Dana Neshe
Dana M. Neshe
Title: Executive Vice President, Chief Community Banking Officer, Middlesex Savings Bank; President, Middlesex Savings Bank Charitable Foundation
Age: 47
Experience: 24 years
Like so many who graduated from college during the recession of the early ’90s, Dana Neshe entered a difficult job market. However, the FDIC was hiring, so she began her banking career in compliance. After a few years, though, Neshe knew she wanted a place to put her mug, and when she examined Middlesex Savings Bank, something resonated with her. She threw her hat into the ring and after a fortuitous phone call with the then-CEO, she joined the bank in its compliance function. Today, she heads up the bank’s retail branch network, its marketing function and its charitable foundation.
Q: How did that compliance background help you when you got into banking?
A: I think the interesting thing about having a compliance background is that in your formative years, you get to interact with lots of different parts within the bank. Unlike somebody who might come up through the branches or through lending, where they tend to be exposed only to perhaps that area, when you’re in compliance, you’re dealing with the lenders, the branches, the marketing folks, accounting, senior management, so you have a pretty good understanding early on how all the pieces start to come together. You may not have a clear vision of the puzzle, but you have an idea of, these are the edges, this is the middle, and so that gives you a different perspective.
You also learn pretty quickly how to interact with folks throughout the organization; you learn how to build consensus. As a compliance officer, I didn’t have any staff, so it’s not like I had anybody to manage, but I needed to get people to collaborate and to work with me. That’s something that I think is not directly tied to knowledge of the rules and regulations, but it comes from having those early years spent in that discipline.
Q: You must have had a bit of a learning curve when you took over the branch network – how did you work through that?
A: Well, I had never worked in one of our branches, so that was certainly a huge challenge. I didn’t know how the branches functioned, and I didn’t know all the people that well.
My first year, I was very fortunate that my predecessor was still here, so I got to apprentice with her. I was exposed to a lot of the different reports, and a lot of it was just changing focus. When you’re in compliance, you spend a lot of time worrying about tying the little things together, and you spend a lot of time reading and making sure that you understand conceptually where these things come together.
When you’re in the branches, it’s much less predictable because you’re dealing with customers. There’s nothing you can go to that says, “When the customer says this, you must now do this.” A lot of it is a lot more intuitive, so the first year was just spent really learning, trying to get to know the people, trying to get to know the regional managers and the people who were going to be reporting to me, trying to build relationships of trust and understanding, and letting them know that I needed them.
I came in and said, “There’s an awful lot that I don’t know but together we can do this really well, I think.” It was all new, so just about everything was a challenge.
Q: What’s in store for Middlesex Savings Bank this year?
A: A lot of folks are talking about chip and PIN right now. That’s something we’re in the process of getting started, with all of the fraud and all of the breaches we’ve seen over the past year, particularly. It’s important for us to make sure we’re providing customers with technology as safe and secure as what’s possible. We’re excited about that and we’re hoping to get that out probably over the summer.
The other thing we’re very excited about is Freedom Platinum, which is a new checking account for us. We have a lineup of the different levels of checking. Freedom Platinum’s going to be our new premiere account and it’s going to have a slightly higher balance requirement, but in return for that, almost everything else is free, I think with the exception of two of our normal fees.
In terms of charitable donations, our board was very, very generous this year. There was a $4 million donation from the bank to the charitable foundation, so our endowment is now over $15 million, which is very significant. It’s very exciting to have been on board when we started with $2 million and now here we are, not that much longer, at just over $15 million, so we’re looking for new and interesting ways to partner with folks in the community and provide some really impactful funding.
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