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James Barger
Massachusetts and Connecticut Market President, KeyBank
Age: 57
Industry experience: 24 years
Cleveland-based KeyBank has had an office in Boston for more than 20 years, but no local branches. For the past year, KeyBank’s Connecticut and Massachusetts market president, James Barger, has been preparing to expand the lender’s commercial banking services in the region, but without adding branches. KeyBank’s commercial banking team will begin by focusing on companies with revenue over $20 million, and in 2021, Barger will begin putting together a business banking team to focus on companies with revenues less than $20 million.
KeyBank has branches in Maine and entered the Western Massachusetts and Connecticut markets through its 2016 acquisition of First Niagara Bank. Barger, who splits his time between Key’s Boston and New Haven, Connecticut, offices, spent five years in the Navy working on submarines before going to graduate school to study finance and starting his banking career.
Q: What is KeyBank planning for the Greater Boston area?
A: Boston is the market that we really identified as a growth market. In our offices at 225 Franklin, we have about 60 employees. A lot of those employees are involved in national businesses that have a national footprint. For example, we have about 10 IT investment bankers that work with software companies, a foreign exchange trading desk and a large commercial real estate capital markets group. We have a commercial real estate group there that we’ve had for a long time, and a smaller group that has been focused on the Boston area. So, KeyBank has been active in the commercial real estate market in Boston and the vicinity for quite a while. What we’re trying to do is grow our presence in Boston.
I took over responsibility for Boston with a very strong growth mandate on Jan. 1, 2020. To have a presence in commercial banking in Boston you’ve got to have feet on the street. Once our commercial banking and business banking teams are in place, the plan is to have our private banking group put some folks in Boston to serve the customers of our commercial accounts. As we grow, if our growth is good – and so far, our results have been outstanding – we will add more bankers as needed to meet the growth that we see in the market.
Q: How will you build brand awareness without a retail branch network?
A: We do not have a branch network in the Boston area. We do in Western Mass., Connecticut and Maine. For the time being, we do not have plans to add branches into the Boston area. Commercial banking is really a relationship business – person to person. It’s the banker with the leadership and the owners of the companies. A lot of that is reaching out and marketing directly to the companies that we have as clients, that we want to have as clients, and reaching out to the firms – like accounting firms, law firms, private equity firms – that are important to the business community in Boston. We’re doing a lot of that outreach.
Q: What are the opportunities for KeyBank in Greater Boston?
A: KeyBank has great reasons to focus on Greater Boston. Personally, I’m very excited. I grew up in Boston. In my adult life, I never worked in Boston, I didn’t go to college in Boston, so this is kind of a homecoming for me. I am just thrilled to have the opportunity to represent KeyBank in Boston and grow our presence in this market.
Boston’s a great place to be. It’s a dynamic community; it’s a dynamic economy. A lot of things that are going on in Boston are very aligned with KeyBank’s capabilities and what we focus on. The start-up community, all the technology, all the biopharma, all the health care that is in Boston – Key has a lot of specific focuses in those areas. It builds on the brand and the footprint that we’ve built all around Boston. We have the location and people already in Boston in these businesses. It just made sense to make more of a commitment on business in Boston itself.
Q: What will distinguish KeyBank in the Boston market?
A: The way we interact with our communities. We’ll really get involved in the community and focus on needs in those areas as we build our brand and build our presence in Boston. Banks derive their livelihood and their business from the community, so it is our practice to give back to the community. When we acquired First Niagara back in 2016, we committed to a five-year, $16.5 billion community benefits plan in Key’s markets. I look forward to bringing that aspect of KeyBank’s approach into Boston.
Q: Do you have a growth target for Greater Boston?
A: We grew on a measure of profitability a little more than 20 percent last year in Boston. That’s not the goal this year, but it’s an impressive number. I think that has to do with our investment in resources. I think that has to do with the alignment of Boston to the kind of value that KeyBank can bring to the community. We have very aggressive growth expectations for Boston.
It was just a coincidence that my first year in Boston happened to be 2020, which is probably one of the strangest years any of us have ever seen in general, and that’s certainly true in banking. I would be remiss if I’m talking about growth, growth, growth – but we’ve also been very, very focused on supporting our customers through the pandemic and the challenges that it brings. In Boston and in all of our markets and in all of our lines of business, KeyBank has been very proactive in trying to ease the burdens that our customers have. I would say that we’ve generally been pleasantly surprised at how our customers have weathered – economically speaking, financially speaking – COVID. But there have been challenges, and certain industries are a lot worse off than others. We’re really trying to help them out.
Barger’s Five Favorite Books
- “The Killer Angels” by Michael Shaara
- “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- “A Man in Full” by Tom Wolfe
- “The Hunt for Red October” by Tom Clancy
- “Alexander Hamilton” by Ron Chernow
