A look ahead with Rob C. Holmes

President & Chief Executive Officer
Texas Capital Bancshares, Inc.
& Texas Capital Bank

January 24, 2022, marks one year since I joined Texas Capital Bank as President and CEO. Looking ahead to a new year, I’m honored to share my reflections on our Company, on doing business in Texas and on the economic opportunities and challenges we all face in these uncharted times.

Texas Capital Bank is the only full-service bank headquartered in Texas and serving businesses across all sectors in our state, which gives us a unique real-time view of the state’s economic and business realities. We’ve seen the Texas business sector not just rebound from the acute Covid crisis of early 2020, but innovate, grow and thrive. Our clients’ dedication and resilience amaze and inspire me. Our Company, too, is adapting and growing to serve our current and future clients with the consistent excellence they deserve. 

I joined the bank with a mandate to lead an enterprise-wide transformation of our business. Simply put, we aim to build Texas Capital Bank into the flagship financial services firm in Texas, serving the best clients in all of our markets. Our strategy, which I announced last September, centers on building the best team of bankers in Texas, delivering seamless service and execution and providing the widest possible range of products and services to ensure the bank is a relevant, trusted partner to our clients throughout their corporate life cycle. We are proud of the bank’s 22-year history of growth. But going forward, we will focus on sustained client engagement and differentiated solutions, not loan growth for growth’s sake. We will be a valued partner, never merely a transactional counterparty. And we know the success of our clients will define our Company. 

I came to Texas Capital Bank after leading a global business and several large national businesses during 31 years at JP Morgan Chase, a job I loved and thought I’d never leave. But Texas Capital Bank represents a unique opportunity: to build a regional bank into a truly world-class financial institution here in Texas. I have deep roots in Texas business. My grandfather and great-uncle built one of the state’s leading food retail businesses. I grew up immersed in stories about how they addressed the challenges of their times. From them I learned to set the highest of standards for myself, to put customers first, to invest time and treasure in the communities where I’m privileged to do business and to maintain humility. Like them, I believe in meeting face-to-face with clients all the time. Like my grandfather, I am candid, perhaps to a fault.

Over the past year I’ve replaced much of the bank’s Operating Committee. I’m humbled by the caliber of professionals we’ve attracted to our leadership team. I recruited each of them for their experience and track record of success, but also for their character and cultural fit. Without exception, we’ve created a team of high-energy, client-obsessed, collaborative business builders. They relish the opportunity to have their thumbprints on a distinctive business transformation. They embrace our core values of candor, transparency, trust and accountability. They’ve joined us from around the country – our head of operations and private wealth management, John Cummings, is from Princeton, New Jersey; mortgage finance head Madison Simm is from New York; chief risk officer Tim Storms (who came out of retirement to join us) is from New York and California; and more. Like so many other successful businesspeople who started elsewhere but came here as fast as they could, they’re thrilled to be in Texas.

Culture & Strategy

Our leadership team is intentional about the corporate culture we’re creating at Texas Capital Bank. Employees hear all the bank’s leaders say the same things with the same words, from the Operating Committee down. Our culture focuses relentlessly on knowing current and potential clients well, listening closely and delivering tailored solutions and high-touch service. If we say we’re going to do something, we do it – and with urgency. We empower middle-level leaders to find opportunities to do things better and take action. We’re also intentional about corporate responsibility, as reflected by our multimillion dollar investment in corporate giving in Texas communities last year and the careful thought we put into those contributions.

In September I set forth a transformative strategy for our bank. First, we are reorganizing the bank to optimize client delivery. This means expanding industry verticals so that we’ll cover more than 50% of commercial and industrial clients with bankers specialized by industry, as clients expect. We know there is intense competition for the best clients in each industry, and we intend to win more than our share.

Second, we are greatly expanding our product range. We passed a historic milestone when we launched our new investment banking division: we now offer clients a full suite of financing products across their life cycle. We received our broker-dealer license and are rapidly recruiting talent. This represents one of the fastest investment bank launches in history and makes Texas Capital Bank the only Texas-based institution offering top-tier investment banking services fully competitive with major Wall Street banks. We’re also expanding the offerings in our fast-growing private wealth and treasury services businesses and in our nationwide mortgage finance business, which already touches 5% of all U.S. residential mortgage originations.

Third, we are executing an aggressive, targeted talent recruiting program to advance our strategy. Of the bank’s 1,850 employees, 750 joined or begun new roles since I became CEO. We’ve more than tripled our number of client-facing bankers, many of them experienced veterans with expertise in specific industry verticals. We’ve also established our “STARs” training program, the only program of its kind in Texas, to build a cadre of young bankers who will grow up in our culture and hold the rest of the organization accountable. We’ve already made tremendous progress towards our goal of being the employer of choice in Texas finance.

Fourth, we have strengthened our balance sheet and financial resilience to enable the bank to support our clients and communities through any economic conditions that arise, and to even expand client relationships in times of stress. We optimized our capital structure. This included issuing perpetual preferred stock just after I joined – the largest capital raise in our company’s history – and making significant improvements in our risk management, credit, operational and reputational risk. 

At a time when most banks are pursuing large acquisitions or stock repurchases, I’m proud to lead a bank with a differentiated strategy, focused on high-quality organic growth in America’s fastest-growing state.