Few corporate executives are as direct, as uncensored, as Bill Cooper, the CEO of TCF Financial Corporation, parent company of TCF Bank. Launching into a conference call with Wall Street research analysts in late January, he fairly crowed as he began his presentation on TCF’s results (NYSE: TCB) for the fourth quarter of 2008.
“Based on today’s earnings reports, TCF is the best dog in the pound,” Cooper said. With most of the nation’s bigger banks still desperately trying to figure out how to recapitalize their balance sheets, he emphasized that the fourth quarter had been TCF’s 55th profitable quarter in a row—almost 14 years.
Cooper does not suffer financial fools gladly. During the conference call, he took aim at his “incompetent” and “illogical” competitors. In a comment on TCF’s operating expenses, he lamented that the company has incurred higher Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance premiums because it is “paying for the sins of its competitors.”
After the conference call, Cooper sat down for an interview with Twin Cities Business at TCF headquarters in Wayzata. His presence there is a story in itself.
Cooper retired as TCF’s CEO on January 1, 2006, a little more than 20 years after he was named chief executive of the predecessor company, Twin City Federal Savings and Loan. He reorganized the S&L into a bank holding company and innovated by being one of the first in the Midwest to open bank branches in supermarkets, stay open seven days a week, and offer “totally free checking” accounts. He tailored TCF banks to a low- to mid-income mass market and expanded into other states. By the time he retired (staying on as board chair), Cooper had more than doubled TCF’s assets to $13.4 billion, and its stock had been posting average annual returns in excess of 20 percent for more than five years.
His handpicked successor, Lynn Nagorske, had increased assets to more than $16 billion two years later. But TCF’s share price was slipping on weaker earnings—back to its 2003 level of around $18 by the end of 2007. Investors blamed the economy, not Nagorske. Still, he suddenly retired in late July 2008, citing burnout. Cooper, 65, was back in the chief executive’s office—just in time to see TCF tested by his industry’s biggest crisis since the savings and loan collapses of the late 1980s.
Today, TCF has about 450 branches in seven states, and total assets of close to $17 billion. That makes it the second-largest Minnesota-based commercial bank after U.S. Bank, which has assets of around $262 billion. TCF has had to increase its reserves to cover growing loan losses in the past year, but it avoided subprime lending and exotic investment instruments, so the hits aren’t what they might have been. The company’s share price has still been sputtering—around $13.50 in late March, down from a 52-week high of $28—but what bank stock hasn’t?
