Matthew Roddy
Title: Vice President, Portfolio Manager, Investment Management Group, Rockland Trust
Age: 42
Experience: 21 years
Matthew Roddy gets in early and often works late, but his family still recognizes him and he manages to squeeze in plenty of time at the gym. Rockland Trust brought Roddy on in April to help expand the bank’s business in the Boston metro area. He’s spent the past 16 years working in investment management for big names, like Bank of America, Charles Schwab and U.S. Trust, but at Rockland Trust, Roddy says he’s in just the right spot to do a little creative problem-solving.
Q: So what’s an example of some creative problem-solving you’ve done lately?
A: We were recently speaking to the head of a fairly large nonprofit organization, and he wanted that local nonprofit to potentially be the financial provider for his employees. In this situation we were able to put together a single, one-page bank offering for things we could do on trusts and estates planning, financial planning, investments, mortgage lending, commercial lending, bank services, cash management. And we were able to put together different levels of discounts and put it together and say, “This is what we can provide to your employees.”
In my experience at a large organization, that never could have happened in any reasonable expectation of time. But it certainly also couldn’t have happened at a smaller organization that doesn’t have all those services. We’re really in the sweet spot for having all those services and being able to deliver them in a reasonable time frame and a simplified format that really offers value to the client.
Q: Boston must be a great place for Rockland right now.
A: One of my favorite things about Boston is the diversity of what we have here. We have young people coming to our colleges and universities, and we also have older folks moving in. The city’s really growing for the first time in a long time. Manufacturing is coming back. We have the technology industry, the health care industry, the biotech industry. The innovation district is over here, Cambridge is over there. It’s happening all around us, it’s really exciting.
There really is opportunity for growth through partnerships with attorneys and accountants and some of the folks advising these business owners and so forth. It’s pretty impressive what’s going on in Boston. That’s a big part of why Rockland’s here. Not only is the city’s business and economy coming back, but the population’s coming back, too, and that’s a double win for us.
Q: Can you tell me a little more about your own role in expanding Rockland’s presence?
A: I’m building a business, so I’m out and about more than I ever have been. I go to many chamber events, and I go to a lot of CFA type of events. I’m doing a lot of lunches. We’re bringing on a lot of new clients, and we’ve had a lot of success already.
We meet once a week to discuss meetings we just had, meetings we have upcoming, things we need to accomplish, our longer-term plans for what events we’re going to have and what marketing we’re going to do. We talk about how can we take our own individual centers of influence and make them into collective “we” centers of influence so it creates impact.
I’m also part of the research process, so I cover a sector of the economy and also some different asset classes, so I’m doing a fair amount of research as part of the collective research team.
That’s really cool. Smaller organizations don’t really have the intellectual capital to do it. Larger organizations have it, but it’s much more fragmented. They’re not able to get together once a week in a room. Generally there’s a lot of intellectual capital in their own silos, and there’s one person like me shopping for it and saying, I’ll pick these stocks and these funds. That’s not how we do it. We all work together to pick the stocks and the funds so we can offer our clients the best mix of assets for their portfolios.
Top Five Favorite Things About Boston:
- I’m a huge Boston Red Sox fan.
- I’m a huge sports fan, so Bruins, Celtics, and Patriots are all #2.
- The diversity of the city’s economy.
- The diversity of its geography.
- Boston is like a big town. If you meet someone, you’d better remember their name because you’re going to see them again.
