Midsize companies see opportunities amid tariff chaos
Where others see uncertainty, middle-market businesses also see opportunity.
According to a new survey by KeyBank, the vast majority of midsize companies are focused on adapting to President Trump's volatile trade policies — but they also see it as a good chance to improve their businesses.
The survey found that the No. 1 priority for 91% of U.S. companies with between $25 million and $1 billion of annual revenue is limiting the damage from new tariffs. At the same time, 92% of the same firms view the policies as an opportunity to innovate and restructure.
"That's an overwhelming majority saying that tariff management is a top priority," Ken Gavrity, president of Key Commercial Bank, told American Banker.
He noted encouraging signs in the firms' answers about how they're managing the tariffs. "Nowhere in the top five was 'pausing my growth initiatives,'" Gavrity said.
Since early April, the Trump administration has sporadically imposed, paused and made exceptions to a series of historically high tariffs on almost 90 U.S. trading partners.
The new costs for businesses, combined with an atmosphere of unpredictability, caused many firms to put major investments on hold, a number of bank CEOs have said.
"You're definitely hearing people start to mention a slowdown," Edward Barry, CEO of Capital Bank in Rockville, Maryland, told American Banker last month. "I have heard that other banks are seeing their loan pipelines start to come in a bit from what they thought earlier in the year."
A recent survey by HSBC found that 72% of American companies with between $50 million and $2 billion in revenue saw their operating costs increase due to the tariffs, and almost three-quarters had "paused or reconsidered long-term investments due to policy uncertainty."
Key's survey makes it clear that middle market firms share those concerns. Sixty-one percent of the respondents told the bank that "clarity on U.S. economic health" is the most important factor right now for making decisions about investing in their business.
But unlike HSBC's respondents, most of the business leaders who talked to Key said they were not reacting to the tariffs by putting investments on ice. In fact, almost half of Key's respondents — 49% — said the levies may open opportunities for market expansion. Technology companies were even more optimistic, with 68% seeing this upside.
To seize those opportunities, companies were adapting to the new tariffs in a number of ways. The most common tactic, used by 60% of companies, was to adjust their supply chains. Another 53% said they were passing the costs onto their customers, and 47% shifted the burden to their vendors.
Key drew out more granular detail from larger businesses. Among firms with annual revenues between $500 million and $1 billion, 88% were investing in technology to improve their supply chain visibility, and 71% were expanding their supplier bases.
"All of these companies are going to have to understand their cost structures better," Gavrity said. "They're going to have to be much more dynamic regularly, because the current view would be, 'I'd love stabilization, I just don't know when I'm going to get there. So I have to be change-ready.'"
KeyBank is the banking subsidiary of KeyCorp, a Cleveland-based financial services corporation with $189 billion of assets. At the end of this year's first quarter, the company's CEO, Chris Gorman, expressed deep concern about the new tariffs — though KeyCorp's financial guidance for 2025 remained the same.
"Recent events are clearly having an impact on markets and client sentiment," Gorman said in April. "So far in the second quarter — that is, since the tariff announcements — we have seen our clients pause transactional activity, waiting to see how things play out."For its middle-market survey, Key questioned 300 executives at midsize American companies in May 2025 — one month after the Trump administration announced the bulk of its tariffs, temporarily reduced most of them and made exceptions for certain goods.
Midsized companies are an important driver of local economies, and can provide a helpful temperature check on U.S. commerce in general, Gavrity said.
"These are $400 million-revenue companies that are making super-important things that we all touch every day," he said. "People just don't know their names because they don't generally have the retail brands. But they're huge GDP providers, huge employers, and how they go — the community is massively affected."
As such companies try to adapt in the face of uncertainty, Key is affected as well.
"We're still cautiously optimistic because our clients are still cautiously optimistic," Gavrity said.
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