James D’Amico:
Putting a premium on personal service

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At heart, James D’Amico is a small-town fellow. So it made sense when he decided to help start a bank focused on the values of service and family that he holds dear.
D’Amico, president and CEO of Genesee Valley Trust Co., has sought to promote the personal service missing from not only his last banking experience, but many of the commercial establishments of modern life, from gas stations to hardware stores.
Folksiness is only part of the equation, because financial institutions do not survive in a market like Rochester’s without a healthy dose of competitive spirit. Since its inception in 1994, Genesee Valley Trust has seen its assets grow to $240 million, by offering personal trust services to people and institutions with $300,000 or more to invest. It also has brought the services of world-class money managers to customers by pooling assets.
Genesee Valley Trust is not trying to be “the next Chase,” D’Amico says. Instead, the company competes by striving to fulfill its mission.
To him, that means demonstrating to prospective clients that Genesee Valley Trust can provide both caring and competence, empathy and healthy returns on investments.
The trust aspect of the business serves people and organizations managing their money for the long term, for generations, and needing planning and estate advice to fulfill their financial missions.
Though unaware of it, D’Amico spent most of his life laying the groundwork for becoming the CEO of a trust company. He had worked in banks for 14 years, mostly on the sales and marketing sides of trust departments, when he decided his career needed a change.
Most of those years found him traveling 110 miles daily to and from his job in Albany while his family lived and grew in Glens Falls. He let his colleagues at Norstar Bancorp know he was available to relocate if the right opportunity came along.
In 1987, three months after he took a job as senior vice president and manager of the Buffalo trust area, Rhode Island-based Fleet Financial Group Inc. took over Norstar.
D’Amico was charged with turning around the Buffalo trust office, which covered the Southern Tier, an area from Batavia to Jamestown. He did, increasing profits sixfold in four years, from $250,000 to $1.5 million.
But his responsibilities also increased when he was handed the additional job of directing sales in the New York and New England area. He had to make regular trips to oversee sales forces in other parts of the Fleet network, including Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Besides the constant flights to different parts of the Fleet empire, D’Amico also was coping with the recession of the early 1990s, which saddled all the company’s departments with hiring freezes and budget cuts.
And Fleet’s style was a complete shift from what D’Amico had known at Norstar.
“We had always been the acquirer,” he says. “In the Fleet situation, we were the acquired.”
There were more people to report to at Fleet, and managers had less power to make independent decisions.
At Norstar “it was a very free rein. Age and all those other things were never an impediment to advancement,” he says.
The travel and the corporate constraints weighed on D’Amico for two years.
“He came home down every day,” his wife, Renee D’Amico, recalls. “He hated it.”
Finally, D’Amico decided he had had enough.
“The last two years were a nightmare,” he says. “I got on a plane and flew to Providence and said, “I want out of this organization.”’
Before he decided his career needed to become a priority, family concerns dominated D’Amico’s life.
Growing up in Syosset, Long Island, he lived one house over from Renee Perlman. Her father was an umpire for his Little League games. Throughout their childhoods, the two were thrown together because both were active in school sports.
They started dating when they were seniors at Syosset High School and married four years later. After D’Amico graduated from SUNY at Stony Brook with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, the couple moved to Glens Falls.
Three of their four children were born there, while D’Amico spent time working at various jobs, including teaching and lifeguarding, eventually getting a job as trust officer at the Glens Falls National Bank & Trust Co.
Six years later he landed a job at Norstar, working his way up to become, at age 32, the youngest vice president at the company.
His schedule at that time was designed to allow his family to remain in Glens Falls, and he commuted to Albany. He also made sure he was there for all of his children’s events, getting involved in Little League, girls’ softball and the soccer league.
D’Amico’s own father died when he was 17.
“I guess that’s how it left its mark,” he says. “I made the decision that while my kids were growing up, I was going to be there.”
“He never missed anything,” Renee D’Amico says. “If there was a game or a recital, he planned that ahead of time.”
Even when his oldest son attended prep school at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, D’Amico found a way to coordinate his work so he could drive to his son’s swim meets.
When his three oldest children had left home, and the youngest was 12, D’Amico realized he needed to let his career be a priority or it would stagnate. So he accepted the job to restructure the Buffalo trust office.
But once the Fleet phase of his career had come and gone, D’Amico did not know what he wanted to do or where he wanted to live. While he spent the next year or so cushioned by his executive severance package, he started a search for a new place to live and work.
“I had a year to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up,” he says.
D’Amico traveled around the country, visiting friends and relatives in Florida and Nevada.
“Whatever I wanted to do, I wanted to have fun,” he says.
One day a friend from the Fleet and Norstar days called D’Amico and told him about a newspaper ad he had seen. A group was looking for a CEO to run a new trust company.
Talks began with Harold Feinbloom, his wife and sons, their attorney and their accountant. In the beginning, D’Amico says, the Feinblooms, whose Champion Products Inc. was bought out by Sara Lee Corp. in 1990, wanted to start a limited-purpose trust company for the family.
“Initially they were driven by their own needs, as most good ideas are,” D’Amico says.
But that did not interest him.
“If you want a chauffeur, I’m not the man,” D’Amico says he told them in discussions about the job. Instead, he suggested setting up a trust company to serve the needs of other families and organizations as well.
“We were looking for a take-charge-type person,” Feinbloom says, “to get the charter, to fulfill the terms and conditions in the feasibility study.”
Feinbloom and others in the group believed “there was a need in Rochester for trust services and for management services that were different from the traditional services offered by what I call “cookie-cutter banks.”’
D’Amico had the banking experience and the required understanding of investment theory.
“He’s very articulate. He’s very capable in marketing solutions,” Feinbloom says.
So, D’Amico took the job and his family moved to Pittsford. He found space for Genesee Valley Trust in the Tobey Village Office Park. Other start-up activities included securing the charter for the trust company, selecting directors, hiring staff and looking for clients.
The business brought together several elements that appealed to D’Amico. Chief among them, he got to start a company from scratch.
“He made a going organization from nothing,” Feinbloom says, “every step of the way–from the corporate logo to the stationery to trust services. … Everything was under his supervision and direction.”
Now, four years after it was chartered, Genesee Valley Trust has almost quadrupled its first year’s assets of $64 million under management. D’Amico handles sales and marketing. Trust administration is in the hands of Nancy Dickerson, a vice president with 23 years in bank trust services.
D’Amico spends most of his time meeting with clients and prospective clients, helping them figure out what services they need that Genesee Valley Trust can provide. He also conducts due-diligence visits to money managers around the country and abroad, including Oppenheimer Capital L.P. and Lazard Freres & Co.
Combining the funds–from some 100 families, several non-profit organizations and corporate retirement plans–enables clients to obtain the services of elite money managers that would normally be out of reach to all but the ultrarich.
The office is expanding. Last year saw two additional hires, bringing the total staff to eight. Growth is inevitable, D’Amico says, but it will not come at the cost of losing the personal touch that makes Genesee Valley Trust unusual.
In the past four years, D’Amico has managed to make a lot of acquaintances, spreading the word about Genesee Valley Trust.
“He’s out there in the hustings,” Feinbloom observes. “He hadn’t lived in Rochester, but he seems to know almost everything about everybody.”
D’Amico and his wife imagine they might retire in 10 or 15 years, perhaps moving to Florida to live near one of their sons and traveling to visit the other three children.
In the meantime, D’Amico cannot imagine anything better than what he is doing right now.
“If you believe in fate, all the things I did in my life led me to this point,” he says. “I believe that.”