Michael Butler entered the banking business straight out of college when he joined the Albany, N.Y.-based Key Corp. as a management trainee. He’s since accrued more than 30 years of banking experience, ranging from mergers and acquisitions to business banking to consumer finance. A little over four years ago, he came to Boston as president and CEO of First Trade Union Bank. He talked to Banker & Tradesman about First Trade’s approach to an ever-changing industry.
Michael Butler
Title: President and CEO, First Trade Union Bank
Age: 53
Experience: 31 years in banking
Q: First Trade is one of the few banks – if not the only bank – headquartered in Boston’s Seaport District. Have you always been here?
A: We’ve always been in and around this area. We were here before the renovation that went on, and it’s been great over the last three or four years to see the district grow up around us.
The convention center, the courthouse and everything in the middle – that’s brought in a great deal of business activity. You see several law firms have come down here; there have been multiple hotels that have been brought up, and it’s started to attract a younger, more entrepreneurial type clientele. It seems to attract the more technology-oriented companies. That is an area we like to operate in.
Q: What’s new in that area?
A: Well, we’ve been a big believer in the ever-changing consumer behaviors of clients not necessarily wanting to walk into branches to conduct their business. You’ve seen a surge in online banking in the last couple of years, and that has moved to the smartphone. We’ve built a lot of our process around that, so we’ve built a much stronger and more innovative online banking solution.
We have great apps out there, so people can do business with us via their smartphone with never having to walk into a branch, which is the way we think people want to operate in the future.
Q: First Trade recently partnered with LevelUp on a new product. Can you tell me more about that?
A: LevelUp has developed a mobile payment solution, which allows clients to walk into 4,000 merchants, in and around the New York and New
England area predominantly, and use their phone to pay for products, which we think is really what consumers want to do in the future.
They’re going to develop a kind of white-label solution for us, in which our mobile banking app will have that capability built into it. We’re the only bank at this point in time that has gone out and done that.
Q: So you can kind of use your phone as your debit card?
A: Exactly. And the idea is that really, as I think many of us would have noticed even from individual consumer behavior, you’re more likely to leave your wallet at home than your phone. I personally found myself one day, I left my house one day without my wallet, but I had my phone. Now I would have been able to buy a cup of coffee because there’s plenty of places that accept my phone with LevelUp. … We realized mobile payment devices and mobile banking are the future. Consumers are going to use their phone for a lot of things. That’s their computer, really, so they want to do their banking there.
Michael Butler’s Five Recommended Books:
- “Bank 3.0: Why Banking is No Longer Somewhere You Go But Something You Do,” by Brett King
- "Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution,” by Lisa Bodell
- “The Death Instinct,” by Jed Rubenfeld
- “No Easy Day,”by Mark Owen
- “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” by Nicholas Taleb
