Katherine L. Andersen
Title: Senior Vice President, Life Sciences Group, Wells Fargo
Age: 34
Experience: 14 years
When most kids her age were at sports or dance camp, Katherine Andersen headed off to economics camp when she was 16. From that moment on, she was “bitten by the bug,” and she chose to study economics and finance in college just a few years later. Since then, she’s parlayed that passion for finance into a successful banking career, working in auditing, equity derivatives, mergers and acquisitions and asset-based lending. Last fall, she was tapped to lead Wells Fargo’s Life Sciences Group in New England.
Q: How did you wind up leading this new group at Wells Fargo?
A: I did touch this space a little bit through our health care [asset-based lending] platform. … So that, coupled with my own personal interest in the industry, had me making the jump. The opportunity presented itself and it clearly just made sense.
In Boston, [the Life Sciences Group is] new but we actually started a number of years ago. We got significant traction in the space and now we have a national footprint. It’s a pretty exciting story and that, coupled with the significant growth we’ve seen in New England, I’m really interested to see where things go over the next one to two years. Clearly, 2014 was a really exciting year in this industry. The number of IPOs was tremendous, and so everybody’s looking to see how 2015 pans out.
Q: What kind of needs are you seeing out in the life sciences space right now?
A: As to the need, it varies. One of the really interesting things about our group is that we don’t necessarily have a sweet spot, so we cover everything from early stage R&D, pre-revenue, pre-profit, all the way up to commercialization and global expansion. We’re Wells Fargo, so we have over 80 products we can bring to the table regardless of where folks are in their life cycle.
What I try to do is I get into companies and really just start building that relationship. I want to establish a level of trust, and how do you do that? You do that by getting in and just learning about their business and wanting to be more of a partner, a consultant. I’m getting in and seeing what works, what doesn’t, what are your pain points, this is what I’ve seen for other companies at this point in the life cycle, these are the things you should start thinking about six, 12, 18 months out, and I can align those to particular solutions we have at Wells Fargo, and that’s how we start off a relationship.
Q: Do you notice any common pain points across the businesses you’re banking in this space?
A: Absolutely. The industry is unique, but you see the same story a lot of times. Think about a company that doesn’t have any cash on their balance sheet, they have two employees sitting on boxes in some shared space, clearly, no revenue, so pre-revenue, pre-profit. All of a sudden, they get some funding. They’re sitting on some cash. What do we do with said cash? That’s something we can help with. All of a sudden, they have revenue. They have employees. What do we do with those employees? Well, we can offer a 401(k), we can start to talk about those kinds of solutions – but what I tell people is, “I want to try to help you minimize the bumps in the road.”
Q: What kind of activity are you anticipating in the year ahead?
A: What’s really exciting for me, given that we’ve never had a local presence in Boston, is there is a lot of activity, there is a lot of demand and so we’re covering everything within life science.
We cover everything within the industry and we’re seeing so much demand because it’s a space we haven’t been able to cover up until this point. It’s all of those companies, and I’m not focusing on any one in particular in terms of industry segments. I want to cover as much as I can.
I started at the beginning of November and I’m starting to see some significant traction already, which I think is very telling of the amount of demand in the industry in this space. … New England, and Boston in particular, is really in its infancy for this group, but we’ve seen significant traction over the past five months already. I’ve touched a lot of prospects in the area and I’m excited for what’s to come this year.
Andersen’s Top Five Activities For Families:
- Pat’s Peak in Henniker, N.H.
- The Museum of Science
- The New England Aquarium
- The Boston Children’s Museum
- Wingaersheek Beach in Gloucester
