PeoplesBank's "name, image and likeness, or NIL, deal with Storrs Central helped the bank connect UConn athletes with the Hartford Boys and Girls Club. UConn players are shown leading a wheelchair basketball clinic in this handout photo. Photo Courtesy of PeoplesBank
PeoplesBank is continuing to invest in growing its Connecticut presence with a new, multifaceted, multiyear partnership with Storrs Central, an independent sports news site for passionate fans of University of Connecticut athletics.
The tie-up is centered around what’s known in sports marketing parlance as a “name-image-likeness” deal, or NIL.
The partnership will include being designated as the Official Bank of Storrs Central, student-athlete appearances at several planned grand opening events scheduled for new PeoplesBank locations, the sponsorship of a youth basketball clinic at the Hartford Boys & Girls Club supporting the Ryan Martin Foundation, and sponsorship of the 2024 Men’s Basketball Repeat Championship Dinner via Bleeding Blue for Good.
All of Storrs Central’s profits go to supporting student athletes.
“We’ve been actively expanding in the Connecticut market for the last three to five years, but more so in the last three years, and we continuously look for partners in the Connecticut area, to kind of help show how we support the community and grow our business and all the things that we want to do to expand in that market,” PeoplesBank President Brian Canina said. “We identified the changes with the NIL as a potential avenue.”
A former resident of Connecticut, Canina said he is well aware of the state’s passion for collegiate sports that revolves around the UConn Huskies.
“I thought that they would be a perfect match for what we’re trying to do,” Canina said. “So when we evaluated it, it was a good way for us to show us trying to align with the community in that Northern Connecticut, Hartford market to kind of illustrate the passion that we have for Connecticut and sharing their passion for UConn.”
Recent NCAA changes to NIL rules now allow student athletes to profit off their name and overall brand. Athletes can endorse products, sign sponsorship deals, engage in commercial opportunities and monetize their social media, presence for example.
“As college athletics continue to evolve, our job is to keep UConn at the forefront of the NIL space,” said Jared Thomas, executive director of Storrs Central. “Through Storrs Central, we now have the ability to pair UConn student-athletes with reputable corporate partners. PeoplesBank gets to unleash the phenomenal marketing power of our student-athletes. Storrs Central gets to help UConn maintain a championship standard.”
Thomas describes the partnership as a win-win for both parties.
Expansion is Survival
Along with the NIL partnership, PeoplesBank recently also announced a merger between its holding company and the holding company of Massachusetts-based Cornerstone Bank, a $1.59 billion community bank with a strong presence in the growing Worcester area.
While Canina said that the bank always evaluates opportunities for expansion and mergers, it is focused on its efforts to solidify its presence in Connecticut.
“Over time, we will look for opportunities to spread the PeopleBank name but as we do things like the Cornerstone acquisition, it doesn’t take any of our focus away from what we want to do in Connecticut,” he said. “We still have an active expansion plan, looking to add more physical locations in different areas in Northern Connecticut to start. After we establish a presence there, adding more staff, then we’ll continue to look for other continuous markets, going further south into Connecticut over time.”
Headquartered in Holyoke, Massachusetts, PeoplesBank has invested in the Nutmeg State. It currently has four branches in Connecticut and Canina said the bank is looking for other areas of the state to expand into.
For Canina, expansion is a means of survival in an industry where larger conglomerates are swallowing up community banks.
“In this environment, banks need to continue to grow in order to succeed and survive,” he said. “We look for opportunities to expand our geographic footprint and one of the things that we noticed in the last five to seven years is the continuous consolidation of community banks, and now what’s starting to be almost the extinction of community banks. When we evaluate the Northern Connecticut landscape, which is the area that immediately is contiguous with our geographic footprint we can see that it’s totally dominated by the national banks and the large regional banks. We feel that we provide more value to consumers and commercial businesses in those markets through the support that we provide to the communities where they do business and where they live and I think that that’s something that has been getting lost over the years.”
As examples, Canina highlighted the acquisition of Farmington Bank by People’s United Bank as well as a merger between Rockville Bank and United Bank. People’s United was itself acquired by M&T Bank in 2022.
“We want to go down there [Connecticut] and offer more local community banking and give back to the communities the way we do as a mutual bank,” he said. “We think that there’s a real opportunity, and that’s something that’s missing. The other thing is, we already had a good Connecticut client customer base on our business side and they were really pushing us to get a physical presence down there and there’s a really good referral business from them because of how much they enjoy doing business with us. That also helped support our movement down into the Connecticut market.”
