Company: WBS-PG
Filing Date: 2025-03-03
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000801337-25-000004
Chunk: 202

Company: WEBSTER FINANCIAL CORP
Filing Date: 2025-03-03
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 202
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Our success depends, in large part, on our ability to attract, develop, compensate, motivate, and retain skilled people, including executives, managers, and other key employees with the skills and know-how necessary to run our business. The failure to attract or retain talented executives, managers, and employees with diverse backgrounds and experiences, or the loss of certain executives, managers, and key employees, could have a material adverse impact on our business. These risks may be heightened when U.S. labor markets, or segments of those markets, are especially competitive. 

Competition for the best people in most activities in which we engage can be intense, and we may not be able to hire sufficiently skilled people or retain them. The recent transition towards companies offering remote and hybrid work environments, which is expected to endure, as well as our workplace policies (or perceptions of those policies by current and potential employees), including policies with respect to remote and hybrid work, could impact our ability to attract and retain talent with the necessary skills and experience. In addition, the transition to remote and hybrid work environments may exacerbate the challenges of attracting and retaining skilled employees because job markets may be less constrained by physical geography. The unexpected loss of services of our key personnel could have a material adverse impact on the business because of their skills, knowledge of our markets, years of industry experience, and the difficulty of promptly finding qualified replacement personnel.

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Further, our business is primarily relationship-driven, in that many of our key employees have extensive customer relationships. The loss of a key employee with such customer relationships may lead to the loss of business if the customers were to follow that employee to a competitor or otherwise choose to transition to another financial services provider. While we believe that our relationships with key personnel are good, we cannot guarantee that all of our key personnel will remain with our organization.

We operate in a highly competitive industry and market area.

We face substantial competition in all areas of our operations from a variety of different competitors, both within and beyond our financial markets, many of which are larger and may have more financial resources than we do. Such traditional competitors primarily include national, regional, community, and internet banks within the various markets in which we operate, including the HSA market. We also face competition from many other types of financial institutions, including savings and loans, credit unions, non-bank health savings account trustees, finance companies, brokerage firms, insurance companies, online lenders, factoring companies, and other financial intermediaries. Some of these organizations are not subject to the same degree of