Wachovia Corp. has hired Joseph Pollicino, a veteran commercial banker, to lead its effort to step up its middle-market lending in the New York area.
He joined Wachovia on May 16 as the commercial banking director for New York and Long Island. He will oversee 17 bankers.
Before joining Wachovia, Mr. Pollicino spent 24 years as a middle-market specialist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its predecessors. He succeeded David Ring, who has been promoted to head commercial banking for the Atlantic region.
The commercial lending effort in the region comes about two years after Wachovia opened its first retail branch in New York. It now has 13 branches in Mr. Pollicino's coverage area, all of them in Manhattan.
Mr. Pollicino said in an interview Monday that he plans to work on raising awareness of Wachovia's brand.
"There is a need to educate the marketplace," he said. "We're basically a new entrant as far as New York City and Long Island are concerned."
Wachovia wants to hire more bankers, he said, but he would not specify how many.
It has its work cut out in New York, where heavyweights like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup Inc. are based. Other area banking companies have been stepping up their commercial banking operations, and the region has at least one newcomer. KeyCorp of Cleveland opened a middle-market office in New Jersey in January and hired Christopher Kleczkowski, a former FleetBoston Financial Corp. commercial banker, to run it.
This year Commerce Bancorp Inc. of Cherry Hill, N.J., opened a Wall Street office staffed with commercial lenders, and North Fork Bancorp in Melville, N.Y., has added commercial lenders from Fleet, which Bank of America Corp. bought in April of last year.
Wachovia plans to court companies with annual revenue of $15 million to $250 million and is touting services such as cash and capital management, as well as investment banking, Mr. Pollicino said.
"This is more than a loan production office," he said. "There are no easy pickings. This is a full-fledged effort to bring the bank to the client."
Analysts said its makes sense for Wachovia to conduct a middle-market campaign in New York, where, according to the most recent FDIC data, it has more than $1.1 billion of deposits. They said Mr. Pollicino - who spent a long time at Chemical Bank, which was known for its middle-market prowess - should make a good fit.
"Stage one is to just gather deposits," said Kevin Fitzsimmons, an analyst at Sandler O'Neill & Partners LP. Perhaps the hiring "is a signal that they're ready to move into phase two," he said. "They have been very methodical."
Wachovia's chairman and chief executive, G. Kennedy Thompson, sounded positive about his $506.8 billion-asset company's commercial lending outlook Monday on a conference call hosted by Merrill Lynch & Co.
Mr. Thompson said Wachovia is "seeing commercial loan demand pick up a little more than we would have predicted maybe at the beginning of the year."
Meanwhile, the Nov. 1 acquisition of SouthTrust Corp. of Birmingham, Ala., has resulted in some banker defections in Georgia and Florida, he said.
"We lost a few more small-business bankers than we would have expected," Mr. Thompson said. Many who left had been managers who were removed from those roles after the integration, he said.
