Alexander Masse
Title: Vice President, Business Banking, Chelsea Groton Bank
Age: 41
Experience: 18 years
Alexander Masse is one of those increasingly rare bankers who has spent his entire career at the same institution. “They’ve always treated me like gold,” Masse said of Chelsea Groton, where he began working as a teller in 1998. He worked his way up through various management positions and eventually to the bank’s cash management division. When he’s not working with Chelsea Groton’s business clients, he enjoys spending time with his wife, their two boys and their new puppy, and he also coaches youth baseball. “We have a very full life,” he told The Commercial Record.
Q: How has the cash management division of Chelsea Groton grown since you joined in 2013?
A: When we started, it was just myself and my supervisor, Senior Vice President Bill Lidestri. From there we took on board two people. Now we have a business banking specialist and a business banking representative and they’re primarily tasked with establishing new accounts for businesses, servicing those businesses for cash management services, like remote deposit capture, ACH origination, wire origination, and Positive Pay. They help our customers on a day to day basis in addition to developing new business leads of their own, as well.
That’s one of the things that makes Chelsea Groton Bank special. When it comes to cash management services, our group takes a lot of time to work with our customers and help them use those services. Any bank can offer those services, but with this group we really help customers maximize the use of that and get them comfortable with it, no matter whether it’s business owner or the person who uses it on a day to day basis as well.
Q: What kind of businesses do you work with primarily?
A: I would say that we help businesses of all different sizes, honestly. We’ve definitely branched out, now that our commercial lending department is doing more with businesses outside of our immediate area, and we’ve expanded our commercial lending staff, or the bank has, considerably. So now we’re doing business with companies in New Haven and Hartford because we have that loan production office in Glastonbury. Because we’re meeting with clients outside our area, we’re meeting with clients that are larger, that have more need of some of these cash management services I’ve been talking about, so I would say that we run the full gamut of all different sizes. All different sized businesses use all variations of these products as well.
Q: How have technological advances changed the game when it comes to cash management services?
A: I think the technology has become more and more prominent now that business owners are looking to do more with less and with less time.
For example, a customer that would have normally taken their deposit to the branch every day, now they can actually do those deposits from remote deposit capture. They are able to save money perhaps by doing payroll in house using our ACH service for direct deposit. That’s definitely become more prominent.
I’m going to take a step back here. We redid our online banking system in 2013 into 2014 and that was basically the foundation of everything else that we built off of it. Helping customers maximize it by using our online entitlement system, so they can assign various authorities within the system to their staff, that enables business owners to not just having to do all of the online banking themselves. They can empower different members of their staff to do different functions for them. Like I said, they’re doing more with less time and they’re able to use the system to maximize that.
Q: What kind of conversations are you having with your business clients around fraud?
A: Right now we’re seeing a definite concern toward fraud. This is becoming more and more prominent and more of a conversation with customers. Not only is it check Positive Pay, but it’s also ACH Positive Pay. So all of those electronic transactions that are coming in and hitting their account, customers can actually designate certain businesses that are allowed to debit their account. Anything else that would try to hit their account would show up as an exception for them in Positive Pay, so really it does lock them down from checks clearing but also ACH. That’s one way when customers are concerned about fraud and how can they protect their money, this is one of the hot topics in those conversations.
I’d say this type of concern shows up in almost every conversation I’m having with my clients. I think it comes down to utilizing the online systems to monitor accounts as the first and foremost basic ways customers can protect themselves, too. It’s more and more common that they’re having individuals watching for activity on a day to day basis as opposed to waiting for a bank statement to come each month, and I think that’s the first line of defense.
When customers want to find more advanced ways to protect their firms, that’s where the Positive Pay would come in. We try to educate our customers on all these different aspects of banking and the services that can help them, and it all starts with finding out what their needs and concerns are and trying to match up a solution for that. Now we’re even drawing from examples we see on a day to day basis to help educate them. We may see different kinds of fraud we’re able to alert other customers to, just to be aware of these types of things.
Masse’s Top Five Driving Songs:
- “Wanted Dead or Alive,” by Bon Jovi
- “Superfly,” by Curtis Mayfield
- “Shipping Up To Boston,” by the Dropkick Murphys
- “New Orleans,” by Roomful of Blues
- “California Soul,” by Marlena Shaw
