On the heels of 25% year-over-year growth, Atlanta-based SunTrust Banks Inc. is expanding its auto unit’s geographic footprint into Dallas, Chicago, and Boston.
The bank will offer a full line of wholesale and indirect banking products to dealers in the three cities. The move comes after the bank’s investment arm, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, grew its corporate banking presence into those same markets as part of a bigger national expansion strategy.
“We decided to mirror the moves we’ve made in other parts of our bank and expand beyond the retail footprint,” Beau Cummins, SunTrust’s commercial and business banking executive, told Auto Finance News.
Wes McKnight, formerly with EFG Companies and Ford Motor Credit, and Greg Buell, formerly with Ally Financial, will lead the Dallas-based dealer finance team. Former M&T Bank executives Scott Worthing and Michael Walsh will lead the Chicago and Boston teams, respectively.
The superregional bank is yet one more player in three of the nation’s most competitive auto lending markets. But, Cummins said, being a large bank with an established investment arm via Robinson Humphrey gives his company a big advantage. Beyond being just a lender, SunTrust is a multifaceted advisor that provides a full suite of capabilities, Cummins said, pointing to the bank’s floorplan lending, facilities financing, and online lending platform called Light Stream.
“We have all the capabilities of a traditional regional bank, but we also have an investment bank that has a very expansive set of capabilities that we can bring to bear on behalf of our clients to help them reach their growth goals,” Cummins said.
Cummins used a recent visit to a dealer group client to further make that point. He said he asked the dealer about what his growth goals were in the coming years.
“They painted a picture of going from 50 to 150 dealerships,” Cummins said. “When you paint a picture like that, they clearly have a material need for capital to achieve that goal. Growth capital comes in multiple forms. It can be debt or equity capital. But it can also come from private or public markets.”
Specifically, SunTrust can help dealers raising capital manage the risk of interest rate movements before they go to market. The bank also offers services focused around cash management. Another value-add could come on the acquisition side, Cummins said, through introductions to other dealers who might wish to sell.
“Once they’ve decided where they’re going, there’s a multitude of paths that our full set of capabilities allows us to talk to them about,” he said.
But is the hop-skip outside the bank’s southeastern footprint part of a more aggressive growth spurt? “If we were to have aggressive growth goals, you’d find we are behaving differently than I just described,” he said. “We want to respond to the demand in the marketplace and the demand within our client set for perspective clients and existing clients.”
He said SunTrust is seeing substantial growth right now in actual growth terms. “Our last year’s growth would be pretty illustrative of the inroads we’re making,” Cummins said.
