Ashley Hayslip entered the banking industry during the financial crisis. The COVID-19 crisis gave her a chance to prove herself as a leader.
A senior vice president at Umpqua Holdings in Portland, Ore., Hayslip played a critical role in managing the company’s Paycheck Protection Program lending. She coordinated some 600 employees, splitting bankers into teams to work on different elements of the lending process and meeting morning, noon and night to collaborate. Working in shifts around the clock, usually from their kitchen tables, Hayslip and her team processed $2 billion in PPP loans for roughly 17,000 small businesses.
Her efforts did not go unnoticed. Looking to keep the momentum from PPP going, the $29.4 billion-asset Umpqua has launched a new division focused on banking businesses with $1 million to $15 million in annual revenues and has tapped Hayslip to run it. Her new title is executive vice president and head of the community and business banking group.
Rolled out just days after Congress authorized the funding for it, PPP tested thousands of bankers and gave many midlevel bankers a chance to prove their leadership skills under pressure. Now, some of those bankers, like Hayslip, are gaining new responsibilities.
“It’s going to be a select few who really stood out and performed, but we’re absolutely going to see some new names populating the senior ranks,” said Michael Givner, a senior partner with the recruiting firm Korn Ferry.
The new business unit aims to capitalize on the PPP success to strengthen Umpqua’s commercial banking presence on the West Coast. During an October conference call to discuss third-quarter earnings, Umpqua executives set out a goal to increase commercial and industrial lending by 8% to 12% by the end of 2022.
According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., C&I loans totaled $3.3 billion and made up 11.6% of Umpqua’s total assets at Dec. 31, 2019. At Sept. 30, C&I lending totaled just over $5 billion and made up 17.2% of total assets, largely due to PPP lending.
Though the near-term economic outlook is uncertain and non-PPP lending has been flat, the coronavirus pandemic has caused disruption in the industry and Umpqua executives believe the bank is well-positioned to take advantage.
“We feel we're very well positioned to leverage that disruption to continue to build on the momentum that we have and to continue to grow market share in small business, in our business community markets and certainly in middle-market banking,” Umpqua Bank President Tory Nixon said while discussing the company’s third-quarter results.
Hayslip will lead about 100 employees in the new division. Smaller businesses don’t necessarily need entirely different banking products and services than their larger peers, but they often do need more individualized attention, and that’s essentially what Hayslip and her team will provide.
“It’s really how you help people understand the products and services so they’re not picking it off a rate sheet, especially if you’re a business in growth mode,” Hayslip said.
Michael Brauneis, the managing director of the consulting firm Protiviti, said he doesn’t expect many other banks to follow Umpqua’s lead in building out a whole new division to handle small businesses. But the Paycheck program has certainly given some banks and fintech firms a foot in the door to scale up that lending activity and capture business from small firms unhappy with their existing banking relationships.
The Paycheck pogram — and the pandemic more generally — also showed bank leadership what their employees were made of.
“You had a lot of employees that went way beyond the normal expectations of bankers’ hours and went way out of their way to get funding to customers,” he said. “This has allowed banks to get a much deeper and broader view of the talent they have.”
Korn Ferry’s Givner agreed.
The PPP "was just a brilliant example of dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands, of bank employees banding together to tackle an incredible challenge, which along with the mortgage crisis will have its place in history as one of this generation’s greatest trials.”
In an email to American Banker, Nixon said he believed that PPP leadership across the industry would accelerate many careers. In particular, he praised Hayslip for demonstrating “unrelenting compassion,” strong collaboration skills and an ability to think “clearly, creatively and quickly as the PPP effort unfolded.”
“An analogy would be someone who is piloting a plane while building it,” he said.
