Strategy
10/03/2017

Innovation Spotlight: Howard Bank


innovation-10-3-17.pngScully-Mary-Ann.pngMary Ann Scully, CEO and chairman
As a lifelong banker with over 30 years of varied executive experiences, Mary Ann Scully headed the organizing team for Howard Bank of Baltimore, Maryland, and currently serves as a board member of the Baltimore Federal Reserve and a community advisory board member for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Under her leadership, Howard Bank recently announced its fifth acquisition in five years, which will make it a $2.1 billion asset institution. It has maintained a commitment to high touch service throughout each integration.

When you started at Howard Bank, what did you want to do differently with innovation?
We have always viewed our differentiation as high touch expertise and advice. Therefore, we tried not to be leading edge from an innovation perspective. However, we also recognized that to attract small and medium-sized businesses that we should not and would not ask our customers to make a choice between competitive products and delivery available at larger banks and our high touch advice. So we have always had to be competitive and with a more sophisticated customer base, the bar was set higher.

Over the years, how has your digitization strategy changed?
We opened the doors in 2004 with online banking, online check images, hand scan safe deposit boxes—not your typical start-up community bank mix. Over time, we have become more and more committed to being leading edge in the utilization of information to inform our decisions, optimize our processes and advise our customers. Our recent project with [commercial lending platform] nCino is an example of this commitment. Our commitment to a new universal banker branch model is another.

You were once quoted as saying, “Thriving is different than survival and relevance is more than profitability.” What does it take for a bank to thrive AND stay relevant in this competitive environment?
It requires, first, great clarity of strategy: “What do you want to do, how and when, for whom?” And that requires being able to articulate the more painful, “What do you not want to do or whom are you not targeting?” The second requirement is a long-term vision because relevance requires constant investment in the business—in people and technology. It also requires access to capital, both financial and human, to facilitate those investments.

Finally, it requires flexibility because the world changes at a faster rate than ever before and it is important to be able to reallocate resources to what our customers feel is relevant for them. Our high growth trajectory requires a mindset throughout the organization that acknowledges the need for change. For example, we have attracted five teams from other banks in five years. We’ve done five acquisitions in five years, the most recent and largest just announced in August. We’ve accomplished seven capital raises in 13 years, the most recent and largest in January of this year.

After being involved in several M&A deals, what lessons have you learned about integrating technology platforms to ensure business continuity?
First, we always remember to view integration from a customer’s perspective. There is always disruption involved in a merger, some sense of “I did not ask for this,” and flowery promises do not alleviate the skepticism even when an in-market merger is perceived by a community as being positive. So we plan, plan and plan to ensure that customers never lose functionality and if possible, gain something in the process. This means being willing internally to change the “host” systems as well as the acquired bank systems. It means viewing integrations as an opportunity, not a necessary evil, to take the best of both and occasionally the best-of-breed, not just as a way to save costs and slam things together but as a way to enhance the combined systems. We have a cross-functional team who has worked together on each transaction, some who started on the acquired side who are now sitting as an acquirer and their experience and perspective are invaluable. That team always has representatives from each bank for each function. Conversions are not for amateurs or the faint of heart so constant communication between providers and users is also important for successful platform integration.

Bank Director Staff Writer