JOHN E. KOHL Title: Group executive vice president, KeyCorp Capital Markets and Key Investments Inc.
Mission: Heads a team developing KeyCorp's ambitious plans in the investment products area. The company's First Choice 2000 initiative also is aimed at delivering financial advisory services and other capital markets activities to individual investors and corporate clients.
Team concept Kohl, 55, emphasizes the collegial nature of the work ahead. Two managers reporting to him, Gerald Fallon and Jack Kopnisky, also are relative newcomers. "We're all on the same floor. We're all learning to work with each other," says Kohl, who spent 23 years with McDonald Co., the Cleveland-based brokerage firm. "That's hard to do in some investment firm. Banks provide relationship managers; there's a total sharing."
Leveraging the network: Will be selling through Key's extensive branch network in 13 states. "We have 3.4 million families as existing customers. We hope we would justify to them their doing business with us in a number of different ways" that will be keyed to relationships, not transactions.
Unusual background: Started as an investment analyst at the old Cleveland Trust Co., then joined McDonald in 1967, where he rose to executive vice president and a director. Left in 1990 to become president and chief operating officer of Man-Gill Chemical Co. in Cleveland, where he'd been (and remains) a director. Had helped the owner, a friend, do strategic planning and acquisitions. Kohl says his years there "helped me in working with and leading people, and focusing on customer needs."
Long ties. "I've been a customer and a friend of the bank for a long-time, so I've come full circle," he says, referring to work McDonald did with the old Society Corp. "If I can help focus the whole investment products) operation, it will be good for them, and good for me."
