Associated Hires B of A Execs to Run Michigan Loan Office

Associated Banc-Corp (ASBC) of Green Bay, Wis., has hired two Bank of America (BAC) employees to lead a new office in Michigan as it looks to make commercial real estate loans in the Detroit area.

The $22 billion-asset company said Friday that it had hired Don Heath as a team leader and Kathy Bozek as a CRE relationship manager for the office.

Heath will be responsible for managing and developing the company's real estate lending presence in the state. Prior to joining Associated, Heath oversaw CRE business development for Michigan at Bank of America.

Bozek will be responsible for generating new CRE loans and developing client relationships in the market. At Bank of America, she most recently was a senior debt products officer.

"We expect the state of Michigan, in its recovery status, to be a significant contributor to the execution of Associated Bank's Midwest footprint strategy," Breck Hanson, Associated's head of CRE, said in a news release.

Associated has been aggressively adding lenders over the last year as it aims to grow its market share and replace the roughly $18 million a revenue it is expected to lose each year as result of new caps on interchange fees. Aside from its latest hires, it has added roughly 100 customer-facing employees from rival M&I Bank, which was acquired last year by Bank of Montreal's Chicago-based subsidiary, BMO Harris Bank.