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Scott Gesell is the new CEO of Gateway First Bank, Tulsa,
Oklahoma. He has been an integral part of Gateway since 2013.
During his time at Gateway, he played a leading role in the merger of a
100-year-old community bank with a 20-year-old mortgage company to
become Gateway First Bank. Now, as CEO, Gesell is poised to lead the
company through the COVID-19 pandemic that is affecting customers,
employees, and the industry in ways unforeseen. Under his leadership, he
says, the Gateway team has shown commitment and resilience during the
COVID-19 pandemic. While moving more than 1,400 employees from
office to home, the company continues to see record-breaking volume.
Gateway funded more than $11.3 billion in mortgages in 2020.
Let's talk about what modern banking
solutions you and Gateway have
developed, or started to use more
often, since the onset of the COVID-19
pandemic.
Scott: One of the things that we had
done about three years ago, we implemented
the process of putting our prominent
employees, rather than having towers at
their desk, on laptop computers, and we also
invested some time and energy into [virtual]
"Go to Meetings." So, we had that capability
before COVID-19 hit, which was a saving
grace for us. We had to move, pretty quickly,
1,400 employees from offices to their homes,
and we were able to achieve that without a
significant amount of disruption.
We had to do some shoring up of other
infrastructure problems—the firewalls and
things like that. We had some additional
hardware purchases that we had to do, but
nothing that kept us from doing business.
We also started working on how we
communicated with our teams in the field
from a technology perspective, because we
couldn't just walk down the hall and talk to
somebody; we had to get in a situation where
you can still communicate and do things,
with our customers too.
Cover Story By: Christina Hughes Babb
TEAMWORK
IN TROUBLED
TIMES
Scott Gesell, CEO at Gateway First Bank, shares his secrets to surviving, and thriving,
during a national crisis.
