Five Questions With: Katy Knox

Katy Knox, head of business banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is a member of the executive management operating committee based in Charlotte, N.C.
Her business banking client team provides services for companies nationwide, generally ranging from $5 million to $50 million in annual revenues. Knox has more than 25 years of leadership experience and currently sponsors a handful of individual New England markets, including Rhode Island.
She talks with Providence Business News about her experience, business banking across the country, how retail consumerism has changed and her personal connection with the Ocean State.

PBN: Besides sponsoring Rhode Island as one of your markets, what’s your connection with the Ocean State?
KNOX:
I grew up in Rhode Island. Both my parents were from Massachusetts and moved to Rhode Island mainly for employment at the time. I grew up here in East Providence right over the bridge, very close, and started my career with Bank of New England in 1986 and have been with the company for 30 years in March. So, I have very deep ties not only to Rhode Island, but with New England because I spent my entire career here before about eight years ago when I transitioned to Charlotte as a part of an initiative to bring leaders who hadn’t spent time at the headquarters to North Carolina. I’ve been down there [since].

PBN: What’re your responsibilities and what does your day-to-day look like?
KNOX:
It’s a lot of travel. Last week I was in [Los Angeles], Orange County, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I spend a lot of time in the northeast, as it’s so easy to get here from Charlotte and I have the markets here that I sponsor (Rhode Island, Worcester, Mass., New Hampshire and Maine). But I try to spend at least four weeks a year on the west coast to meet with each of our market leaders, see a lot of clients and to attend a lot of events. I typically would be out with clients two-to-three-days a week and with the teams. We learn a lot when we’re in the markets.

PBN: Can you tell our readers a little bit about your professional background working at Bank of America?
KNOX:
I’ve been in every business in the company. This is my 29th year and I started out in commercial banking. I’ve worked in commercial, operations, marketing, I was in corporate strategy, and prior to going to consumer I lead the east region for middle market.

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PBN: Prior to your current position in business banking you headed retail banking, how has that segment of the business changed?
KNOX:
I went over to lead retail banking and I was there for about four years and it was phenomenal. At that point and time we were looking to go through a pretty significant transformation. Our clients were using a lot of mobile, we were launching the first ever video ATM, so we were really looking at the behaviors of our retail clients and at the same time setting the strategy for what our financial centers would look like in the future. It was a tremendous time to be in retail and to spend time with the mass-market clients and the strategy of what will be an evolution over the next five to ten years of how people will bank.

PBN: Do you see the same transformations in retail banking happening on the business side?
KNOX:
I see a lot of automation with our clients, but I will tell you that our model is a much more of what I call a “client-coverage” model. Our clients really like us to spend time with them and understand what their needs are and what services they need. We spend a lot of time understanding their growth and how we can help fuel that growth. What I am seeing is a transformation of automation in our product set and integration into their systems. But the shift to mobile on the retail side, when you look at that younger generation, has just exploded.

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