Paul Totino
Title: Executive vice president commercial lending and finance, Needham Bank
Age: 52
Experience: 28 years
Paul Totino has never been a heavy numbers guy, and he readily admits that. The chief benefit of his bank teller job was that it let him out in time to play baseball. And he met his wife while working at Dedham Savings Bank.
But that part-time summer job lead to a lifelong career for Totino, who studied economics with a heavy dose of liberal arts as an undergrad (at an Ivy League school he is too bashful to boast about) and later earned a master’s degree in professional accounting. Since then, Totino has dabbled in a myriad of jobs in the banking world – teller, auditer, credit analyst and even chief financial officer – but he still maintains that his favorite gig ever was commercial lending. He signed on at Needham Bank last fall as an executive vice president of commercial lending and finance. And now, Totino says he’s got the best of both worlds.
Q: You’ve dabbled all over the place in the banking world – how did you wind up in commercial lending?
A: [After grad school] I started in the accounting department at the Bank of New England, which at that time was the 18th largest bank in the country. I figured I’d get into the bank, see what I wanted to do and what I didn’t want to do. It was a commercial bank and commercial lending interested me. Eventually, I decided as a young lender that it was not the place to do business, so I left and went into commercial lending at Middlesex Savings Bank. Six months later, Bank of New England collapsed.
Q: What did you like about commercial lending?
A: I liked dealing with the customers, I liked competing with other banks, and I enjoyed meeting and dealing with business owners of all kinds. I like the variety. It involved some financial work – you had to know balance sheets, income statements, cash flow statements – but it also involved some sales. It was a little bit of everything.
I actually enjoyed cold calling on businesses. You get a lot of rejection, but also a lot of experience. I chose not to go the glamorous route of the big Fortune 500 or the big real estate deals because I wanted to deal with small business owners and community banking.
Q: What are the challenges for community banks this year?
A: Since the economy went down in 2008, it’s been very challenging for any bank to operate, but I think for the most part, the banks in … the Boston area have held up. We’re going to be in this low-rate environment for a while. It’s a great place for borrowers, but not a great place for savers.
However, we are seeing a lot of residential mortgage activity. People are trying to lock in a 30-year fixed rate. To avoid interest rate risk, we’re selling 30-year fixed rates to an investor, so we can still hold the customer, they can get the rate they want, and there’s less risk for us, though we do hold most of our loans.
Q: You mentioned earlier that checking accounts are really important for a small bank – what makes a commercial lender like yourself say that?
A: We have an interest-free checking account, which seems to be a big issue in banking right now. Needham Bank added about 1,500 checking accounts in 2012. For five branches, that’s phenomenal. I think it’s a great product to promote, and adding checking accounts is important for any community bank. When you ask somebody, “Who do you bank with?” they don’t necessarily go with who they have their mortgage with or refinanced with. They answer with where they have their checking account. That’s the most basic relationship and from there it can grow.
Paul Totino’s Five Favorite Sports Teams:
- Patriots
- Red Sox
- Boston College football
- Bruins
- Celtics
