Kim McKenna
Kim McKenna
Title: Vice President, Director of Foreign Exchange, Rockland Trust
Age: 49
Experience: 25
Like so many others before and after her, Kim McKenna had no idea what she wanted to do when she graduated from college, but by a stroke of luck, she wound up in the international corporate finance group at the Bank of Boston. “I learned so much… Maybe it was meant to be,” she said. McKenna later wound up at Sovereign Bank and eventually joined Rockland Trust after consulting for the bank. Today she’s the go-to person for any customer looking to do business abroad
Q: What does your day-to-day look like at Rockland Trust? How has this business line grown since you joined?
A: I divide it up into three buckets. There are the retail customers, which typically are people sending money to family members abroad, or they’re buying something and they have to send a wire somewhere. Then there are the corporate customers, so those are either small businesses or large corporate customers. They’re either doing those types of wires, or they’re hedging their foreign exchange exposure to another currency. And then I work with all the internal people in the bank, whether it’s the branch managers, the relationship managers who talk with customers, or the people in treasury or in the wire room.
Even though I’ve been here for two-and-a-half years, it’s still quite new to Rockland Trust, but it’s taking off really fast. The word gets out that someone knows something about international and the phone calls I get.
It’s grown so much. I think it took about six months when I got here to get up and running. The increase in wires and the assistance we’ve given to customers to make it better for them, the way they process their payments and customers that didn’t know they could talk to Rockland Trust about anything international. Even in trade-related transactions, we have customers that want to buy from companies outside the U.S. but they’re worried about that transaction because they don’t know them, they’ve never met them, but they want their product.
Finding out there’s someone here in the bank that can help them with an international transaction and tell them about the products available has made them just more solidified as a customer.
Q: You recently offered a talk to some of your customers about a hot topic: China. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
A: The purpose of that mini-conference was to tell our customers that there may be ways that they can change how they pay for goods they’re importing. That was mainly the focus because of currency changes.
The Chinese government came out with a new regulation, allowing people outside of China to pay for goods they’re buying in the local currency. It was a huge change. So first, we wanted to inform our customers, and second, we wanted to tell our customers that there may be a cost savings. If instead of paying with dollars, they talk with the supplier and maybe pay with the local currency, they may find a savings.
It increases our foreign exchange volume, so that’s the interest on my side, but for our customers, it’s a savings to the cost of the products they’re buying. It’s mostly buying. Not a lot of them are exporting to China, so it’s one-sided there.
That was mostly it. We’re continuing to follow up with the customers about reaching out to suppliers, seeing if there’s a cost savings, doing some calculations and stuff like that, but it was well-attended, and we’re going to do another one this year.
Q: You’ve mentioned the importance of mentoring to your own career. Is that something you’re doing now that you’re better established in the industry, kind of paying it forward?
A: It was pure luck, the people who mentored me when I got out of college. I met with them recently, too. There was one woman in particular who took me under her wing, we had lunch recently and I told her: I don’t think I would have been so successful in my life if she hadn’t helped me.
I think that when you go to take a job at a company, it’s great to meet as many people as you can to find out if they’re willing to go that mile with you. I know I’ve reached out to people here already who I’ve been really impressed with, and I think that maybe if their talents are underused and they have a huge potential, then I‘m willing to spend that time with them.
I don’t really consider it paying it forward. I just consider that that’s my obligation to do that and to help them grow. Some people can’t be bothered with going over details, but the devil is in the details and I think that when you have someone who will go, with someone who pays attention obviously, and will take it all in and not waste someone’s time, that’s huge.
Kim McKenna’s Top Five Tips for International Payment and Foreign Exchange
- To avoid fraud, when providing your banking account information to a supplier or vendor, always send a secure, encrypted email and break up the information into two parts.
- Never act upon an email with new or modified wire instructions, especially for international wires, unless you’ve spoken with the company to confirm its accuracy.
- If you are a U.S. dollar company and you receive an invoice in CAD (Canadian dollars), don’t convert it back to U.S. dollars. It could cost you less to pay it in CAD.
- Foreign exchange rates on the Internet and in the Wall Street Journal are typically based on $1 million interbank transactions. Smaller deals would be traded at different rates.
- Don’t try to predict where a foreign exchange rate will be. That’s speculation.
