Bank Rhode Island has expanded its leadership team as it reshapes upper management
to support a planned expansion of its business lines and the addition of six
more branches in the next several years.
Donald C. McQueen, executive vice president and chief credit and administrative officer at the bank, has been promoted to chief operating officer, a new position.
The bank also named Linda H. Simmons to the newly created position of executive vice president for finance and treasurer. She was an executive at Bank of America’s Treasury Group in Boston.
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“Our growth has necessitated the expansion of our executive management team,” said Merrill W. Sherman, president and CEO of the bank. “These changes form the structural basis to support our continued growth and will put us in an even better position to capitalize on market opportunities and conditions.”
BankRI’s executive management team is now Sherman; McQueen; Albert R. Rietheimer, chief financial officer; James V. DeRentis, executive vice president for retail banking; and Simmons, who joined the bank this month.
McQueen has been with BankRI since its inception and has been instrumental in the growth of the bank’s business lines, Sherman said. As COO, Sherman said, McQueen will provide “heightened executive-level focus on customer advocacy and operational excellence.”
Simmons was with the Fleet Financial Group prior to the Bank of America deal, serving as manager of domestic modeling, as a director of international ALM modeling, and in other capacities.
“We have been recruiting for some time for just the right person in the finance and treasury area,” Sherman said. “We were fortunate that the Fleet-Bank of America transaction basically dislocated a number of highly skilled treasury professionals. We hired one of the few that were still employed at Boston Fleet.”
As a veteran of a much bigger bank, Simmons has the level of financial expertise that BankRI needs to manage its fast-growing assets and increasingly complex finances, Sherman said. The bank’s deposits have grown from $516.6 million in 1999 to $887.8 million in the last five years alone; its commercial loans have grown even faster, from $175 million to $370 million in those five years.
Before Simmons came onboard, BankRI used an outside consultant to assist CFO Rietheimer in managing its finances, Sherman said. The new recruitment gives BankRI the power to do it internally, she said, and to deal with an increasingly complex and demanding regulatory environment.
“What was driving this is the growth we’ve experienced as well as the growth we anticipate in the coming years,” Sherman said. “Managing $1.2 billion in assets is very different from managing $500 million. We wanted to get somebody who’s been in a larger institution and is savvy about managing a first-rate portfolio.”
Two additional senior-level changes were also announced: Stephen J. Gibbons, formerly head of the bank’s real estate lending group, will now serve as chief lending officer, replacing McQueen in that capacity. In July, Marianne F. Monte joined BankRI in the new position of senior vice president for human resources.
Sherman said the bank faces “an incredible array of business opportunities,” and as a “somewhat unique” institution within the Rhode Island market, it is uniquely positioned to take advantage of them, especially with this expanded leadership team.
Up to now, BankRI’s growth has been entirely organic. Asked how that might
evolve as the bank goes into its next stage of growth, Sherman at first dismissed
the notion of acquiring other institutions – “there are not a lot of strong
buying opportunities.” But the bank also wants to add new lines of business,
she noted, and on that front, acquisitions are “definitely a possibility.”
