Welcome to Grupo Bancario Latino, SunTrust's virtual laboratory of Hispanic marketing. The 17-month-old Grupo is SunTrust's way of offering Hispanics their very own bank branch. There are 10 bilingual bank officers, each with a specialty - securities or residential lending, for example. Unlike most banks, where customers have little contact with top-level executives, the senior vice president in charge, Cesar Calvet, leads prospective customers on tours of the 12th floor and explains the bank's services before sending the customer to a bank officer. "We're really a bank within a bank," Calvet says.
That SunTrust Bank has gone to so much effort to make Hispanics feel at home is evidence of the power and potential of central Florida's burgeoning Hispanic population. More than 57,000 Hispanics moved to Orlando and the surrounding six counties between 1990 and 1996, bumping Orange County's Hispanic population to more than 12% of the county's total and nearby Osceola County's to more than 15%. Most of the immigrants come from Puerto Rico; Coral Gables research firm Strategy Research Corp. estimates that 54% of central Florida's Hispanics are Puerto Rican, followed by Cuban (11%) and Mexican (11%). Strategy Research also estimates that the average income for Hispanic households in the nine-county area that includes Orlando, Daytona Beach and Melbourne is $38,806.
The story of Rick Hernandez, an advertising account executive with the Orlando Sentinel, is typical: Distressed over rising crime and crowded conditions, the former owner of an office products company moved his family from Puerto Rico to Orlando in 1987. "We used to come to Disney at least once or twice a year, and we saw (Orlando) as a nice place to raise our kids," Hernandez says. When he joined the Sentinel, he was the newspaper's third Hispanic employee. "Now there's 300," he says.
This growth means lots of opportunity for Hispanic entrepreneurs - last year, Hispanic Business magazine ranked Orlando eighth in the U.S. among major cities as a good home for Hispanic-owned business - as well as for Puerto Rican companies hoping to leverage their ties to the home country into success in Florida. Doral Mortgage Corp., Puerto Rico's largest mortgage banking company, opened its first Florida branch in Orlando four years ago with five employees. Vice President Lucille Benitez says Doral executives realized the opportunity when they noticed lots of their clients in Puerto Rico asking for mortgages for second homes in Florida.
The biggest splash has come from Banco Popular, Puerto Rico's largest bank, which entered central Florida a year ago with the purchase of Seminole National Bank. Banco Popular now has seven branches, and Mercedes F. McCall, president of the bank's Florida operation, figures to have 10 or 11 branches by the end of the year.
Banco Popular is betting that Hispanics in central Florida will feel more comfortable doing business in its branches, and so the bank works to retain Hispanic customs. For example, all new branches are opened with a big party and blessing ceremony with a local minister or priest, and every Oct. 5, the bank celebrates its birthday with cupcakes for customers, and all employees wear yellow. "Banco Popular is exactly what its name implies, the bank of the people," says McCall. "We have been on the island of Puerto Rico for 104 years. This is more than a business." So far it's working: central Florida is the bank's fastest-growing U.S. market (it's also in New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston).
Girding for competition
The coming of Banco Popular scared SunTrust executives - especially since McCall was hired away from SunTrust - who had been working on boosting their Hispanic marketing since the early '80s. The bank's former top executive in Orlando, Ted Hoepner, suggested to Calvet in 1990 that he create a task force to prepare the bank for the Hispanic boom. Early on, SunTrust became a player with local Hispanic business organizations, sponsoring expos and donating computers. Calvet also is responsible for ensuring SunTrust has bilingual employees in the right branches, matching up employee information from human resources with census tract data. "We were always the bank people knew in the Latin market," Calvet says. Later, SunTrust decided it needed to be more aggressive, and Calvet began planning what became Grupo Bancario Latino. Although the bank feared a mass exodus once Banco Popular moved in, that hasn't happened. Calvet says Grupo Bancario Latino in 1997 met local branch performance standards for new deposits and more than tripled the standards for new loans.
Marketing to Hispanics has crossed over into other sectors in addition to banking services. Winn-Dixie is angling to become the supermarket favored by central Florida Hispanics over the numerous bodegas like La Placita Latina that have sprung up in places such as Kissimmee. Winn-Dixie has selected a store on Semoran Boulevard in a working class area of Orlando as its local Hispanic prototype. The chain plans to expand the variety of Hispanic branded goods, increase the amount of root vegetables, which are popular in Hispanic cooking, staff the store with bilingual employees and pipe in Latin music over the loudspeakers. The revamping was scheduled to be finished last month, and Winn-Dixie's central Florida spokesman, Larry Beck, says the chain plans to use the results of the Semoran store to make changes in its other central Florida stores. "We're familiar with the Spanish market, but we're still learning about the Puerto Rican market," he says.
It's tricky, because unlike many of the Cubans who moved to Tampa or Miami decades ago, most Puerto Ricans in the Orlando area already speak English and are very Americanized. "You're getting a person who right away can blend into the community here without a problem," says Mariel Llenza of Orlando marketing and advertising agency Merkel and Adler. "The Puerto Rican has been an American all his life." That means the Puerto Rican customer demands a high level of service that the local bodega may not be able to provide.
On the other hand, she sees the Puerto Ricans who seemed so Americanized back home yearning for their language and their culture now that they're in Florida. Crowds packed the opening of a new Banco Popular branch near the predominantly Hispanic Buenaventura Lakes development in November (that branch was demolished by tornadoes in February).
"Even though there is a love and passion for Banco Popular because it has been on the island for such a long time, it's still a baby bank here," Llenza observes. But she feels there's enough business to go around. "I don't think that anybody will lose," she says.