Fred Elliott

How Can Your Expertise Help a Business?

How our expertise helps the businesses is, one thing we get to see in our role as commercial relationship manager, we get to see a lot of different types of businesses. From different sizes, from small to large, to different types of industries, to businesses in different areas. So, we get to see a lot of things where we can help a business and say, “Hey, we’ve seen what you’re running. We’ve seen what you’re facing. We’ve seen that in another customer or in another area, and here’s some suggestions or some advice from what we’ve seen that could help you.” Also, from having been in banking for a long period of time, you develop a lot of contacts. One thing hopefully we can help is, “Can we introduce you to something that maybe is outside of banking. Do you need a good insurance person? We can introduce you to some of our contacts there. A good attorney, we could introduce that attorney.” A lot of times it’s, “We’ve been around for a while. Hopefully we can go and introduce you to some new customers and some new vendors that can help your business as well.”

What Makes Your Local Community Special?

Birmingham is a special place to live. I grew up here, went away to school and came back here, so I’ve been here basically all my life except for college. It’s a great mix in that it is a very family-oriented town with some great neighborhoods and great school systems, but it’s also got sort of this new vibe going on. Just in the last five, 10 years we’ve seen our tech scene really boom. We’ve always had a great medical scene with UAB, and that’s started to lead to some really neat things. We’ve got a great arts environment here. We have a fantastic restaurant scene that’s here in Birmingham, and we’re starting to see a lot more young people move to Birmingham. So, I’ve got the Birmingham I grew up with that I love from a family standpoint but also feel like I’m almost in a new city as well with all the exciting things that are coming about.

Tell Us a Fun Fact about Yourself!

Most people, some people do, but what most people don’t know about me is I am a absolute secret closet weather geek, to the extent that shortly after I got married to my beautiful wife, I sprung the surprise of, “Hey, let’s move to Starkville Mississippi because I think I want to get my broadcast meteorology degree at Mississippi State.” The reply was not good. She was like, “I have no idea what you’re even talking about.” I love the weather, have always loved the weather. I’m the guy that when a bad storm comes and everybody goes into the closet or the safe place, I’m the one that goes out into the middle of the road to see if I can see the storm coming. So, I spend a lot of time reading weather sites and looking at weather reports, so that’s sort of the thing most people don’t know about me.

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