BANKING CONSTRUCTION & FINANCE OVERVIEW
Tim Schar Tampa Market President SunTrust (now Truist)
How does a large bank like SunTrust (now Truist) retain the personal touch of community banking? We have a program called “T3: Touch, Technology and Trust,” featured in our new logo. There are some companies out there that are just technology companies and although they have great products, it can be impossible to get someone on the phone to provide support. We had to think about how to serve our communities, but this cannot be done with just touch alone. Consumers want to be able to solve problems through their technology, then they want to reach out to customer support and potentially go to the branch, with the branch employees able to track all their previous interactions with the bank. Part of the synergies of BB&T and SunTrust will be technology-based, and we are making significant investments in this area.
Ormond Beach, which ranked first and fifth worst, respectively. Still, there are signs of improvement: for the first time since 2016, the nationwide mortgage fraud risk declined year-over-year between 2018 and 2019, partially due to interest rate reductions that caused a marked increase in the total number of low-risk refinance transactions. This dragged the percentage of risky applications down despite the absolute number of risky loans remaining more or less the same. In Q2 2018, 0.91% of applications contained an indicator of fraud, whereas 0.81% of applications indicated potential fraud in Q2 2019. In other mortgage-related news, the Water Street Tampa development, Jeff Vinik’s $3 billion, 50-district overhaul of Downtown Tampa Bay being carried out in partnership with Bill Gates’ Cascade Investment LLC, received a considerable cash infusion thanks to
What services attract the most demand in the Tampa Bay area and why? We see things differently than a traditional bank. The days of pushing a specific product are gone. Today, the most demand is for sound advice, especially given the huge access to information people have. Anyone can go on Google and find out almost anything, but what we can provide is tailored advice based on individual circumstances, resources and goals. Our advisorybased market strategy is founded in our industry expertise, understanding of our clients’ business and providing the best-in-class knowledge around financial strategy going forward. What are some of your goals for the next year for Suntrust (Now Truist) in the Tampa Bay region? Our initial goal is to help the market understand our capabilities. We now offer a suite of services our customers haven’t really experienced before on a community level. We have more people focused in West Florida today than either BB&T or Suntrust had prior to the merger, and we are still considering expansion. There is still a lot of work to be done. www.capitalanalyticsassociates.com
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