Photo courtesy of PeoplesBank

Aleda DeMaria
Chief Operating Officer
Age: 45
Industry experience: 18 years

PeoplesBank is not looking to be your average community bank, says Chief Operating Officer Aleda DeMaria. The mutual institution is always looking to innovate and it’s DeMaria job to make that happen. Whether it be moving to a new core service provider or launching new lines of business, she says, the bank is always looking to improve how it conducts business. The Commercial Record spoke to DeMaria to get her views on what PeoplesBank does behind the scenes to put that principle into practice.

Q: How do you view innovation in your role considering the changes banking has undergone over the 15 years?
A: I don’t want to say it’s a challenge because there’s always a way, If you go in with the mindset of saying “Here’s really where we’d like to be,” you view all of the other noise as just something that you have to navigate to get to where you want to go. I don’t think that innovation is impossible with regulations or with roadblocks, because you just leverage the team that you have. You get your risk team and your legal team and everybody that you need to say, “Hey, how can we how can we do this? How can we do this safely? And how can we do this in the manner which would make us all proud and that would equal success?” It’s not impossible to do.

Q: Big, sudden shifts have become the norm in bank regulation. How can an ever-changing regulatory environment affect how you innovate?
A: I think we’ve been able to navigate it very well, but it does start from the top down. You have to have a good relationship with your board and make sure they’re educated on the regulations, how they might affect your initiatives, how they would affect innovation, and then from there, you really need to start collaborating with the teams necessary. Our project management team, and then we partner with our risk teams, get involved very early on initiatives.

I think it’s a really good approach that we have, which is very collaborative. We start getting people involved that can help us think of the different challenges and how do we navigate that. We do that early on, instead of trying to get all the way down to the path where we are trying to launch something or we are ready to either sign a contract or we’re ready to announce something, and then you’re getting the input from people. So it really does start from an all-hands approach from early on in order to make sure we understand everything that’s going on around us in the regulatory environment and how we navigate it. Do we always say yes to everything? No, we don’t, but we definitely don’t start with no. We always take the approach of saying, “Can we get to yes safely?”

Q: What project are you most proud of that PeoplesBank recently completed?
A: The two biggest ones are the launch of our fully national digital brand Zynlo, which launched in 2020. That was really a significant step for the bank, and that brand has been really successful for us. Zynlo launched a lot of our partnerships with different fintechs and and different partners that we may not have otherwise been exposed to. The other one that I can think of is the core conversion that we did last year, leaving our legacy banking core system for one of the industry disruptors.

Q: How important was adding Zynlo and how does that fit with PeoplesBank’s view on mutuality?
A: I think it was extremely important for us as a mutual. I didn’t see the importance of it at the time, but now I do, because it allows PeoplesBank to remain committed to the communities that we serve. On the Zynlo side, because it is a division of PeoplesBank, we get to go out into other areas of the market and offer different products and services without watering down the PeoplesBank name or trying to make PeoplesBank so something large that it keeps us away from our community roots. It’s really important that we were able to grow and expand our product offering, grow the business, grow our understanding of technology and partnerships, without losing who we are as a mutual institution.

Q: When you went through the core conversion process, what were those conversations like with the board, and how important was it to have a board willing to try something new?
A: Our board was a very integral part of our conversations about do we or don’t we. To sum up in essence, years of conversation, it was really do we look at the risks of doing this, or is the bigger risk staying where we are and not being able to accomplish what we want to as a financial institution in the long run? We felt the bigger risk was staying with the partner that we were on and worrying about becoming irrelevant, or not being able to do what we wanted to do in terms of innovation of technology, innovation of product, innovation of service offerings.

We didn’t want to just be another community bank that lives quietly. We really wanted to thrive versus survive, and I think that’s really important. We needed to change core technology partners in order to do that. Board conversations were extremely important, but that’s why I feel very blessed to have a board team that we do. They give very valuable strategic input, and we’re able to have an open dialog. There are no surprises, and they understand why we’re doing things that we do, and not only understand it, they support us.

DeMaria’ Five Favorite Things to Do

• Spending time with her daughter
• Spending time in Naples, Florida
• Watching competitive cooking shows
• Think about the future of PeoplesBank
• Playing pickleball