‘Most good leaders are learners’: Top banker Tim Wennes on financial prosperity, cracks in trust, and what people are doing wrong in interviews

Welcome to?Human Capital, an open exploration of the ideas and people moving financial services forward. In each edition, we feature a leader or rising star who’s changing the game in his or her own way. “Finance is an apprentice business,” one often hears in this sector. Here are some of the teachers. Click Subscribe above to be notified of future editions.

Most people in the U.S. are feeling economic headwinds blowing in their direction: 69% are concerned about a recession’s impact on their finances; 67% feel they can’t save enough because of inflation; and 60% have already made spending cuts as a result.

For Tim Wennes , the CEO of Santander US , it’s a concerning picture. But the same data — the results of a recent survey of middle-income Americans by the bank — includes a healthy dose of optimism: 79% of respondents believe such headwinds won’t stop them from achieving financial prosperity in the next decade.

I recently sat down with Wennes to hear what he took away from the research, and what it means for a bank leadership team like his. We also spoke in the wake of turmoil in pockets of the industry, following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, so the conversation veered toward trust and learning from crisis. That included the yearslong crisis that was the COVID-19 pandemic — which hit the U.S. about two months after Wennes became CEO.

Below are excerpts from the conversation.

What were your top takeaways from the survey results?

The majority of our customer base in the U.S. is the middle-American consumer. And in this post-pandemic world, there are a lot of mixed signals out there. So, we took the opportunity to, firsthand, understand: What is driving behavior? What are the impressions, the views, the aspirations and desires of our customers?

It confirmed that middle Americans are under some stress driven by inflation. They’ve got concerns about recession. On the other hand, they’re resilient and hopeful. While more than 50% have had to make some spending adjustments because of inflation, and two-thirds are worried about the effects on them personally of a potential recession, eight in 10 have confidence that in the next decade they will achieve their version of prosperity.

We are also the fifth-largest auto lender in the country, and we’re a full-spectrum auto lender, meaning we lend to customers from super-prime credit histories to subprime. In this area, the research confirmed what we thought, which is that reliable transportation is a key to prosperity for most people. Three out of four said that reliable transportation enables them to get the job, and three out of four said the job is the most important source of the income that allows them to achieve prosperity.

People don’t wake up and say, “I want to get an auto loan today.” What they want is reliable, safe transportation that gives them an opportunity to earn their living.

What are the implications of research like this on how you and the leadership team steer the bank?

Our mission is to help consumers and businesses thrive and prosper. This is at the heart of what we do. And quite frankly, this is why most of us are in banking, or at least why I got into financial services. If we do our jobs well, it can be meaningful and impactful.

Research like this helps us shape how we communicate better with our clients, and ultimately how we serve them better. That’s why we also ask them questions about how they’re interacting and engaging with us.

We also ask questions about who and what institutions they are looking to for financial advice. One of the interesting takeaways was how important the employer was in that arena. That surprised me.

It didn’t surprise me that more than 50% said they would look to a financial services provider, or a bank, for financial products and advice. But the fact that employers were so high, I think, represents the changing expectations that employees have. It reinforced that the role of the trusted organization where a person works is more important today than it was 10 or 20 years ago.

Speaking of trust, the banking industry — at least pockets of it — have undergone something of a trust crisis lately. What’s been your take?

The foundation of the banking industry is trust and confidence. So, when there’s a challenge to that credibility, even if it’s only in certain pockets, it impacts all of us.

This has been a real opportunity for us to reconnect with many customers and reassure them. We talked about this during the pandemic too, which is that banks really should be a pillar of strength for the community during times of crisis or uncertainty. This is another one of those times.

In all of the things that we do, whether it’s in the areas of risk management, customer engagement, or employee engagement, it’s critically important that we’re very clear, transparent, and can instill trust.

How did you decide that a career in finance was the path for you?

I’ve always been interested in business, since a very young age. My parents would characterize me as entrepreneurial — I was always trying to start a business or figure out a way to do a business.

My undergraduate degree at University of Southern California was in the business school there. In the ’80s, the word entrepreneurship was not such a popular term, and USC was one of only a handful of schools in the nation that had an entrepreneur program. I was in that program, which was an immersive one — you had to write a business plan, and the goal was to help launch businesses.

What most people learn, including me, is that without experience and without funding, it’s pretty difficult to convince other people to give me the capital, which makes it difficult to start a business. So, I got into banking thinking that I wanted to work with and serve entrepreneurs — to help them achieve their aspirations.

I thought that I would do that for a few years, then go start a company or run a company. But I found that I really enjoyed financial services, and that the best way to spend as much professional time as I could with entrepreneurs was to become a banker.

As you progressed through your career, were there certain factors that, looking back now, really contributed to your success?

First, doing something you’re really interested in and passionate about. For me, I was able to embrace with enthusiasm what I was doing, and really felt strongly about it. So, I had a lot of energy to do it. And if you’ve got the energy, the enthusiasm, and the passion, it becomes contagious. It’s contagious with customers. It’s contagious with your co-workers. It can be contagious with everyone around you.

Second, this industry gets back to integrity and trust. You have got to be an authentic person. That’s even more important as a leader of other people.

We’ve got nearly 15,000 employees here at Santander in the U.S., and for us to be successful I need to have our entire population of team members be engaged, feel good about the purpose of what we’re doing, and feel trust and confidence in the organization and the leadership. The only way to do that is to be authentic. Communication is important here, but it starts with integrity.

Communication is the vehicle for your integrity. Together, they lead to trust.

The third element that I think is important is really being open to feedback and learning. I consider myself a lifelong learner. In any situation, you’re going to learn something — either good or bad. You can see things that are good and bad, but how you learn from them and apply them going forward makes all the difference.

The same is true for people in terms of their careers. Most good leaders are learners. They’re looking to learn from all situations, and then apply what they’ve learned into the future.

Learning from difficult situations was on clear display during the pandemic. You became CEO a few months before it struck. What did it teach you?

One of the key takeaways is that we can overcome and accomplish things that we think are not possible, when we are really working together as a team.

If you had said, “Tim, you need to get 10,000 of your 13,000 employees to work from home, and you’ve got a week to do it, and you need to maintain your quality, and you need to maintain all of your operational integrity and risk management,” I don’t know that I would have thought it was possible. But guess what? When it came down to it, we figured it out.

The key takeaway for me was not to underestimate the power of ingenuity, creativity, and tenacity — and the resilience of a team.

By the way, if you had also said to create a new loan product, and be able to deliver it at 50 times the throughput you’re doing today, and do it in a few weeks, that was the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses. We had more than 100,000 small businesses that trust us as their bank, and thousands and thousands and thousands now needed the funding because their businesses had been shut down. They needed us like they never needed us before. We rapidly put together a program that, under normal circumstances, we would give ourselves three months or six months to do.

So, with the right mandate, mission, and passion, what we can accomplish is quite remarkable.

Even now, when I’m talking to teams about a new initiative or a problem we need to solve, I’ll say, “How do we do this on pandemic terms? What if we have less time than we think, fewer resources than we think, and very high expectations for ourselves? I have confidence that this team can do it — look at what we did during the pandemic.”

How have you seen the skills required for success in this industry change or evolve over time?

In some ways, I think the key skills and attributes haven’t changed at all. Some of those that I mentioned earlier — communication and integrity and passion and customer orientation — I think those remain core attributes and skills for success.

That being said, how we deliver financial services today is very different than how we did five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and 30-plus years ago when I started. So, having proficient technical skills, and understanding how technology can impact and drive our business, is of critical importance.

The idea of collaboration and teamwork is not necessarily different, but how we execute projects and initiatives is very different today. The multi-channel orientation that we need to have is very different — so much of what we all do used to take place in-person only, and much less of that happens today.

I would say for young people and those earlier in their careers, having some coding experience is good for everybody; having some project management experience would be good for everybody; having understanding of data and modeling and analytics and other quantitative elements, if you’re going to be in financial services, is important.

You don’t have to be an expert in all those areas, but having those skills augments the core competencies very well.

How does that translate when you’re sitting across from a job candidate? What are you looking for?

There are a couple of elements that are hard to teach, primarily energy and enthusiasm. Is this someone who is going to bring positive energy and enthusiasm to the table or not? That is such an important ingredient — and I find that it’s hard to teach.

For anybody I’m considering, I’m assuming they are already qualified. I find that, particularly for people earlier in their careers, they want to spend a lot of time justifying why they’re in front of you. When you’re in that interview, remember that they wouldn’t be talking to you if you weren’t a qualified candidate, because there are 90 resumes that didn’t even make it to the interview table.

So, focus instead on what makes you unique. Why you are going to be value-added to the organization. Why you are going to be dynamic in terms of being collaborative, having good chemistry, and embracing the culture.

Most times when a job doesn’t work out, it’s because of cultural fit more than a mismatch in skills or capabilities.

I think people and organizations are better at interviewing for experience and skills and capabilities, and spend too little time focused on the cultural fit. Is this going to be a match? Will everybody benefit as a result? That lens makes all the difference.

Join the conversation with your own take on these topics in the comments below.