Michael LaBella
Title: Commercial Market President, Connecticut, TD Bank
Age: 57
Experience: 32 years
Michael LaBella got his foot in the financial services door when he got into GE Credit’s management development program out of college before working for Citibank for 16 years. At TD Bank, he oversees retail and commercial operations in the bank’s Connecticut market. “It’s amazing covering the whole state,” he told The Commercial Record. “You really appreciate what a diverse state it is.” When he’s not busy banking, LaBella enjoys golfing, riding motorcycles and exploring all the Nutmeg State has to offer.
Q: What were some of the highlights for TD Bank in Connecticut last year?
A: The last year to 18 months has been a challenge across the whole industry. Just the economics of it, the challenge with a low rate environment. … It’s always a challenge to earn money in the business in general, but I think what’s great is, we’ve found some really great niches where we’re really expanding our business. One of those is our health care offering.
When I say health care, I mean the smaller-end health care. Not hospital lending and nursing home lending. We have a great program we came out with and really expanded about a year ago where we’re providing up to 100 percent financing for medical practices, physicians, dentists, veterinarians, to buy businesses, to merge businesses, to have new partners come in, maybe out of school with a couple of years of experience, and buy practices where other doctors may be retiring.
There’s been a lot of activity in the health care industry and we’ve found that this has been a very high growth area for us. That’s really been a great success the last couple of years.
Even on the smaller side, a lot of medical practices have also been very successful in that space. We’re seeing some smaller lines of credit and term loans to the medical community. That’s been a great success in small business.
Q: How does your business differ across different parts of Connecticut?
A: In regional [banking], it’s a little bit higher sale size and loan size. The strength we’ve really seen in the market has been somewhat geographic. The southern part of the state, when we look at Fairfield County especially, that’s very heavy in real estate and that’s been a big growth component for us over the last two or three years. That product set has seen very high growth.
We have four regional offices, by way of background. We have Fairfield, Hartford, New Haven and New Britain. When I look at the New Britain market, that’s an area where we still see some good bread-and-butter, basic manufacturing business. A lot of that’s tied to a lot of the contracts we’re seeing coming out in aerospace – that is probably our biggest portfolio in manufacturing – and a lot of it is tied to a very strong backlog in aerospace.
In that area we are seeing expansion, in both facilities and lines of credit, to handle some of the large pipeline coming down the road for a lot of the large aerospace contracts.
One of the tougher areas has been our middle market segment, and I think that’s across the board. There’s some M&A activity going on in the middle market segment, which is good and bad. There are some deals out there – [but] not a lot of deals – and with some of the M&A activity, it’s making the pool a little bit smaller.
Q: How is the retail side of the house doing? Where do you see opportunities, and where do you see challenges?
A: We’ve been growing the retail business. It’s been really positive. We have a home equity business and a lot of things coming out in home equity now. There is some strengthening in the consumer world, so we’re seeing an uptick in our home equity business. We all kept thinking the mortgage business was going to start slowing down because of rates, but rates really haven’t increased on the long term basis.
I think some of the challenges in retail, as we see a lot of changing in people, especially the new generations, as I like to call them, we’re seeing less traffic in our stores. Technology is really starting to drive some of people’s preferences as to how they bank.
Mobile banking is becoming more and more important, and so is nonbank competition. When you see Apple Pay and things like that coming into the market, it’s not just a challenge to our existing competitors that we know every day, but it’s some of the nonbank competitors that are starting to come into the space that we have to be aware of and make sure we’re keeping up with on the technological side.
LaBella’s Top Five Wines:
- Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon
- Franciscan Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon
- Brunello di Montalcino
- Meiomi Pinot Noir
- Domaine Robert-Denogent Pouilly-Fuisse
