KeyCorp hired AmSouth Bancorp's chief financial officer, Beth E. Mooney, to head its community banking efforts, partly filling a post that had been vacant for nearly a year.
Her hiring, announced Tuesday, makes her the third banking CFO in recent months to swap number-crunching for a post that involves business-line responsibility.
Ms. Mooney, 51, will join the Cleveland company as a vice chairwoman this month. She is following a path similar to the one taken by Robert P. Kelly, who stepped down as Wachovia Corp.'s CFO in mid-February to become the president and chief executive officer of Mellon Financial Corp. A month later John Presley left the top financial post at Marshall & Ilsley Corp. for a broader but undefined role at Fifth Third Bancorp.
In an interview Tuesday, Henry L. Meyer 3d, KeyCorp's chairman and CEO, said Ms. Mooney would round out a management team he has been building since 2002. He said that her experience, coupled with her background as a CFO, should help her land business while finding more ways to use technology and cut expenses.
She had been AmSouth's CFO since February 2004. Before she joined the Birmingham, Ala., company in 2000, she had been Ohio CFO for Bank One Corp. Earlier she had been the president of Bank One's Ohio arm.
Anthony Davis, an analyst at BankAtlantic Bancorp Inc.'s Ryan Beck & Co. Inc., said the trend toward hiring CFOs to run business lines reflects the fact that banking companies are increasingly cost-conscious and want executives who can also watch the bottom line.
"It's not just about installing leadership. … It's also about managing returns," and Ms. Mooney fits that description, he said in an interview.
Ms. Mooney said she was attracted to the $93 billion-asset KeyCorp because it would let her manage lines of business, and because she grew up in nearby Michigan.
"This job is a fit between my background and where this company is trying to go," she said.
KeyCorp reorganized its community banking unit in August, moving from a centralized business model to one with 13 independently operating centers, and gave the division the name KeyBank. The changes came a month after the departure of Jack L. Kopnisky, the president of consumer banking, who is now the president, CEO, and chief operating officer at First Marblehead Corp., a Boston provider of outsourcing services for private student loans.
Ms. Mooney will run retail and commercial banking, as well as KeyCorp's brokerage division, McDonald Financial Group. In all, she will oversee an operation that has about 950 branches in 13 states and accounts for nearly 50% of the company's earnings.
Mr. Meyer said Tuesday that KeyCorp had "turned the corner" on the reorganization, and that its 8% deposit growth last year was the company's best in years.
It has introduced new products and consolidated others, and Ms. Mooney's job is to "get the sleeping giant moving a little bit faster," he said.
She will also play the leading role in KeyCorp's community and regional bank acquisitions, Mr. Meyer said. It could pursue such acquisitions as early as next year, he said, though he would like to further improve Key's performance and buying power before then.
According to Mr. Davis, KeyCorp may not be ready to pursue bank deals, since it remains under an October consent order with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and a memorandum of understanding with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland tied to Bank Secrecy Act compliance. Though they do not preclude bank acquisitions, Mr. Meyer has said in the past that they would make purchases more difficult.
Mr. Davis expects regulators to sign off on KeyCorp's compliance as early as next quarter.
Her tenure at AmSouth has given Ms. Mooney some experience with such orders. Late last year it was cleared from a ban on expansion that stemmed from October 2004 charges that it had committed "systemic and serious" violations of the BSA and other anti-laundering laws. The company paid $50 million of fines without admitting or denying wrongdoing.
A spokesman for KeyCorp would not say when the orders could be lifted, though he said his company is "aggressively" addressing regulators' concerns by enhancing training and conducting more client due diligence, among other things. It did not have to pay a fine in its dealings with regulators.
AmSouth, which has $53 billion in assets, named controller and principal accounting officer Alton E. Yother, 53, to take over Ms. Mooney's duties on an interim basis.
