Gateman sits down to explain why Wall Street careers have purpose, how she serves corporate clients through market turmoil, and why bankers should work from the office.
Transcription:
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Mary Ellen Egan (00:10):
I am Mary Ellen Egan, senior director Content and Strategy Live Media at American Banker, and I'm here with Jill Gateman, the head of corporate banking and specialized finance at TD Bank. Welcome, Jill. Thank
Jill Gateman (00:21):
You.
Mary Ellen Egan (00:21):
So let's talk a little bit about what challenges you're facing currently with your role at TD Bank and how you're kind of handling those kind of changes or issues.
Jill Gateman (00:31):
Sure, and I think most of the challenges I'm facing are not bespoke to my situation. Having said that, we are driving a great deal of cultural change within the organization alongside a fairly significant amount of business transformation. And while those two initiatives are not exactly competing with one another, it is difficult to drive very meaningful business change and maintain that historical corporate culture. And quite frankly, some of it did need to change with the times. So that's really what is driving me. Every day when I come to work, I am looking at where we need the business to go and how can we present that in a way to the teams so that it's easy to absorb and digest and just provide really clear direction on moving forward in terms of how that gets accomplished and what that looks like day to day. It's a lot of communication. It's very frequent visits to the wide geography that we cover. I'm in the markets very frequently. It's quite frankly the best part of my job is to go visit the teams and to meet all of the very hardworking people who drive success at this organization.
Mary Ellen Egan (01:50):
So as we look across the industry and with the challenges with the markets, the uncertainty in the us, China, what kind of issues is your sector facing and how are you helping to navigate that?
Jill Gateman (02:04):
Yeah, I think you left a few out too. There are so many, there's a lot. There are so many challenges this day. I've been doing this for a long time and I cannot remember at least within the last 20 years, a time where we face so many different challenges. As head of corporate banking, I oversee pretty much every area of corporate finance. And the most overriding concern, I would say among our client base is just the fear of making a decision right now. Interesting. Where we see the most indecision is in what I call confidence spending. It's in the client's ability to really have a clear path and say, yes, I want to invest this amount of money because I feel so confident that investing that money will yield greater return going forward. That seems to be lacking right now. We see that in tepi loan demand.
(02:59):
We see that with the slowing of the m and a activity that pretty much everybody thought was going to pick up this year. And we're still hopeful the second part of the year that will happen. But the rate cuts have an impact on that tour, the lack thereof, and it's just putting a cloud of uncertainty among most of our corporate clients. Having said that, it's a great time for us to get in front of our clients. I certainly encourage the teams to go out and talk about what's facing those particular industries that our clients serve. And that is always well received from our client base. Every client wants to know more about the industry that they're in, more about what other clients are doing to face these challenges.
Mary Ellen Egan (03:50):
And you've had a long career as you touched on earlier. So when you were a more junior executive and now being a leader, what do you wish you would've known about leadership or what would you have changed perhaps?
Jill Gateman (04:06):
I wish I would've understood earlier that as I worked up the organization, it's really my job to serve those that work under me. So I'm a big proponent of servant leadership and once I found that philosophy or discovered it, started reading about it, truly that's when my career started to take off because that was such a pivotal mindset for me. Everybody works as a leader. You work on working your way up the next step, where am I going to be tomorrow? Well then when you get there, you realize you are only as good as the people that work for you. And it became such a defining moment for me because it's so clear. There's nothing more clear than getting to your office and saying, where do my people need me today? What can I do for my teams today to make them more successful? And then the rest comes, the success for me will come later. But on the ground, the way I can really help my teams is by starting my day saying, how can I help you?
Mary Ellen Egan (05:14):
And then we look at today, the current environment or there's so much going on and we know on so many levels, but what keeps you up at night
Jill Gateman (05:23):
For certain? What keeps me, what is most unsettling for me is the fact that we still have so many people working remotely. And it's difficult to instill, retain a feeling of culture and a culture of care when we have so many people working remotely. And my primary concern is retaining, attracting, promoting strong talent. That endeavor is rendered significantly more difficult when you're not bumping into these people in the hallway when you're not seeing them smile or seeing them not smile in a meeting. There's so many nonverbal cues that you can get from your staff in team meetings that you really can't glean on a zoom meeting. And that's by far what is most unsettling for me is we care so deeply about all of our employees. And it's difficult to do that in a fully remote environment. And while we have plenty of people in the office too, I worry about them as well because this is a very difficult environment, not just within banking, but we have so many things coming our way and it's very hard to make people feel valued. And that's what definitely keeps me up the most at night is how can we make people feel energized, really important within the organization, show them how they could add value to the bottom line. And that's just something that I will forever worry about. And we have varying degrees of success at times, and that's what keeps me up at night.
Mary Ellen Egan (07:07):
Yeah, I mean, that's one thing I find it's very hard, especially with younger people to mentor over Zoom because again, they miss out on the nonverbal cues, that kind of network, the kind of meeting in between meetings where you run into maybe somebody more senior and can say, Hey, go up to them and ask 'em casually a question without feeling like I have to raise my hand in this big meeting. And I think that that's has such a value. And although I think a lot of us do value the opportunity to do remote work, those of us who have grown up through, you're in the office five days a week, understand what is the lost when you're remote.
Jill Gateman (07:40):
Yeah, I agree. I call those the accidental interactions, the things that just happen and they're so meaningful.
Mary Ellen Egan (07:46):
So when we look at, finally, I want to talk to you a little bit about how do we attract the younger generation to Wall Street jobs to careers? How do we interest them in banking and finance and how does that play out do you think, or should play out? I
Jill Gateman (08:04):
Think first of all, we have to make it look fun. Again, when I was going through my career, I couldn't imagine doing anything, but when I first got out of college, all I wanted to do was work on Wall Street and work in Manhattan and commute, if you can believe it, commute into New York because what we would see and what we would hear on the news looked like a lot of fun. And through a variety of reasons, things have not been as much fun when you consider all that's the banking industry is facing. So number one, we need to do a better job of making it look like fun. Number two, we also need to highlight how you can use your right side and your left side of your brain in this business. I think people, their notion of banking finance can or steer toward something that could be boring. And I may have a personal bias, but I would say it's anything. But there's so much creativity that comes into presenting a solution, a capital solution to a client who's deciding whether take a leverage dividend, whether they go public, whether they do something in the middle. And there's just so much fun and creativity involved in that. And I don't think we do a really great job to date of explaining to people how creative and really fulfilling those solutions can be.
Mary Ellen Egan (09:30):
Great. Well thank you Jill. I really appreciate your time.
Jill Gateman (09:33):
Thank you.
