Sun Bancorp Inc. in Vineland, N.J., has hired a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive to help improve its retail performance.
At a meeting of branch managers Tuesday - at which the $3.2 billion-asset Sun also unveiled a sales training program - president and chief executive officer Thomas A. Bracken introduced Jeffrey P. Hawkins as the executive vice president of retail banking.
"We've been talking about reinventing our retail bank for about a year," Mr. Bracken said in an interview Tuesday. "We've done a lot from an infrastructure standpoint. The final piece was finding the right leader. We now have the right leader."
Mr. Hawkins, 38, was a senior vice president and national sales director at JPMorgan Chase, where he created and implemented retail sales initiatives for its 2,600 branches.
The parent of Sun National Bank had been without a head of retail banking for a year, since Jack Neary retired in August of last year.
Analysts had mostly positive things to say about the hiring, which followed several initiatives at Sun over the past few months to cut costs and boost income.
"I think this is another step in the right direction," said Joseph Fenech, an analyst at Sandler O'Neill & Partners LP. "It's a positive to the extent that this will result in greater focus on retail banking, which has been more of a push for them recently."
Mr. Fenech has a "hold" rating on the stock, but late last month he raised his 12-month price target by $2, to $19 a share, citing the company's progress in its efforts to improve profitability.
Sun, which has struggled with high overhead of late, said in July that it would close or sell five of its 80 branches this year, renegotiate vendor contracts, and implement strategies to boost fee income. It also cut 8% of its work force in June.
Mr. Bracken said in late July that the changes would increase next year's revenue by about $7 million and get the efficiency ratio, which was at 78.32%, under 70%.
Richard Weiss of Janney Montgomery Scott LLC said he is a bit skeptical about Sun hiring a "big bank guy" to head its retail operations.
"Community banks in general just whip companies like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America because of personalized service," said Mr. Weiss, who has a "neutral" rating on Sun.
Still, he said he found it encouraging that Mr. Hawkins, who has 10 years of banking experience, worked at M&T Bank Corp. of Buffalo earlier in his career.
A Sun spokeswoman said that Mr. Hawkins was busy in his first day on the job Tuesday and was not available for interviews.
Mr. Bracken, who came to Sun in 2001 from First Union Corp., likened Mr. Hawkins' experience to his own. "When I started in banking a long time ago, I started with a very small bank that grew into a Wachovia, so I knew what banking at a smaller level was like," he said. "Jeff Hawkins has had a lot of experience at a lot of different levels. That was important to us."
Sun has been an earnings disappointment of late; over the last four quarters, it has posted a return on assets of 0.55% and a return on equity of 5.7%, according to Mr. Fenech.
But Mr. Bracken said he expects its performance to improve soon, with Mr. Hawkins overseeing retail operations. "We haven't provided the resources to retail that we really needed to. That's what we are doing now."
The sales training initiative has been in the works for three months, Mr. Bracken said. It is the result of Sun's work with the consultant Anat Bird, who was brought in to help develop the staff's selling skills.
Mr. Bracken said the training initiative is designed to encourage employees at all levels - from teller to branch manager - to spot opportunities. It will be "very monetarily rewarding" for the staff to acquire new customers and cross-sell products to current ones.
Mr. Hawkins will report directly to Mr. Bracken and will focus on increasing market share, deposit and loan growth, customer retention, and product development.
The new executive will oversee the company's marketing and facilities departments, helping Sun improve the look of its branches and recommending where it should add branches either by building or acquiring, Mr. Bracken said. When asked whether Sun planned to build or acquire any time soon, Mr. Bracken said, "When the time is right for us to grow, any one of those options is something we would pursue."
