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Name: David Granese
Title: Executive Vice President of Institutional Banking, Radius Bank
Age: 52
Experience: 29 years
After more than 20 years at State Street Corp., David Granese was hired this past March to head institutional banking at Radius Bank, a 30-year-old enterprise that began as a community bank owned by the Carpenters Union, currently with $1.1 billion assets under management.
But these days, Granese said Radius feels more like a fintech company with its “entrepreneurial atmosphere.” In 2016, four private equity firms acquired Radius and gave bank executives the green light on a campaign to pursue consumer deposits with its virtual banking platform nationally. Later in the year, Radius’s Small Business Administration lending team followed suit, setting up offices in Pennsylvania, Florida, Colorado and Arizona.
Granese has spent the better half of 2017 working on cultivating the bank’s institutional business, focusing on bringing in deposits from unions, municipalities, nonprofits and other large organizations. “I’m trying to create a brand recognition to increase and diversify our institutional client base as we partner with our consumer side to grow the bank,” Granese told Banker & Tradesman. “We have a whole new management team and are transitioning the company to something fresher, bigger and better.”
Q: How is Radius Bank’s national digital banking platform different from your typical community bank?
A: We are constantly focused on providing a great user experience to our clients. That manifests itself in the products we offer, our customer service and the technology we provide to make banking with us easy. We don’t view ourselves as a “community bank” in the traditional geographical sense, but rather a bank that works with different “communities” or types of clients throughout the country. One of the main ways we serve clients nationwide is through our digital banking platform, since we do not have a physical branch presence anywhere but Boston. We focus on the banking experience with technology to make it easy to open accounts with our industry-leading digital account opening platform, and online and mobile banking allows consumer and business clients to easily pay bills, deposit checks, transfer funds and more.
Q: What markets is Radius currently in?
A: Our consumer virtual banking business is national via our digital banking platform, with some of our largest markets being Massachusetts, California and New York. We also have teams focused on small business lending and equipment finance that work with small business and middle market clients across the country.
Our business banking and commercial real estate teams focus on working with clients within Massachusetts and the New England region.
The institutional banking team that I lead has historically been centered around New England and the New York Metropolitan area. We’ve expanded to upstate New York, the mid-Atlantic region and most recently into the Midwest with plans to continue heading towards the West Coast. My business team establishes relationships with decision makers through face-to-face interactions. Growing incrementally and adjacently, opposed to hiring people in totally different parts of America, helps us build on regional name recognition and brand awareness.
We have a seven-person sales team covering 18 states, and those 18 states represent more than half of all union workers in the country. And while we came up in the union space, our products are attractive to a variety of companies and organizations.
Q: How have you been able to find success in markets outside Massachusetts?
A: It hinges on the banking model we’ve built that focuses on the customer experience: providing great products, service and technology. The institutional banking team has welcomed a number of new pension fund and union organizational clients in the regions I mentioned earlier, and we look forward to further expanding our presence outside of Massachusetts in 2018. We’ve done that through a combination of great relationship managers in those territories delivering personalized service and our online and mobile banking technology. This allows clients to easily bank with us without needing a physical branch. The same holds true for our virtual consumer business and other business lending teams that operate nationally. We’re able to provide a great banking experience without having a large physical presence in these markets.
Q: What is your goal for the future?
A: Our goal is to be recognized as a national leader in consumer and institutional banking. Between our forward-thinking products and services, and our exceptional customer experience, we will get there. In the short-term, we’re following the same deliberate pace we set out to elevate our consumer business to a national level. Companies that balloon ten times their size in a year can be difficult to manage. Ideally, expansion is like the steady rings caused by a single, carefully skipped stone, rather than the quick splashes of a handful of rocks.
Our institutional salespeople are only on the ground where it makes sense. But if an opportunity – perhaps in California or Texas – comes up where jumping in is the right decision, we would certainly be open to that. If this past year is any indication of the advancements that lie ahead for Radius Bank, then I can confidently say we’re just getting started.
Granese’s Five Favorite Places to Fly-Fish in Massachusetts:
- Any beaches on Martha’s Vineyard
- Dowses Beach in Osterville
- East Branch of the Westfield River
- Hoosic River near North Adams
- Any of the dozens of spring-fed kettle ponds on Cape Cod – they’re all good!
