Anyone looking for a banking job in Central Massachusetts – or beyond – can’t help but notice UniBank’s ads. The bank’s logo seems to crowd local online job boards, and positions are available throughout the Whitinsville-based institution.
The rapidly expanding bank – which boasts the slogan, “Big Bank Know-How. Community Bank Attitude.” – is certainly hiring like a big bank. It currently has as many as 12 openings for two Worcester offices.
It is also bringing back a practice from the days before big banks got quite so big: The management training program.
It adds up to a bit of the old and a good dose of the new for UniBank, according to Director of Retail Banking Christopher Foley.
Foley said the bank wants to “change our consumer delivery model” to be more “like the Apple model.” UniBank branches will be staffed by “relationship bankers” who greet customers as they arrive and are able to help “regardless of the transaction.”
In June, the bank will open its first full-service branch in Worcester at 24 Gold Star Boulevard. Once that office is open, it will move its current downtown loan production center to the new office. In the fourth quarter, the bank also has plans to open a branch in Grafton, and is currently undertaking an effort to “reenergize our call center.”
That’s where the management training program comes in.
New Kid In Town
Unibank Senior Vice President Deborah Larsen – who, like President and CEO Jim Paulhus, was hired from Bank of America – acknowledged the management training program is a bit old school.
“In the 90s, when the economy started turning, a lot of big banks started cutting management training programs,” she said. The result is an industry, especially among community banks, “with lots of senior bankers, but no bench.”
UniBank has been busily poaching commercial bankers from “the big money center banks” in recent years, but Larsen said UniBank now hopes to “home-grow our own bench” by hiring recent college graduates to work its call center, where they’ll “learn the products,” and eventually move up through the ranks.
The ranks are going to need them.
In addition to UniBank’s immediate hiring plans, it also expects to open two or three branches each year “for the next few years,” Foley said.
“In markets where people are underserved,” Larsen added.
Worcester, the scene of the bank’s present developments, certainly isn’t underserved.
But that’s not to say it’s overbanked, either.
Peter Alden, president and CEO of Worcester-based Bay State Savings Bank, said Massachusetts’ second city “offers a generally favorable climate for business activity.”
He said banks are attracted by Worcester’s relatively large population and economic development projects that help the city appear “poised on positive economic activity.”
“Competition in the banking business has been strong for a long time,” Alden said. “Overall, I think it is healthy as it keeps us sharp and customer-focused.”
Still, competition from one of the new kids in town forces old standard bearers to “continually focus on developing our existing customer base and business development,” Alden said. “Asking for the business is an important aspect of that process.”
