Julieann Thurlow
Julieann M. Thurlow
Title: President and CEO, Reading Co-operative Bank
Age: 48
Experience: 26 years
Julieann Thurlow jokes, “I don’t think anybody chooses to become a banker. I think everybody lands there.” For her own part, Thurlow landed in banking after college (she majored in music), and she stayed because the field always provided her with a challenge. After a short stint working for the FDIC during the recession of the early ’90s, she joined Reading Co-operative Bank. Since taking over as president in 2006, she’s grown the bank’s balance sheet more than 90 percent. Thurlow sat down with Banker & Tradesman to talk about growing after recessions and what it means to be cooperative.
Q: When you joined Reading Co-operative in 1993, you were tasked with growing – or rather, you said, restarting – the bank’s lending department. What kind of challenges did you face in doing that, post-recession?
A: When I got here, we were $78 million in assets and we only had $20 million in loans, so we were kind of a non-bank. We probably looked more like State Street, on a much smaller scale.
The beauty of Reading Co-operative in 1993 is that we didn’t have very many loans, so when everybody else was having loan problems, we had wisely invested in treasuries. I say that because the challenge at that time was to get back into the market and get us started again. It was a lot of face time, getting out in the community, learning who the businesses were, learning who the dealmakers were, learning who the local Realtors were who did the transactions that we really wanted to be a part of, and getting us started again.
My predecessor’s predecessor made a safe decision by stockpiling cash, and we benefitted from it because at that point – when we were just coming out of the recession – we were able to deploy all of those treasuries into loans. Now our loan to asset [ratio] has been over 70 percent for a long time, which is something that’s a strength for us.
Q: You’ve also grown the bank pretty significantly since you took over as president in 2006 – how did you do that after another recession, and while remaining mutual?
A: Well, we’re very careful to make sure we pace our growth so it doesn’t outstrip our capital. We know how much we can grow every year. We model it out to understand what “well capitalized” is, and where we need to grow, and how much we can grow, our assets. We’ve also done it by improving earnings and by changing the nature of the assets on our balance sheet. At this point, we’re growing commercial lending about 14 to 15 percent a year and residential loans about 8 percent. In doing so, we’re changing the nature of the balance sheet very slowly, so we’re not taking on additional risk, but it’s improving our earnings and our yield on earning assets.
Q: Reading Co-operative also recently incorporated some bylaws into its charter to preserve the institution’s mutuality. Can you tell me about some of the thought process behind that?
A: When I took over as CEO, we had two individuals retiring from the board who had been there for a long time, so we pulled together a nominating committee and we talked about what principles are important to us. We actually require that each board member take a pledge not to convert the bank, which is great to do when you’re sitting in a room together, but it’s different when everybody is at retirement age and about ready to walk away from the board, to realize their investments have made the bank as successful as it has been. To grow from $70 million to $450 million is no small feat, and to walk away from that …
With us having that conversation right now, my predecessors are still on the board, so there are actually three people who have contributed to the leadership at this bank over decades, so it seemed to be an opportune time to say, “OK, if we’re committed to mutuality, what’s going to happen when we’re all gone?” The original founders of the bank are not there, their ancestry is not seated around the table because it truly is an independent board, so how do you preserve something like that?
At our strategic planning session, we had Stan [Ragalevsky] come in and talk about what that would mean, what limitations would be put in place. As board members it’s their fiduciary obligation to make decisions that are in the best interest of the bank, and it’s kind of hard, as a fiduciary, to make decisions in the best interest of the bank at the same time that an investment banker is talking in your ear about how much money you could make on this.
Thurlow’s Five Favorite New England Ski Areas:
- Sunday River
- Mount Sunapee (family)
- Wildcat Mountain (when it’s sunny)
- Bretton Woods
- Nashoba Valley (on Sunday or Wednesday nights)
