Click here for Part I & Part II

Continuing a nearly 200-year history of service for customers and communities

Rodger Levenson is CEO at WSFS Bank. As the oldest locally-managed bank in the Delaware Valley, WSFS carries forward a 180-year-plus legacy of outstanding financial services for its community. The bank offers individuals and businesses access to commercial banking, cash management, retail banking, trust and wealth management, and more. Earlier this year, WSFS acquired Beneficial Bancorp, Inc. and its primary subsidiary, Beneficial Bank, further growing its regional footprint. The newly combined bank will be relaunching its brand and branches later this month.

EDWIN WARFIELD: You mentioned the challenges banks face when keeping up with consumer demand for technology. How does the new acquisition improve your platform?

RODGER LEVENSON: We have a fabulous digital offering today. We feel very confident that through your phone or through your desktop you can do anything with us that you can do with any large bank. But one of the things that we’ve observed over the last couple of years, because of technology and raising the bar on customer expectations, things are changing very, very quickly. Our ability to move as quickly as we need to stay competitive, we were sensing, was starting to lag a little bit.

That's primarily driven by the fact that we outsource our major technology today, our core systems today, to one of the large service providers, FIS, who we have a wonderful relationship with but we're one of literally thousands of banks that work with them. Our concern was, when we looked at the landscape, if we see our customers moving in a certain direction, we can't be one of dozens of banks at FIS that works through their process to provide the product that our customers need.

So, we just launched a $5 million brand campaign, which is starting with a lot of billboards, bus wraps, other areas of advertising, that just introduced the name WSFS—and that's all it's doing, just saying WSFS. And then it says, “coming August 2019.” We will then be following up with WSFS and Beneficial, then it will fold in some more print, some radio, some TV, so that when we do the systems and brand conversion later in August of this year, we will have introduced our brand to this market in a very significant way. It's part of the reason we made a very conscious decision to not do a conversion right when we closed the deal in March, but to take another five solid months to do it. We knew it was going to take time for us to get all the customers comfortable with our name, all of the associates that work for us who came from Beneficial—get them comfortable and confident in front of their customers—and to do all the work around not only a large systems conversion but the fact that we were closing all these locations. It requires a lot of movement and a lot of logistics, and we felt we're in this for the long haul. It made more sense to take our time and do it right, even if it meant that we weren't getting some of the cost saves and some of the other things that come along with the conversion earlier on in the process.

Q. The WSFS tagline is “We Stand for Service.” What does that mean to you?

A. One of the hallmarks of our company has been we have a very, very unique culture. The foundation of our culture is based on service. We Stand For Service is not just the acronym, but it has really been our differentiator. The way we measure our ability to provide service is through the engagement that we have both with our associates and our customers.

We have been working with the Gallup Organization for the last 17 years, helping us to talk to our associates, talk to our customers, measure through their very specific science our level of engagement, because our belief is when you have engaged associates giving great service—what we call stellar service—to customers you get engaged customers. Those customers become advocates of yours. Not only are they more loyal, they buy more from you, but they are more likely to refer their friends and family to you. It creates strength in the business model. Working with that Gallup information, we get compared to all of the companies across the Gallup worldwide database on customer and associate engagement. We get a lot of feedback from our associates and our customers, and we use that to get better and to instill this culture and make that culture thrive. That's ultimately what has delivered the bottom-line financial results that we've had.

We're very, very proud that our associate engagement is in the 90th percentile in the worldwide Gallup database. Our customer engagement last year is just a little bit below that, in the mid-80s. We work at it very hard. It is our differentiator, it is our brand promise, and it is perfectly aligned with being a locally headquartered community bank.

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ABOUT NEWMARK KNIGHT FRANK

Newmark Knight Frank (NKF) is one of the world's leading commercial real estate advisory firms. Together with London-based partner Knight Frank and independently-owned offices, NKF's 15,000 professionals operate from more than 400 offices in established and emerging property markets on six continents.

With roots dating back to 1929, NKF's strong foundation makes it one of the most trusted names in commercial real estate. NKF's full-service platform comprises BGC's real estate services segment, offering commercial real estate tenants, landlords, investors and developers a wide range of services including leasing; capital markets services, including investment sales, debt placement, appraisal, and valuation services; commercial mortgage brokerage services; as well as corporate advisory services, consulting, project and development management, and property and corporate facilities management services. For further information, visit www.ngkf.com.

NKF is a part of BGC Partners, Inc., a leading global brokerage company servicing the financial and real estate markets. BGC's common stock trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol (NASDAQ: BGCP). BGC also has an outstanding bond issuance of Senior Notes due June 15, 2042, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol (NYSE: BGCA). BGC Partners is led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer  Howard W. Lutnick. For more information, please visit www.bgcpartners.com.

Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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