With American banking groups taking their turn in the line to
report damage they’ve taken from the mortgage crisis, sceptics may
be watching for bad news to filter out of KeyCorp and on to its
subsidiary, Key Equipment Finance (KEF).
Fortunately, KeyCorp had already sterilised itself of toxic
sub-prime exposure when it sold the mortgage business in November
2006.
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Call it savvy or just pure luck, but from the point of view of
John Evans, executive VP and managing director of International
operations, that is good news and surely a relief.
Taking the hot seat after the departure of Alun Richards – KEF’s
former managing director for Europe – and an organisational
restructuring, Evans is, of course, keen to “leverage the expertise
developed in the US to develop the business
internationally”.
As trite as that may sound, Evans is confident of achieving new
heights in the company’s vendor-driven model of expansion, one that
has hitherto been mostly concentrated in the area of IT equipment.
He sees, for instance, the booming healthcare sector as a likely
place to look for opportunities.
Even with market fallout from the credit crunch threatening to
squeeze margins further, Evans believes that, in Europe, not all
financial institutions are suffering the same way.
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By GlobalData“In the US, my sense is things are more level in terms of what
people are seeing, in liquidity and in credit, so everybody’s kind
of in the same position in the US. In Europe, there’s a difference.
Some people seem to be acting as though nothing has happened, while
others tend to be acting as though the world’s ended,” he
said.
“With the strength of our vendor relationships, and because not
all of our products are solely dependent on interest rates, we are
managing to be fairly resilient. Again, having a global business
helps. It gives us some strength, whereas the dynamics are
different in Canada and Asia Pacific versus Europe. It’s not all
moving in one direction.”
