Wayne Patenaude
Title: President and CEO, Cambridge Savings Bank
Age: 54
Experience: 33 years
When he finished business school in 1982, Wayne Patenaude initially wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with himself, but community banking soon proved to be a natural fit. After all, he did come from a family of bankers, and he still keeps his father’s nameplate on his desk today. The Connecticut native wound his way up into Berkshire County before he landed at Cambridge Savings Bank in 2007as its CFO. When he’s not leading the $2.9 billion institution, he’s spending time with his family or working on what he calls his “second career:” coaching youth basketball.
Q: Give us a retrospective on your first two years as CEO. What did you set out aiming to accomplish and how are you doing by those benchmarks today?
A: We’ve been pretty successful in what we’ve wanted to accomplish, which is to grow the organization and our commercial business. We’ve been very successful in that over the last two years, even prior to that. When I got here, the bank was predominantly a residential mortgage consumer bank, with about 70 percent of its portfolio in that mix of assets and 30 percent in the commercial side. Through leadership and as a CFO, we changed that mix and essentially reversed it. We didn’t have a lot of asset growth. We were changing the mix in that time.
When I became CEO, part of the plan at that time was to grow the organization. We’ve grown about 10 percent on an annual basis over the last couple of years, and a lot of that has been growth in the commercial portfolio, which has been up about 16 percent over the course of that time.
We have two business lines in commercial. One is commercial real estate, in which we’ve been very successful. That makes up about $1.3 billion of our loan portfolio. The other commercial line is corporate lending, C&I lending, which we really started to promote and put emphasis on over the last five or six years, and more recently, this year, we’ve actually grown quite nicely, about $38 million or 20.5 percent over that period of time.
Q: What about the retail side of the house?
A: We’ve got two other business lines: wealth management and consumer banking.
We combined residential and consumer lending to form consumer banking. I think it creates better operating efficiencies, and the retail network is one of the main delivery channels for those types of products.
Our focus is on core deposit growth and we’re up $80 million this year in retail deposits. Year-over-year, June to June, we’re up about 7 percent, so we feel like we’ve done a nice job growing the deposit side of our franchise, which will be important to support the growth on our commercial side as we go forward.
On the wealth management side, we’ve been in that business for about 14 years and we’ve been successful in growing that, particularly over the last six years. We’re currently at $800 million in assets under management, which is a good size for us, and that’s where we expect to generate fee income. We think we’re in a great market for the wealth management business here in Middlesex County, not only the market itself but within our own customer base. We feel there’s opportunity for our wealth management business, not just the high-net-worth clients, but also taking a look at clients that have a lower amount of assets to invest where we can provide that service to a broader part of our customer base.
Q: The competition for good talent is intense these days. What are you guys doing to invest in your people?
A: You’re right. It is competitive. You have to pay more for the talent you have and the talent you bring in. We’re willing to do that. The trick then is to keep them here. Obviously, you need to incentivize them properly, but you also need to give them opportunities to grow and develop. We think we’ve done a decent job of that over the last few years and we’ll continue to do that.
The second thing is that we do want to develop a training program within our credit area, so we’ll bring in some folks that have very little experience in the credit side and train them, using both external training services, like the Massachusetts Bankers [Association] program, and expose them to opportunities in the credit area here and have people mentor them. We’re going to try to do it ourselves, to an extent, as well as hiring out.
There’s no easy answer, there’s no quick fix. I like to think that as we build an even stronger reputation in the market, people will want to work here and we’ll keep them engaged, motivated, give them opportunities, and they’re going to want to stay here as well. You’ve got to do all of those things to create the right environment for talented people.
The Top 5 People Patenaude Would Like To Have Dinner With:
- David Koch
- Sheryl Sandberg
- Steven Spielberg
- Jimmy Kimmel
- Pedro Martinez
