Spotlight On: Heath Campbell, Regional President, Charlotte Metrolina Region, Truist

Spotlight On: Heath Campbell, Regional President, Charlotte Metrolina Region, Truist

2023-05-12T12:43:20-04:00May 12th, 2023|Banking & Finance, Charlotte, Economy, Spotlight On|

3 min read May 2023 Heath Campbell, Regional President of the Charlotte Metrolina region for Truist, spoke with Invest: to discuss Truist’s role in diversifying the local economy, the importance of the financial services community showing up for underserved neighborhoods and the technological innovation on the horizon for the industry going forward. 

What were the highlights for Truist in the past year? 

There are so many we could touch on. We successfully completed one of the largest and most complex mergers in the digital age – not just mirroring technology to a domain but also the digital interfaces our clients, teammates and communities use on a daily basis. It has been a very sophisticated and complex process. It’s hard to imagine that this started three years ago but what a tremendous accomplishment. As a purpose-led organization, we are not surprised, but very proud, of our teammates that remained steadfast in maintaining their primary focus on our clients and communities throughout this process. We want to inspire and build better lives and communities but it’s a great thing to see that in action. 

One of Truist’s values stands out and resonates with me more than the others: Caring. The difference for me is that you can’t talk about caring; you must show that you care. Coming out of the pandemic, we wanted to thank and reward all those that help Truist, and our community, through this unprecedented period. It was a proud moment to see caring in action when Truist raised our minimum wage to $22 per hour for most teammates and launched our new suite of checking solutions called Truist One that simplified banking for our clients and provided a path to remove fees that at one time could compound a difficult moment in a client’s life. Our purpose at Truist is to Inspire and build better lives and communities.     

What common concerns or issues are you addressing for businesses, both clients and partners?

The formation of Truist created a unique and distinctive financial platform by combining a best-in-class community bank with a best-in-class investment bank. As a result, we have the tools, resources, and capabilities to help individuals and companies regardless of where they are in their respective financial journey. For example, we are just as passionate about opening a student’s first checking account as we are providing consultative advice for a sophisticated and complex estate plan. We are equally excited when we help small businesses navigate through all of the pivotal moments in the lifecycle of the company, as much as we are delivering strategic advice to assist clients accessing the capital/debt markets for the first time or being a strategic partner with publicly-traded companies as well.

However, I believe that our unique and distinctive characteristics at Truist have less to do with what we do, but more to do with how we do it. You don’t have to look beyond the name of our company, Truist, to find the word Trust. It would be hard to find something more personal, and at times, more emotional, than dealing with someone’s financial matters. Therefore, how you enter these conversations with clients is essential to the result. We believe our expansive platforms provide our teammates the ability to share strategic advice that our clients are seeking and our local delivery channels across 21 regions better enable us to earn the trust of our clients.  Delivering strategic advice locally is centered on helping our clients, as opposed to selling products to clients. Stephen Covey taught us the value of “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” We believe our capabilities, combined with our local strategy, is what clients and communities are seeking, and it’s incumbent on us to deliver.

How has banking evolved to what is now its digital age? 

We briefly discussed the value of delivering specialization locally for our clients, but another significant value created by the formation of Truist was the much-needed scale to enhance and accelerate digital platforms for our clients. The Truist logo contains the formation of infinite “T’s” that we like to think include Trust, Technology, and local Touch. We are excited about our expansive digital capabilities, but as discussed earlier, we believe local still matters for our clients as well. The simple truth is that in the digital age consumers’ purchasing and buying patterns have changed forever and they want a financial services company that is available when they want and where they want it. Truist has the scale to not only deliver on these client expectations but exceed them going forward.

What does community support look like for Truist in Charlotte?

First, we feel blessed at Truist to be able to call Charlotte home. Our clients, communities, civic, and philanthropic partners have welcomed Truist with open arms and we are grateful for everyone’s shared passion and commitment to ensuring Charlotte has a bright future. Former Foundation for the Carolinas CEO Michael Marsicano once shared that it is a perfect time for a company to relocate to Charlotte. “Charlotte is like a quilt that is only 50% complete.  When a company relocates to Charlotte, you don’t have to be a new company in Charlotte for long, you can become the very fabric of what Charlotte is going to be.” We have found that to be true, we listened, learned a lot, rolled up our sleeves, and have a relentless passion to do our part to ensure Charlotte has a bright future.

As proud and as excited as we are to call Charlotte home, we learned that unfortunately not everyone has benefited from the growth and prosperity equally in the last 10-20 years. As a result, our collective community has left too many local families behind.  

The needs and challenges confronting our most vulnerable neighbors and neighborhoods are extensive, and we certainly do not pretend that we have all the answers. While we continue to support numerous non-profit organizations serving on the front lines to help our neighbors in greatest need, we have been very prescriptive in an area where we can align our internal expertise/capabilities where there are significant needs – affordable housing. While the needs are complicated and expansive, we hope that by providing stability in one’s home could serve as the catalyst of growth for the next generation.

What is your outlook for the next two to three years? 

What an exciting time to be in Charlotte. From a sheer geographic and infrastructure perspective, we have access to lakes, mountains, rivers, parks and Carolina blue skies. From an economic perspective, these are enhanced by a world-class airport, interstate system, rail, ports, etc. Financial services play a key role in the local economy representing ~30% of the GDP, but Financial services only represent 8% of jobs. The Charlotte economy is much more diverse and robust than just Financial Services and thereby much more resilient of an economy that most people realize.  Equally important, the next generation has identified Charlotte as one of the Top 5 cities where they want to live and work. I will leave the predictions and outlooks of Charlotte to our economists, but personally, I like our chances in Charlotte.

For more information, visit:

https://www.truist.com/

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