Bank of America Jacksonville market president Mark Bennett on where the economy is going

Bank of America Jacksonville market president Mark Bennett on where the economy is going (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Jacksonville Business Journal Editor Timothy Gibbons recently spoke with Bank of America Jacksonville Market President Mark Bennett for a segment of the Florida Business Minds podcast.

Sponsored by TECO Peoples Gas, the audio series features candid conversations with top business leaders from the Orlando, South Florida, Tampa Bay and Jacksonville regions.

Bennett (pictured above) has been with Bank of America since 2003, rising through the ranks after starting as an associate client manager. As well as leading the Jacksonville market, he serves as the Southeast region executive for business banking and leads the Black and African American business owner initiative for the bank nationally.

A Raines High School graduate who worked as an assistant to Hall of Fame Coach Bobby Bowden while attending Florida State University, Bennett was recently named 2024 chair of the Jax Chamber board of directors.

The following is a brief excerpt from the interview, edited for length and clarity.

As you look across Jacksonville, as you look across the Southeast, what are you hearing from your clients?

Some of the things that I constantly hear from our various clients, in our local community, as well as around the region, is really the things that you can imagine that’s impacting everyone around the country. It’s all the different macro things that they’re facing at this point — whether its supply chain challenges, or its labor shortages, and not being able to find the employees that they need at a local level, are all the different things that you’re navigating.

I would say, as you look at the overall economy, the consumer still remains really strong. As much as I hear from the business community about some of the challenges that they’re facing operating the business itself, when you look at the overall consumer, they remain resilient, and they continue to spend at elevated paces. Deposit levels remain at an all-time kind of high, and they’re continuing to pay down loan balances at an elevated rate.

We talked about the different hats you wear at the bank. In addition to that, I know you’re also involved in training the next generation of banking leaders. What lessons in leadership have you learned that you think are most important?

I can go back to the time that I had the opportunity in Tallahassee to work for Coach Bowden as an assistant on his staff — because if I compare some of the lessons learned there to the last 20 years in the banking industry, it’s really odd how similar that a lot of those lessons have been. I would probably boil it down to three things in particular. First is how important it is to build the relationship with your teammates, your leaders, as well as the community as a whole. And I will say the second thing is really around collaboration, and being able to kind of trust that team. And the third is being able to adapt to change and the art of pivoting — which is something I’ve learned well over the past 20 years as well.

One of the other roles that you have at Bank of America is helping support Black-owned businesses, which has become an even more important thing, post Covid, with the pandemic specifically hitting entrepreneurs of color and women-owned businesses very hard. What are things that you are doing that has had the most impact in helping those business owners?

The program around Black and African American business owners has been something that I was able to really be in involved in from the very beginning. What we decided to do were lots of listening sessions, where we had the opportunity to engage with probably over 300 Black and African American business owners from all around the country to better understand their overall business journey and some of the challenges that they faced as well as different things that they wanted to continue to accomplish.

Access to capital was one of the key themes that we heard from those different listening sessions, as well as the need for subject matter expertise. That prompted the investment in Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) as well as Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs). We want to make sure that there is that capital available to be able to help those business owners. We’ve also launched a network that gives you a full database of all the different capital programs that’s available, that business owners could go out and actually search and identify those opportunities when they need capital.