Sharon Speyer, a force in the community and local banking for two decades, is retiring at year’s end as president of Huntington Bank’s northwest Ohio region headquartered in Toledo.
Ms. Speyer, 64, isn’t going anywhere. She says she intends to stay active in civic affairs, including with the economic growth organization ConnecToledo, where she is chairman.
Over the years, she has served as chairman of the University of Toledo Board of Trustees, been a trustee on numerous civic boards, and mentored women for executive careers.
Her role at the bank, she said, has afforded her access to the business community and allowed her to build relationships that have resulted in both the growth of Huntington and new cooperation around parks and civic projects aimed at bettering the lives of residents.
“What I believe is different about the business community in northwest Ohio is that there’s not a door you can’t open,” Ms. Speyer said. “It’s a very welcoming community. A very candid community. So, I think that gives bankers an incredible opportunity not only to get to know them but build relationships with them.”
Changing of the guard
Ms. Speyer’s departure from Huntington represents a changing of the guard happening among Toledo’s major regional banks.
In July, Jim Hoffman retired as president of KeyBank’s northwest Ohio market after 30 years at the helm. He was replaced by 38-year-old Dan Dower, Mr. Hoffman’s former head of commercial banking at KeyBank in Toledo.
Ms. Speyer’s successor is Eric Heintschel, 52, who comes out of commercial banking as well. Mr. Heintschel grew up in Oregon, received a master of business administration from the University of Toledo, and spent much of his banking career with Fifth Third Bank before joining Huntington in Toledo in 2020 as vice president of business banking.
“The leadership and mentoring that Sharon has shown to me and other leaders within this organization is amazing. And it starts at the top of this organization and cascades down,” Mr. Heintschel said.
Huntington and KeyBank are first and second, respectively, in market share in northwest Ohio, followed by another out-of-town regional powerhouse, PNC Financial Services.
As a group, they have done so well over the years capturing the consumer deposit and commercial lending business that they’ve kept the big money-center banks such as Bank of America at bay or chased them out of the market altogether.
‘Tough to take clients’
Ms. Speyer is the daughter of well-known local Rabbi Alan Sokobin, who died in 2020 after serving for decades at the Temple-Congregation Shomer Emunim in Sylvania Township. Her mother, Miriam “Mickey” Sokobin, died in 2017.
She said her father was a lifelong learner who earned a law degree from the University of Toledo after retiring from the Temple in 1992. “He was my hero,” she said.
He passed along his curiosity to her as well as a zeal for public service, she said.
Mr. Hoffman, formerly of KeyBank, says Ms. Speyer is a determined competitor in the banking world and an equally determined collaborator on community projects.
He said Huntington, like KeyBank, places a premium on customer service and the ability to offer a full range of consumer and business products.
“They were always tough to take clients away from,” said Mr. Hoffman, who as chairman of the Regional Growth Partnership serves with Ms. Speyer’s husband at the partnership, CEO Dean Monske.
Ms. Speyer became president of Huntington’s Toledo region in 2007 when Columbus-based Huntington acquired Sky Bank, where she was president of the bank’s Toledo region in Bowling Green. She started her career as a lawyer, with a degree from UT, outside the banking industry. Then in 1992 she became the first corporate counsel of Mid Am Bank, which later merged to create Sky Bank.
Since 2010, Huntington’s commercial and consumer deposits in the local market have jumped from $3.6 billion to $5.4 billion.
Huntington has the most branches, 30, of any bank in Toledo. And for 15 years running, the local operation has been number one in deposits. It also is tops in the local market in residential lending and number one nationally in federal Small Business Administration loans.
Pushed local projects
Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz said Ms. Speyer has been a champion of investing in the city’s neighborhoods as well as the big projects downtown.
In 2016, the parent Huntington Bank put her in charge of community development across the company’s 11 states, including Ohio. As director of economic inclusion, she heads the bank’s regional efforts in philanthropy, volunteering, and connection to community and neighborhood groups.
It’s a role that Mr. Kapszukiewicz said has pushed forward community development in Toledo.
“There’s not a major project in Toledo that doesn’t have her fingerprints on it,” said Mr. Kapszukiewicz, adding that Ms. Speyer has served on the boards of many economic development groups in Toledo, including the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority.
One of the projects she says she is most proud of is the naming rights that Huntington bought for the downtown arena that hosts concerts, events, and the Toledo Walleye hockey team.
It was during the Great Recession and risks were high when Huntington paid $2.1 million for the arena’s naming rights for six years because the bank wanted to make a visible statement to the community, she said.
The bank continues to renew the rights based on the positive marketing it gets from the deal, she said.
As director of economic inclusion for regional banking, Ms. Speyer has overseen major growth in community projects across the 11 states. It started as a $16 billion plan in 2016 to bring loans and money to neighborhoods. It jumped to $20 billion in 2020, then doubled the following year to $40 billion.
In 2021, as part of that work, Ms. Speyer joined a team of women from Huntington as American Banker’s Most Powerful Women in Banking and Finance. It was one of five top teams selected for their work in promoting diversity and inclusion.
Tech hub efforts
Ms. Speyer is also involved, through ConnecToledo, in the region’s embryonic partnership to bring tens of millions of dollars of tech-hub funding to Toledo through the Northwest Ohio Innovation Consortium.
That’s a group that is staying together after missing out on $100 million in innovation hub funds offered by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
The partnership is one of several civic organizations and local businesses trying to bring grant money to Toledo to develop stronger and lighter-weight glass for use in solar panels and to help Toledo’s four major glass makers become even more competitive internationally.
Consortium members believed the missed federal tech-hub designation would have brought 9,000 jobs and about $4 billion in economic impact to the region.
Ms. Speyer said they now have their sights set on getting a share of the $125 million that the state of Ohio is making available to mid-sized cities such as Toledo to establish tech hubs. And they’ll be more grant applications after that, she said.
‘Responsibility in town’
William McDonnell, president of PNC Bank’s Toledo region, said Ms. Speyer was the first bank president to welcome him to town in 2012 when he took over PNC’s local operations.
He said that over lunch Ms. Speyer helped him understand how Toledo operates, and said she hoped they would compete by day and cooperate on community projects outside work.
“PNC ingrained in us that banks have a responsibility to support the community, and Sharon welcomed me to town, and said, ‘Yep, you have a responsibility in town as a bank president to support the community,’” he said.
When Ms. Speyer retires, Mr. McDonnell will be the longest-running local leader among the big three regional banks.
“I never thought the day would come, but here I am, the senior bank president in town and I relish that opportunity because it’s a great community,” he said.
Ms. Speyer said Huntington has been in the middle of several “catalytic projects” during her tenure with many more to come under her successor. A recent one was the decision to open a bank branch at 75 Main St. in East Toledo in an underserved area, she said.
“When you think about the trends in banking, recognizing that there is the need on the east side, I would put that project in that [catalytic] category,” she said.
First Published November 12, 2023, 2:00 p.m.
