James Anthony
President and CEO, Martha’s Vineyard Bank
Age: 50
Industry experience: 17 years
Traveling round trip between Martha’s Vineyard and Falmouth might take three hours, but for Martha’s Vineyard Bank and its president and CEO, James Anthony, the two locations make up one community. The Edgartown-based bank, which has seven Martha’s Vineyard branches, last month expanded its presence in Falmouth by opening its third branch there.
The $1.1 billion-asset bank does not plan to expand elsewhere on Cape Cod, Anthony said, adding that the bank looks not at growth but at the customer experience to gauge the bank’s success. Anthony, who became president and CEO of Martha’s Vineyard Bank in 2017, is on his third stint leading a bank, including 11 years as head of Chesapeake Bank and Trust in Maryland. He studied mechanical engineering in college and worked as a consultant for several industries before starting his banking career.
Q: What were your goals when you came to Martha’s Vineyard Bank?
A: In addition to running two prior banks, I had also started a registered investment advisory. Between that and engineering and business school and running the two prior banks, I wanted to bring my diverse experiences to bear to assure the long-term sustainability and vibrancy of a bank dedicated to its community.
Our community here is a unique one. The interesting thing about our community is that it’s full of individuals who have self-selected to be a three-hour, round-trip journey to a big-box store – that journey involving a car, a ferry, and a car at the very least. It’s a very unique and wonderful place, and so that was one of the motivating factors in my coming to Martha’s Vineyard – the ability to contribute to Martha’s Vineyard Bank even more.
Q: What are your goals for the bank now, particularly in light of the pandemic?
A: The pandemic, I don’t think, has changed our strategy and our goals. It added a wrinkle in the challenges that we had to address. But actually, our strategy served us well in the face of the pandemic in that the goal and desire to serve our community being so strong, it was an opportunity to really exercise that.
Our secondary goal for the bank is to get out in front of a wave of change that we perceive fast approaching community banking and to get the bank on a platform of cutting-edge technology. We look at technology as not a replacement for human beings; we look at it as the opportunity to empower our interaction with clients on a person-to-person, one-on-one basis.
Q: Why open another branch in Falmouth?
A: Our community – singular – we think of as both Martha’s Vineyard and Falmouth. We’ve been in Falmouth for years now, and Falmouth and Martha’s Vineyard are very closely connected because Woods Hole – part of Falmouth – is the port town for Martha’s Vineyard. A lot of the folks on Martha’s Vineyard will come across, and if they make that three-hour journey to a big-box store, it’s in and around Falmouth that they’re doing that shopping.
We had an opportunity to purchase a bank building that Bank of America had closed as part of their broad branch consolidation. This location at the Village Green in Falmouth has been a bank office for 200 years this year and has a long history with banking in the community. This site was the location of the first bank on Cape Cod and the Islands, and the bank was started by a gentleman named Elijah Swift, who was a whaling captain and was instrumental in establishing Falmouth and Woods Hole as both vibrant towns and whaling ports. This location has a very strong connection with Falmouth as a town and its history as a whaling port, and it bridges that world to the world of banking and financial services.
Q: What role do you see for branches going forward?
A: The word “branch” I think is the wrong word. It brings the image of transactions across a teller line to mind. If we think of them as offices and the square footage of office space, then we can think very differently about branches in the future. Given our uncommon geographies spanning Vineyard Sound, we have to be creative about serving our market. Having distributed offices is important to our institution. I don’t see appreciable change to our approach to office space.
Q: What are some opportunities for the bank in your market?
A: Martha’s Vineyard Bank is a mutually owned institution. We are technically owned by our depositors, but I think that’s simply a proxy for being owned by the community. We instituted the Martha’s Vineyard Bank Charitable Foundation, and the two are very closely linked. Our opportunity is really to link the value that we deliver as a financial institution back to the very same people that we serve in the community through the bank’s charitable foundation. Probably one of the greatest opportunities that we have is to tightly align and link that cycle and build the momentum of it.
Q: What are some challenges in your market?
A: One of the greatest challenges of the community is a potential disappearance of a culture and/or way of life that the community represents. It’s an uncommon place, and our institution is dedicated to the vibrancy of the community, which could suffer a hollowing out or a gentrification without working hard to maintain the identity. As an illustrative example, one of the primary threats to our community’s history as being genuinely different is the lack of affordable housing for the community’s workforce.
With the pandemic, more people have seen the opportunity to live in a unique place, because they don’t have to be wedded so tightly to their office with remote work. Property values have gone up, which has accelerated the deterioration of affordable workforce housing dramatically in the last six to 12 months.
Q: Are there any solutions to address that?
A: Like many things, any challenge – with a lot of communication, a lot of thinking, innovation, some creativity – you can devise solutions. The upside of all of that is that the topic is getting a lot of discussion and a lot of creative thinking applied to it by a broad variety of people in the community.
Anthony’s Five Favorite Outdoor Activities
- Sailing
- Kiteboarding
- Surfing
- Skiing
- Hiking/backpacking
