Last month, Greenwich-based Fieldpoint Private, a private banking and wealth advisory firm, announced its expansion into Atlanta with a new full-service office. This was the firm”™s third Southeastern office, joining locations in Miami and Orlando; Fieldpoint Private also has a location in New York City. The new office adds to the firm”™s rapidly growing footprint spanning Greenwich, Connecticut, New York City, and Orlando and Miami, Fla.
Fieldpoint Private ranks in the top 5% of the fastest-growing banks in the U.S., according to S&P Global data; as of the third quarter of 2021, the company”™s asset base grew 42% year-over-year.
In this edition of Suite Talk, Business Journal Senior Enterprise Editor interviews Fieldpoint Private”™s Executive Chairman Timothy Tully and the company’s banking unit President and CEO H. Russell Holland about the company”™s place within the financial services world.
What is the game plan for Fieldpoint Private going into 2022?
Tully: We put together a growth plan back in the summer of 2020 to reposition ourselves as a bank. We’re a wealth management business, but we’re a bank and we essentially had more capital than we needed.
There were three pillars to our strategy. First was to grow our balance sheet, the second was to professionalize our deposit gathering, which means beyond our advisor teams to gather deposits from local businesses and other people, and third was to support our existing wealth management, business and advisors and help them grow that business and expand into different areas, largely in the Southeast.
We were about a $950-million-asset bank at that time and we’ve crossed over $1 billion in just a little over 15 months. Heading into 2022, we’ve got a lot of momentum on our side and we anticipate just continuing with that momentum and continuing our growth patterns. We will probably raise some more capital to support our growth, but that’s a good problem to have.
Holland: We leveraged our core value proposition, which has always been private banking and supporting a wealth advisory business. Since our founding, that has been our model and we didn’t stray from that. We grew the bank in the private banking sector, in alignment with our wealth business in Greenwich and in Manhattan. And then we took that south into Atlanta and Orlando and Miami by recruiting teams in those markets and following some of our clients down into those markets when they migrated out.
Your company has focused on the Southeast. Are you looking to expand
to the rest of the country?
Tully: We have clients in 48 states, but a lot of migration of our client base was from Connecticut and New York to Florida, and that market is very much aligned with the Northeast, so it was a good fit for us. But we’re not limiting it to those markets. We”™re going to fill in along the East Coast and look to other markets across the country.
Holland: There are plenty of markets for us to go into along the East Coast. We don’t have anything in Boston, we don’t have anything in Philadelphia, we don’t have anything in D.C., so there’s plenty of opportunity for us.
What are you hearing from your clients today in regard to the overall state of the economy and how it impacts their wealth and their assets?
Tully: It’s been such a difficult period of time for everybody, with Covid and the pandemic. But our clients have done pretty well. It was a tough time back there in March and April of 2020, but the market has been extraordinary in its so-called comeback and resilience in the face of the pandemic.
Holland: Our board approved the repositioning plan July of 2020, when we were in the midst of the initial wave of Covid. And there was a lot of reluctance for other banks to lend at that point in time, other than PPP ”” they were pretty much not doing any lending. It was really opportunistic for us to be out there hiring bankers ”” we hired 38 employees in 2020 and 62 in 2021 to grow our bank. And as a result, we were able to put those additional assets on the balance sheet over the last 15 months.
During the pandemic, your company was honored for its Covid crisis response by Global Finance Magazine, which cited your deploying new technology during the crisis. What is your high-tech strategy, particularly in regard to cybersecurity?
Holland: It’s been a major investment of the company over the last 15 months and will continue to be in the future, from both the digital transformation of the company right into providing our clients with the best possible experience.
When we started the growth plan, the initial investments were in technology and compliance, and we’ve brought on additional team members to from larger financial institutions that have the experience and the capabilities to really build a best-in-class, technology-base platform for all of our core systems as well as our online banking and mobile technology.
Tully: I think also they recognized we were not an SBA lender at the time, and we had to create a way to take care of our clients who were looking for PPP loans. And we were able to do and were able to save a bunch of jobs in the process.
One of the big stories that occurred financially during the course of 2021 involved cryptocurrency. What are your thoughts about that market, and do you have clients that are asking you a lot of questions about investing in Bitcoin and other digital assets?
Tully: Crypto is an interesting asset class and we’re all still trying to understand it. We don’t believe it’s going away. But the regulators are still coming up with guidance on it, so we’ve taken a very cautious approach as to how to work with clients that are interested in in crypto.
Holland: We are working with fintech partners to enable our clients to purchase crypto from us. We’re in the early stages of that.
If we were to pick up this conversation one year from today, where do you expect to see Fieldpoint at that time?
Tully: We’re working on a few other initiatives. We”™ve been approached by other registered investment advisers asking if we could be a private banking solution for them. That’s exciting to us, but we haven’t done it yet. I would hope that we’ve figured that out in the coming year.
