As president and CEO of Stoughton-based Envision Bank, William Parent has tried to strike a balance between working at home to maintain responsible social distancing and showing up to support his new colleagues working at the drive-up windows and doing other tasks at the bank.
Parent, who agreed to join Envision Bank in late January after a long stint at the helm of Blue Hills Bank and then on Rockland Trust Co.’s board after the latter bought the former, was not expecting to start his new role on April 1 amid a global pandemic and financial crisis.
“There’s no track record to go to, there’s no lessons learned to go to from prior experiences,” Parent said, adding that compared to past market dislocations he’s experienced during his career, “this one is just totally different.”
The financial crisis has given small community banks like Envision, which has total assets of about $631 million, opportunities to take advantage of how well they know their customers by reacting to the needs of small businesses and consumers, Parent said.
And despite early frustrations for lenders and small businesses with the Paycheck Protection Program, Parent said these loans could have positive outcomes for business owners trying to support employees and business expenses. He said bank employees were committed to getting the loans processed in a high pressure environment.
Before joining Envision, Parent spent nine years leading Blue Hills Bank before it was acquired by Rockland Trust on April 1, 2019. He said Envision Bank’s platform is more developed compared to what he started with in 2010 at Blue Hills Bank, known until 2011 as Hyde Park Savings Bank.
Blue Hills grew from $900 million to $2 billion, including its acquisition of Nantucket Bank. Most of the growth was organic, Parent said, and though he said he would at some point consider mergers and acquisitions, he plans to focus on organic growth for Envision. He added that the rate of growth could help extend Envision’s longevity past the nine years he had at Blue Hills before the acquisition.
For now, the focus at Envision and most community banks will be on getting through the pandemic and economic recovery.
Whenever it begins, Parent sees the economic recovery as happening in phases, with different transitions depending on industries, geographic locations, seasonal markets and changes in business environment compared to before the crisis.
A crisis like this shows how customer-centric banks that can be nimble with customers’ needs still have opportunities in the marketplace.
“We’re going to come out of a period of enormous disruption,” Parent said. “And I think that customer experience and how they’re treated through this period will create opportunities to have brands excel and probably some opportunities where brands won’t excel.”
