Patrick J. Sullivan
Title: President, Massachusetts, People’s United Bank
Age: 59
Experience: 37 years
Patrick Sullivan is one of an increasingly rare breed of banker. Fresh out of college in 1977, he graduated from one of Citizens Bank’s first in-house training programs and launched his career in commercial lending. Since then, he’s touched every New England state and worked for some of the top names in the region. Recently, he was recruited to People’s United Bank’s top post in Massachusetts, charged with building a competitive new team in the market while embracing what he describes as three of the most important keys to success in banking: “People like you, they trust you and they think you add value.”
Q: Can you talk about Peoples’ commercial real estate business? Where is most of your lending activity concentrated?
A: Greater Boston. I would say we’ve got about $1 billion in CRE assets, and I would say 75 percent of them are in Eastern Massachusetts. Springfield tends to be serviced out of Hartford from our commercial real estate team there.
Our growth, really, on the commercial real estate side is in Boston and Eastern Mass. We’ve done a lot of multifamily. One thing Peoples’ is really good at, and that we’ve extended in Massachusetts, is multifamily; you see a lot of apartments sprouting around, stuff getting rehabbed. Think about all the different neighborhoods you go to now, you’re seeing people knocking things down and building something new. J.P., Allston, Brighton, Somerville. And a lot of our multifamily that’s sprouted up is next to T stations.
I think we’re very selective with our customer base in commercial real estate, but if you look at a bunch of our customers, we have customers that borrow $100 million off us in multiple markets, and we tend to really follow and stay with them a long, long time.
Q: What about the retail side of the house?
A: The retail deposit side is a little trickier. On the retail side, you’re in the mass market. We try to be very competitive on rates, and we try to also invest in our branch personnel. People chase money and it’s tricky to grow deposits today. It’s a lot easier to grow commercial deposits, which we’ve been doing very well at.
How many new households are being created throughout the state? More in Greater Boston than in other places, but you only get your X percent share of households. So the retail business today is kind of a slow-growth business. The things we try to do to get market share now – other than some branding and advertising for awareness – is also trying to use credit, that is, good mortgage lending, good equity credit lines, those type of products, to go after that type of customer. When a household gets created, often there’s a credit event. A lot of times your relationship starts because you needed something and you liked the people in the branch.
Q: As you build out People’s Massachusetts business, where do you see opportunities in this market?
A: We see a great opportunity in the base of the business we’ve built. Small business is a great opportunity; we’ve hired a lot of people and we’ll continue to hire more people, whether it’s in Greater Boston, the North Shore, Merrimack Valley, Worcester, Springfield. … We see the fact that there’s business formation, so the more people we have touching those markets the better. That’s organic growth.
On the middle-market side, we see the fact that we can continue to steal market share from bigger people because we keep hiring people that want to be with us.
And then the wealth [management] and other services – what we call treasury management, cash management – all those things are going to be right behind new customer creation, because when we sell something, we really want to sell four or five things.
The final thing is, we’ve expanded our government banking. We were really good at municipal banking out in Worcester and in Springfield because those two banks [Flagship Bank and Bank of Western Massachusetts] had a pretty good brand, they did a lot of that, so we hired Grace Lee … and asked her to come in here and build up our government business. She’s done a good job and we’ve had a couple major wins. That’s good deposit funding for us. We’re focused a lot on trying to get deposits for the bank and that’s a good deposit gatherer.
Sullivan’s Top 5 Sports Moments:
- Training with his three kids for various marathons.
- Attending the World Series with his son Rory.
- Touring the Patriots’ locker room and participating in the team prayer.
- Traveling to Arizona for the Patriots’ Super Bowl in 2008.
- Coaching his youngest daughter Ashley in soccer.
