Pittsburgh-based PNC Bank has amassed a good business in construction and real estate lending in the Twin Cities in recent years, enough to justify opening its first commercial lending office in the state.
PNC last week opened an office in the AT&T Tower at 901 Marquette Ave. S. in downtown Minneapolis and hired its first regional vice president for the Minnesota market.
Kate Kelly, the former CEO and founder of Minnesota Bank & Trust, took the job with PNC as the bank pursues a three-city expansion. Last September PNC announced it would move into the Twin Cities market as well as the Kansas City and Dallas markets to grow the bank’s commercial lending.
Although the new office is PNC’s first brick-and-mortar location in Minnesota, Kelly said, the bank still made local loans heavily tilted toward real estate and construction.
“They already have a lot of activity going on,” Kelly said of PNC in an interview Monday. “It’s just rich with good prospects.”
One of the bank’s subsidiaries — mergers and acquisitions adviser Harris Williams & Co. — has operated an office in Minneapolis since 2006. The bank does most of its business in markets east of the Mississippi River, Kelly said.
PNC will offer a range of commercial banking services in the Twin Cities market, including lending, deposits, treasury management and wealth management. It highest volume of business, at the moment, is in real estate and construction lending, Kelly said.
“Of all the segments I’ve instantly been most active in, it’s that market,” she said.
Short-term construction and commercial real estate loans are showing a good track record in the state. Those loans showed no delinquencies against banks’ capital and allowances for losses in the state and metro markets during the third quarter of 2016, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
The Minnesota market is attractive to commercial lenders because of the state’s mix of manufacturers, Fortune 500 companies and midsize businesses, said David Vang, a professor of finance at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul.
“We have an extremely diversified economy,” Vang said in an interview. “We’re economically strong.”
Vang said the timing of the expansion may also be good for PNC. President Trump’s administration and Congress may ease bank regulations in place since the industry’s partial collapse in 2008. Those changes could help the bank’s success in any new markets it establishes.
Kelly declined to say how much lending PNC plans to do in the Twin Cities market in the coming year, or how many people will be hired. The bank will hire a local head of corporate banking and a community relations director in the coming weeks.
The new commercial lending operation will soon be on the move. Kelly said the current office space is temporary and that PNC is looking to lease office space elsewhere in downtown Minneapolis. She expects the move will take place within “a couple of months.”
As of the end of 2016, PNC’s parent company, PNC Financial Services, claimed total assets of $366.4 billion in a January filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Source: news.google.com
