had a completely different philosophy."
Wolverton worked with the human resources department on matching workers from the closed branches with jobs that could be done remotely or hybrid. For example, Synovus has been growing its commercial business, creating remote jobs in treasury management services. Wolverton's team identified treasury management jobs where a branch employee's customer service skills would be useful.
Other branch employees moved to small-business lending, another Synovus division that was embracing more remote work. "A lot of people from the branches were qualified to work with small businesses," Wolverton said.
While she considers the retention rate a success, Wolverton does not sugarcoat the closings.
"Any time you close a branch, it's tough. We're very committed to our communities and our people, and at the end of day, both were impacted," Wolverton said.
But Wolverton also saw the branch closings as a chance to show workers how they fit into a newer, more digital banking industry. She brought together 300 company managers for an event where they discussed and saw mock-ups of potential branches of the future — including hybrids of physical and digital branches. The group also learned about the various ways digital tools can enhance retail banking.
Despite the personnel and digital transitions at the bank and a challenging economy overall, Wolverton was able to grow the consumer bank's yearly revenue by 15.3% to $47.9 million in 2022. And the consumer bank's loan volume grew 7.7% to $197 million, reported Synovus, a $60 billion asset-size bank at 2022's end.
Wolverton, who has been at Synovus since 2003, has made it a point to hire women to senior leadership positions, and the majority of her direct reports are women. It's an important transition given economic shifts within households, she said.
"[I]n the past and even now, the individuals reviewing data and designing experiences leaned toward male-led traditional nuclear families," Wolverton stated. But now there is a shift toward seeing women "as the key financial decision-makers and as underserved investors."
Wolverton took on another leadership role last year when Georgia Governor Brian Kemp appointed her to the executive committee of Realizing Education Achievement Can Happen, or REACH. Wolverton said she gets approached to serve on many boards and foundations, but she wanted to work on REACH, because it helps Georgia's students get on a financial and educational path to college as early as junior high school. Wolverton's efforts with REACH include visiting middle and high schools and helping with branding and messaging.
