Maureen Frank
President and CEO, New Haven Bank
Age: 64
Industry experience: 40 years
Maureen Frank started her banking career at First Federal Savings & Loan in Waterbury before joining Centerbank, where she worked for Jack Burke, one of her mentors. Later, as Connecticut’s banking commissioner, Burke would tap Frank for her first CEO role, asking her to lead Apple Valley Bank & Trust, what was then a troubled de novo bank. Frank spent more than five years there before it was sold in 2009.
She began consulting for Start Community Bank in 2012, shortly after it had been certified as a community development financial institution (CDFI). After becoming interim CEO in 2013, Frank took over the role permanently the next year. The bank changed its name last year to New Haven Bank, the only FDIC-insured CDFI in Connecticut and the only bank headquartered in New Haven. With one branch and $150 million in total assets, the bank had eight of its 20 employees working full-time on the Paycheck Protection Program in April and May, lending more than $12 million through the program.
Q: How has the pandemic affected New Haven Bank?
A: A smaller institution is able to pivot a lot more quickly, so in some respects we have an advantage. The disadvantage comes in when you are trying to participate in a program such as the PPP that is moving very quickly, that is ever-changing. You want to be able to help all your customers. You want to be able to help non-customers, but you have a limited staff. We’re a small institution, we have 20 employees, and five of them are branch people. That’s where the challenge comes in. But I have great employees who understood that it was our obligation to meet the requests of the community as much as we could.
What was also important to me during this time was to make sure that we took care of borrowers that were not our customers. They’re part of the community. Some of them banked with larger banks that were not able to accommodate them, so we had many businesses that came to us and asked if we would help them. And we did. There wasn’t anybody that was turned away from this institution. We also handled a lot of nonprofits, some that banked with us, some that didn’t.
Q: As the economy moves into the recovery phase, what will New Haven Bank’s role be as a CDFI?
A: When the PPP came out, to us, it was an extension of what we already do. We handle a lot of customers that other banks don’t want to handle. We do commercial real estate – we don’t do consumer loans – and the requests are typically smaller. They’re more time-consuming, and they require a lot more hand-holding. When this PPP came out, we took time with a lot of these individuals who needed a bank to try to guide them through the process. So, it really was a natural extension of what we do any way; it was just in a much larger volume and a condensed period of time.
We’re a good local bank, and I think we’ve done some great things for the community. I think we’ve always done great things for the community. We’re growing, but I think during the pandemic and when the PPP program came out, our bank stood out for its ability to handle all customers, whether they bank with us or not. Hopefully, we’ll facilitate them getting back on their feet.
Q: What concerns do you have for the coming months?
A: We had a healthy economy before we went into this, but the shutdown has lasted longer than I think a lot of people anticipated. We granted forbearance in three-month increments, and we did that for a couple of reasons. We’re a small institution, and we wanted to reach out to our customers in the middle of the process to see how they were doing. What’s interesting is that the customers that are coming up on the end of the three months, probably more than 30 percent of them have told us that they’re OK, that they don’t need additional forbearance. So, I saw that as a positive sign.
I see it as a positive sign that Yale University is going to come back. Yale is big driver of commerce in New Haven, whether it be rentals, restaurants or hospitality. Yale affects all of that in New Haven. On the flip side, for some of the smaller businesses, the time frame may have just been too long for them to be able to weather the storm. Whether or not they’re able to come back remains to be seen.
I do have some concerns. I’m seeing both positives and negatives emerging, and I believe it’s too soon to tell what the final result will be. I’m optimistic that it will be good. This bank has the resources and the wherewithal to sustain some falling out.
Q: Do you have plans to expand?
A: We’ve talked about it over the last couple of years and started to do some presentations to the board of directors early this year. Then the pandemic hit. I’ve been on the retail side of the bank and small business banking basically my entire career. In order to garner significant core deposits, you need more outlets. What those branches look like now is probably going to be very different. They are going to be smaller, but I think that you will always need brick and mortar. I still think when consumers want to open a checking account and move their core business to a financial institution, they want to do that in person. Once it’s open, they may use alternative delivery services and never visit the branch again, but I do think that that’s the way the consumer still acts.
One of the things we need to be cognizant of is that as a CDFI, we have to remain in areas that are low- to moderate-income. You run the risk of growing out of your CDFI footprint, and that is not what we want to do. When I start looking at places where I feel it might be suitable for us, I’m going to look at the low- to moderate-income census tracts in those areas and at the businesses in those areas.
