Page 15 - Baltimore County 2023 Quality of Life Guide & Business Directory

‘A REALLY
DIVERSE POOL
OF TALENT’
ROB SAGE,
Head of Relationship Management at T. Rowe Price Retirement Plan Services, Vice President of T. Rowe Price Group
T. Rowe Price, with headquarters in Baltimore City and a large corporate campus in Owings Mills, has been a significant presence in the area for
decades. Its investment in the greater Baltimore area gained a new facet with the recent announcement that the firm plans to build a state-of-the-art new campus in the emerging Harbor Point neighborhood. (See rendering at top right.) Read on for more about the new headquarters and T. Rowe Price’s transformative investment partnership with fintech company CNote.
T. Rowe Price has doubled down on its investment in the Baltimore area with a new headquarters in the emerging Harbor Point area. Why is this a sound investment for the company?
We’re a global asset manager, so we work for clients all over the world, but Baltimore is our home and it has been since 1937. Baltimore has kind of an independent spirit that reflects our own independent thinking. I’ve said to people before that we don’t have a Wall Street address and we’re just fine with that. I think it’s actually something that our clients and associates really appreciate about us.
This area provides excellent access to Washington, DC, where we can help inform our government leaders and help them make good decisions. Our presence here also provides easy access by planes, trains and automobiles, which helps us attract talent. Not just from this local area, though that is pretty talent-rich, but from all over the country and in some cases all over the globe.
For the same reasons, it’s easy for our clients to come and see us too. If they’ve got meetings in Washington, DC or Philadelphia or even New York, it’s a two-hour train ride to Baltimore.
The last thing I would say is that we take our responsibility as corporate citizens very seriously, and we continue to be invested in Baltimore’s success.
In general, what makes the greater Baltimore area a good place for financial and professional services firms to be headquartered?
This area gives us a really diverse pool of talent, across just about every single way you can measure it. We’ve got associates who
have been here for decades and we have people who are constantly coming into the area because they decided to relocate. Then we have outstanding colleges and universities, including some of the most prominent HBCUs in the country. They produce a very attractive pool of people with degrees in both the arts and the sciences. Greater Baltimore also has some of the best medical care in the nation.
Not only does all that help us attract talent, but it creates an attractive client base for us and for other financial services
or professional services companies. This area gives us the opportunity to serve a diverse range of clients, everything from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses to individual clients and state and local governments.
What are some of the ways T. Rowe Price supports the success of the local community and economy?
We recently announced our partnership with [impact investment fintech company] CNote. Through that partnership, we are scheduled to deploy about $50 million in deposits to under-resourced deposit institutions — community banks, credit unions, that type of thing. As far as we know, this is the very first investment of its kind, and that social impact investment was driven by our Black Leadership Council, which is a group of very senior African American associates who work closely with our firm’s management committee. Creating those deposits is really going to enable us to provide capital and the coaching for small and emerging businesses. It’s about supporting under-resourced communities and expanding access to things like healthcare, education and affordable housing. Really, it comes down to fostering the resilience of the local economy.
One thing I tell our clients is that we tend to attract associates
who want to serve — our clients, their fellow associates and the community. Last year, for example, our associates gave over 28,000 hours in terms of volunteer work, so that’s anything from framing up houses to working in community gardens to cleaning up highways to serving on boards of nonprofits. In terms of the dollar impact, we gave more than $24.4 million in charitable contributions in 2022.
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