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The Wilber Corporation (GIW) |
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CEOCFO
Interview Index |
This is a printer friendly page! Wilber
Corporation has been finding success with their model of opening a loan production office
where they can find a quality lender familiar with a particular market and bring their
brand of banking into that market BIO: Alfred S. Whittet Mr. Whittet joined Wilber Bank as an Assistant Vice
President in 1972. In 1973, he was named Vice President, a position he held until
his promotion to Executive Vice President in 1976. In 1986, Mr. Whittet was named
President and Chief Operating Officer. He was named President and Chief Executive
Officer in 1998. In addition to his responsibilities at Wilber Bank, Mr. Whittet is chairman of the New York Business Development Corporation Regional Loan and Advisory Committee. He is a member of the Elm Park Methodist Church and the Oneonta Kiwanis Club. Mr. Whittet is a past member and past chairman of the Board of Directors of A.O. Fox Memorial Hospital and the Oneonta Family YMCA. He currently serves as chairman of the YMCA Board of Trustees as well as president of the Hartwick College Citizens Board Executive Council and is on the Board of Directors of the A.O. Fox Memorial Hospital Foundation. Company Profile: CEOCFOinterviews: Mr. Whittet, will you tell us about your background with Wilber? Mr. Whittet: “I have been with the bank 32 years. I came to the bank as a loan officer, after serving some time with the United States Treasury Department as an assistant national bank examiner. Thirty-two years is a long time and I have seen the bank grow from four branches and about $68 million in assets, to over $730 million in assets and now we have 19 whole service branches and a loan production office.” CEOCFOinterviews: How long have you been CEO? Mr. Whittet: “I have been CEO for about six years; I was president and COO, appointed in 1986.” CEOCFOinterviews: How has the bank changed in the last six years? Mr. Whittet: “We have done some more expansion in trying to broaden our market base and started to make loans in a much wider area of upstate New York. We have explored hiring loan people that have a base salary plus commission and we have acknowledged that the market in which we are presently in, the Otsego, Delaware, Schoharie, Ulster, Chenango, and Broome counties, are generally slow-growth areas and we need to expand our horizons. So those are the main things that we have done for the last four or five years.” CEOCFOinterviews: How important is the fact that the bank has been around for over 130 years? Mr. Whittet: “I think from our base counties of two or three local counties, it is important from the loyalty standpoint; many of our customers have been with the bank many years. In today’s economic environment, I am not sure what value that has. I think pricing and personal service are probably the two key things. I think continuity and the fact that we are a local bank where people can come in and talk to us directly and they get to know the lender, trust person or teller on a more personal basis than they would in a larger market.” CEOCFOinterviews: How are you split up between consumer and commercial and how would you like that to change? Mr. Whittet: “In recent years we have moved away from the residential mortgage lending market because of rates. We will probably go back into that at this particular point. In the loan area, we have about $370 million in gross loans; approximately half of that is in commercial loans, about one quarter in residential mortgages and the rest are in assorted other kinds of loans.” CEOCFOinterviews: What type of businesses do you target? Mr. Whittet: “We look to attract small businesses, generally companies that have less than one hundred employees, and less than ten million dollars in sales.” CEOCFOinterviews: How do you reach your potential customers? Mr. Whittet: “On the commercial side, it is generated by calling on a potential customer. We have been doing repeat business with a lot of local businesses for many years. For those in the newer areas, it is a matter of making contact with those folks. On the consumer side, for mortgages and installment loans, we get customers from the convenience of branches. We do indirect lending for automobiles or recreation vehicles. We have an officer that goes and meets with sales people in those various retail outlets.” CEOCFOinterviews: On your website, it reads “The vision is simple, providing money management solutions with new ideas and old fashioned service,” what’s new? Mr. Whittet: “The new ideas have to do with the growth of the offices and the way we package the loans. Our philosophy here is that if there is a worthwhile borrower, we will try to find a way to make the loan. We pride ourselves on trying to be innovative and trying to structure loans as opposed to having a cookie-cutter where all the pieces have to fit. With regard to our trust department, we have about a 300 million-dollar trust department as well; it is a personal trust department and our concept is super customer service. We follow people on a very close and personal trek that they may take through life.” CEOCFOinterviews: Will you tell us more about your fee-based services and is that a growing area? Mr. Whittet: “We try to grow our services through fee income. One of the things we did about eight years ago is start a joint-venture insurance agency called Mang-Wilber, and I believe we were the first joint-venture agency in the state of New York where we teamed up with a regional insurer. We provide that insurance link to all of our customers; we provide life insurance, property casualty insurance, annuities, long-term care insurance and virtually any kind of insurance that someone would need. We have also teamed up with INVEST to market mutual funds. The concept here is that when somebody comes into one of our shops, that customer can get all of their financial needs taken care of in one place.” CEOCFOinterviews: Do many customers take advantage of that? Mr. Whittet: “Yes, we have a fair amount of our customers that have services for multiple disciplines with us.” CEOCFOinterviews: I think that would tend to make them less likely to move! Mr. Whittet: “That’s right! The more products that you can have a customer take with you, it makes it more difficult to move. We are one of the earlier providers of electronic bill-paying services, which is a product that the customers really like but it is also very difficult for them to move because they have everything all set up.” CEOCFOinterviews: Why did you recently move to AMEX? Mr. Whittet: “We are a public company and the main reason we moved is we came to the point to where our shareholder base was at over 500 shareholders. By the rules of the SEC, we had to become a fully reporting company. We also were experiencing liquidity issues from the standpoint of our shareholders. The stock of the company was traded thinly and it wasn’t uncommon for us to move a dollar or two one way or the other on a hundred shares being sold. The timing seemed to be right for us to try to improve the liquidity and stabilized the price a bit and we chose the AMEX to do that. The specialists at the Exchange over the first four months have stabilized our prices from one trade to another. Typically, the price change is ten or fifteen cents. Our volume from February forward has picked up quite a bit; it slacked off some in May but we were trading on the average of 2700 to 2800 shares in a day and that is a lot more than we traded formerly.” CEOCFOinterviews: Will you tell us about your growth and the future? Mr. Whittet: “We continue to look at expanding our physical base. In March, we converted a loan production office in Binghamton New York to a full service branch and in April, we opened another loan production office in Kingston New York, which is about 100 miles to the east. We like the model of the loan production office where we can find a good quality lender that is familiar with a particular market, hire him or her and see if we can bring our brand of banking into that market. If we are as successful as we were in the Binghamton area, then we will expand into a full-service office. It is a conservative way to grow because it doesn’t’ cost very much to open a loan production office. If it isn’t successful, although we haven’t had one that hasn’t been, you can shut it down and move on. If you are successful, you move on and create a larger presence. At the same time we have been doing that, we have been active in purchasing branches. Over my history, we have purchased one bank and bought 3 branches in two separate transactions. We are interested in trying to get into a larger population area where there is more potential for us to grow.” CEOCFOinterviews: How do you maintain the high level of customer service that you pride yourself on as you continue to expand? Mr. Whittet: “It is difficult; the bigger you are the more customers and the less personal it may appear. Our offices are relatively small and are in small towns. The managers and the people that work there, generally work and live in the same general area so they know people on a personal basis away from the bank. We are proud to say that our people in upstate New York are generally friendly and they have a good work ethic but they also have a compassion for satisfying customers' needs and trying to make sure they get the right product at the right time.” CEOCFOinterviews: You mentioned that you had an office in Kingston that is geographically a distance from where you are now, how do you decide where to go and what are you looking for? Mr. Whittet: “We have an office in Boiceville, NY, which is about thirty miles to the west of Kingston. That office was part of a bank that we purchased seven years ago, and it has shown some nice growth; it is not a large office but it has grown very nicely. After 9/11 it picked up quite a bit; it seems like there is an exit out of New York City into the lower Hudson Valley. We looked at Kingston from the standpoint of small business commercial lending, there are many people making home mortgages there, but we thought there might be a little niche in the ability of those banks to serve the small businesses that we focus on.” CEOCFOinterviews: You mentioned that you are looking into getting back into mortgages as the interest rates change, what else has been different for you over this period of time? Mr. Whittet: “The mortgage market in the last three years has been a difficult market. We don’t want to generate mortgages and sell them on a wholesale basis; we want to hold them for our own portfolio. I have been in banking long enough to remember what happened to the savings and loans in the early eighties when they had 7% mortgages and were paying fifteen percent for their CDs; it is hard to make any money in that environment. We chose to selectively close some mortgages. We sold some mortgages in the secondary market but we did them one at a time. As rates will come back up and be closer to the norm, we hope to get back into that market. Many of the consumer products in the last few years have become more of a commodity; pricing and terms have dominated the rule. In our case, we looked at it and decided there was too much interest rate risk as well as credit risk in some cases. That isn’t the same with small business lending; pricing is always a consideration and the low rates have hurt our bank as well as all community banks over the last couple of years. This is an individualized, customized product and personal relationships go a long way there.” CEOCFOinterviews: What sets you apart from your competition? Mr. Whittet: “I think our people and where we are.” CEOCFOinterviews: In closing, why should potential investors be interested and what should they know that they may not realize when they first look at the company? Mr. Whittet: “We have been here 130 years and we have had a continuously expanding base as well as our earnings. Last year was our eighth year in a row where our earnings continued to expand to now over eight million dollars per year. Our numbers are quite good when compared to others in our peer group. We pay a reasonable dividend and work hard at what we do.” disclaimers |
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