Photo courtesy of KeyBank

Mark Williams
New England Business Banking Market Leader, KeyBank
Years experience: 25 

After taking a break from working at large banks, Mark Williams is joining KeyBank to lead the Ohio-based regional bank’s New England business banking efforts.

Williams joins KeyBank from a stint as chief growth officer at Lewiston, Maine-based Androscoggin Bank. At KeyBank, Williams will oversee the business banking sales teams in Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. 

Q: How do you look to work yourself into New England’s business communities  and enter into markets where there are already a lot of community bank competitors?
A: Key has got some differentiated capabilities, specifically around how it conceptualizes and focuses and emphasis payments. Most bankers in commercial and business banking they tend to be either lenders and or payments people. I spent about equal parts of my career doing both.

I started as a payments person, but the majority of my commercial banking experience is really directly lending. I’ve also led treasury teams for the last decade, so I tend to have a unique point of view. I don’t think our customers separate the difference between borrowing money and getting paid and paying vendors. They don’t even conceive of it in that way. They conceive of it in terms of their workflows. What’s the job that I’ve got to get done today? What do I have to wake up and do? I got to pay this vendor. I’ve got to get paid from this customer. That’s how they conceptualize it, and the way Key has structured business banking and its commercial banking services is really more in line with that. It really has been impressive to me, and it’s something that’s attractive to me as someone who spans both the sort of the intersection of payments and credit and how those all function together in and around a business. Key really has emphasized that and focused on that and built its model around it. So that’s really refreshing to me.

Now, how do I differentiate in the smaller markets against the smaller banks? They often play in different avenues. That’s the thing I learned this past year because I’m not a community banker, but I went and spent a year at a community bank. [Androscoggin Bank] was working with businesses that banks in the senior credit space, they are just not going to lend to them. So if it’s a piece of investment real estate, it’s not a credit tenant. It’s just a different type of asset. It’s not bad, it’s just different, and the risk profile is different for us.

Conversely, we have a natural advantage in our platform and our scale. I think often it has more to do with a lot of the business that the senior credit space goes after. The community banks can’t compete on price, so therefore they cede that space to us, and they’ll probably go after the things that are going to be less appetizing for us from a risk standpoint. It’s just a different model. 

Q: KeyBank is based outside of New England. How has it invested in the New England region, and how will it continue to invest in the region?
A: What I’ve seen is from a commercial banking standpoint. My commercial partners, they are growing their teams. That’s the one thing I would say. They see New England as a potential growth market.

I was a banker in Florida for 12 years and you have sections and pockets of that state that their equivalent of GDP is growing 13, 14, 15 percent. It’s kind of not hard to be a banker in that case. It’s like sort of shooting fish in a barrel. It’s harder when you’re in a mature, slower-growing market. That being said, New England, it’s a stable market, so you don’t get the high peaks and the low lows. Business formation numbers are lower, but they are there. So you really have to compete on helping clients think through what their growth strategy, both organically and inorganically. There’s not a ton of organic growth, necessarily. A lot of it is inorganic, so it actually creates the space for a banker who really understands how to leverage things like the SBA.

SBA is sort of the capital markets for small businesses. That’s how I kind of look at it. You use it to acquire competition for other companies you’re interested, whether you’re doing a vertical integration or horizontal integration. It’s actually really a great market for Key because of our strength in SBA, our strength in payments. Those things are vitally important everywhere, but especially in a mature market. 

Q: With the cost of items increasing and interest rates holding steady at rates much higher than the average during the 2010s, how does KeyBank plan to serve small businesses?
A: That’s who [economic troubles] affect the most, especially when you consider how important it is to the economy to have a thriving small business segment. Think about how disproportionate the impact of tariffs are on small businesses. Inflation, a lot of it is hidden or it’s been passed along. New England, in general because we share so much of a border with Canada, and everything that’s recently going on, we’re more exposed.

Small businesses have less resilience. A lot of the costs have been getting absorbed. Larger companies are absorbing it in their supply chain. You know what that means? That means small businesses are paying for it. So, if they’re absorbing the additional cost in their supply chain, it’s either customers, businesses that are selling things to them, or things that they’re selling to businesses – and on both ends of that are our clients.

So how do we help them with it? Well, we really focus on a number of things: What’s their overall cash resilience, and what’s their strategy to build cash and liquidity? Really focusing, hyperfocusing on liquidity strategy is really important, and you do that in a small business by really emphasizing payments, accelerating receivables and reducing the costs associated with accepting receivables and also protecting them, and then really looking for ways to decelerate payables. So how do you shift it? How do you develop a payable strategy so you have no impact with your credibility with your suppliers, but you’re able to extend out what your average days payable are? 

So, not to get overly technical, but that’s really the answer to the question: Really understand and help them figure out how their payments and their liquidity strategy work hand in hand, and how that allows them to build the liquidity over time, allows them to build equity in the balance sheet and strengthen the balance sheet that’ll allow them to be resilient. 

Williams’ Five Favorite Things

1. Reading political, social and economic theory and history
2. Mountain biking
3. Using technology and following the banking industry
4. Researching and writing briefs about banking and the real economy in New England
5. Spending time with his wife, five kids and three dogs