By Cillea Houghton
NASHVILLE, TN — CapStar Bank has unveiled its new corporate headquarters in downtown Nashville.
The bank moves from its current location on Fourth Avenue North on Friday, Feb. 24, to the new location at 1201 Demonbreun St. in the Gulch. Bank employees will work on the seventh floor.
The new building includes a 100-square-foot, state-of-the-art media wall of big TV screens that will be used to display advertisements, images and other local elements that will be visible to passersby on the street. It’s the largest media wall in Tennessee and one of the first of its kind inside a financial institution. The wall was built by UniGuest.
The wall will be used as a method to “put local interest out there” and display a variety of media from updates on CapStar to social media feeds, Tara Alford, CapStar’s consumer banking director, said. It may be used to display sports games.
“After doing some research, we realized really no one in Nashville, especially at a financial center, had a wall like this,” Alford said.
As a local bank, CapStar is feeling the effects of the city’s rapid growth. Mark Mattson, CapStar’s executive vice president healthcare group manager, said “a lot” of the bank’s loan portfolio is focused on the growth in Nashville. “As the economy grows, it provides a lot of opportunity for us to work with businesses,” Mattson said. “It attracts a lot of competition as well.”
Brad Greer, executive vice president of CapStar commercial banking, substantiates the point.
“As the economy has grown, and we’re banking local companies here,” Greer said, “those companies are benefiting from this growth, being construction, being service-related businesses, to help support the influx of people and that, in turn, helps the banks as those local companies need extra capital to grow their businesses.”
Matson also said the Federal Reserve’s two rate hikes in 2016 tie into the city’s local growth, citing Nashville as one of the top five cities in the country with the most cranes on its skyline.
“That gives you a sense of the activity going on here and the growth going on here. The rate hikes kind of tie back to that. It’s a reflection of the growth that’s occurring in the economy,” Matson said. Rates will have “some impact” on the cost of home mortgages.
“It’s offset a little bit in this market by just the job growth and wage growth in the market, so I think the wage growth tied to the market growth will offset that a little bit here locally,” he said.
The new office building features other high-tech features, including biometric readers that allow access to the safe deposit box by reading handprints, and a tech bar with iPads.
CapStar’s new offices offer clients refreshments when making deposits or having a confidential conversation in one of the bank’s conference rooms. Claire Tucker, president and CEO of CapStar financial holdings, calls the new headquarters a “leading edge office” that is a “good gateway into the Gulch.”