(Bloomberg) -- After a year that challenged a host of regional lenders, KeyCorp Chief Executive Officer Chris Gorman says the Cleveland-based bank is ready to begin “playing offense.”

As a series of bank failures rattled confidence, escalated competition for deposits and sent the sector tumbling last year, KeyCorp took steps to shrink its risk-weighted assets to help bolster capital as its stock lagged peers. Now, the bank is focusing on how to angle itself for growth.

“We are going to focus not on the business as necessarily it was, but as the business we think it will be,” Gorman said in an interview. “For us, that means to focus on these capital light businesses, and the investments we’re making are really around people and technology.”

Those businesses include its payments business, investment banking — which just posted its best first-quarter ever — as well as its wealth business, which has amassed more than $57 billion in assets under management. The firm is investing in technology around its embedded banking business within payments, and hiring people in wealth business and investment banking, Gorman said.

KeyCorp reported net interest income that missed estimates on Thursday and said it was sticking to prior guidance for the metric to slide 2% to 5% this year. The stock was down about 1% at 2 p.m. 

The bank’s shares fell 17% in 2023 — making it one of the worst performers in the KBW Bank Index. The firm built up its capital position over the past year, hoisting its Common Equity Tier 1 ratio from 9.1% over twelve months to 10.3%. 

Last month, the bank announced an agreement between its specialty finance lending group and Blackstone Credit & Insurance for forward flow origination, which Gorman said will let Key “continue to serve our clients and help them on their path to growth, but also have diversification in terms of concentration risk.”

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