Interview: Jim Daly, Regional

Safe and healthy

Welfare of personnel and clients has been a key theme throughout the pandemic

Jim Daly

Regional President, West Florida – Truist

How has demand for your services shifted over the course of the past year? We had to take a couple of things into consideration. No. 1 was keeping our teammates safe and healthy, as well as our clients. We have over 100 locations in Tampa Bay and we had to make sure that we continued to do business while keeping that personal touch. We’re amazed at our teammates in our retail branches and their capacity to continue to make connections, even in a drive-through environment. The demand for connection was off the charts. That extended to our outreach. In addition to providing financial advice and accommodations from a financial perspective, our teammates made a myriad of phone calls, texts and WebEx outreaches to reinforce that personal touch. Truist can play the role of contingency financial plan advisers for those who have been lacking one throughout this atypical experience. That part of our business is going gangbusters. We also have real depth in industry advisory services in a lot of different verticals. Many business owners are looking to either diversify or shift their core business toward other verticals. There’s significant capital out there looking to invest in businesses from an ownership perspective. We’re advising business owners on how to optimize their enterprise value with either private equity or other companies that are looking to grow through acquisition. On the family front, they are either trying to put their kids through college, save for retirement, get a handle on their budget and strategically move forward as a family.

How important is sustainability and corporate responsibility for Truist? COVID-19 really brings perspective, well beyond your corporate life. You take stock of your own narrative, your own story and use that to then continue to connect as an organization and really lift everybody in the community. Part of our role is to learn. Our social responsibility philosophy is pretty simple: make sure everybody in every community that we serve has our advice and our guidance allowing them to achieve their hopes and dreams. In doing so, we are living our purpose to inspire and build better lives and communities. The primary part of that journey is the learning and then the action. The learning is understanding, identifying, asking people about their background and what their challenges are. The action is targeting areas where predominantly low- to moderate-income folks live, including small, undercapitalized and underserved businesses. We focus on how we can truly play a meaningful role in bringing opportunities to those communities as we go forward.