Exclusive: The Bank of Tampa names new president, COO

The Bank of Tampa has named a new president — the bank's third in its 36-year history.

T. Corey Neil, currently the bank's chief banking officer and former market president for Hillsborough County, will take over as president of the bank. He will also serve as COO, a position that was previously unoccupied.

Current President Bill West will remain as CEO.

"This is the natural evolution of The Bank of Tampa," West told the Tampa Bay Business Journal on Thursday. "Corey's passion is on the revenue side, working with our clients, and we are going to ask him to continue to do that."

West said the bank's growing size necessitated a COO.

Neil has been with the bank since 2003 and has held a number of leadership roles over his 17 years. West said the bank prefers to promote from within to fill out its leadership team, which he said helps the community bank preserve its culture. This system, which includes investment in coaches and sending employees back to school for additional degrees, has produced other executives at other positions within the bank, like current Hillsborough County Market President Scott Gault and Chief Human Resources Officer Genna Dziloski.

"When I became CEO in 2008, I had been there since 1993 and [former CEO] Jerry [Divers] had been doing same thing with me that we did with Corey," West explained. "It was a very deliberate process that we asked [Neil] to go through ... it's a longer and more expensive process to develop from within, but we think it's the right thing to do."

Neil started out as a market director following a jump from SunTrust Bank. He was promoted to director of personal financial services in 2011, and then to managing director a couple of years later.

"He didn't know a thing about retail banking [when he was promoted in 2011] but we wanted him to develop his leadership skills," West said. "We told him to figure it out, and he did."

He was named market president for Hillsborough County in 2016 — a position he served in until late last year — and was promoted to chief banking officer in 2018.

Neil said he was happy to stay on the client side of the business, which he said was the aspect of the job he was most passionate about. The bank had a chance to shine in that area recently during the Paycheck Protection Program, where The Bank of Tampa provided more loans in excess of $150,000 to Tampa Bay businesses than any other bank based in the region, according to data from the Small Business Administration. The bank ended up processing more than 2,300 loans in total.

"We worked our tails off into the wee hours of the night ... but we would do it all over again just because of what it meant to those [businesses]," Neil said.

While Neil will be taking on more responsibilities in his new role, West stressed that he was not stepping away from the bank or looking to retire. As CEO, he will continue to oversee the bank's operations.

"This doesn't mark my retirement or any reduction in my role within the bank — it just elevates Corey within our executive leadership team," West said.

The Bank of Tampa is the third largest community bank in the region, according to the 2019 Book of Lists. The bank had $1.73 billion in assets in 2019 and 263 employees.