Photo courtesy of PeoplesBank
Tom Senecal
President and CEO, PeoplesBank
Industry experience: 35 years
PeoplesBank, chairman and CEO Tom Senecal announced that he will retire at the end of 2025. Senecal was elected president, CEO and chairman of the bank in 2016.
The banking veteran led the Holyoke, Massachusetts-based mutual bank through a period of significant expansion, including a holding company merger with Cornerstone Bank and the acquisition of Connecticut-based First National Bank of Suffield. The bank also launched a national digital bank and secured the naming rights for the PeoplesBank Arena in Hartford to help differentiate the bank from the former Peoples United Bank, now part of M&T Bank.
With his time at PeoplesBank nearing its end, Senecal and his team embarked on the latest phase in what’s been a career-long innovative journey. The bank’s core and processing platform is now on the cloud thanks to a partnership with Nimbus. Ahead of his retirement, Senecal still reflects on how much technology has changed the banking landscape.
Q: What stood out when you first started working for the bank?
A: I had worked for KPMG for nine years, and said, “I’d love to go work for a bank.” I picked PeoplesBank because I really thought they were a really good bank at the time. I think they still are. What really stood out to me is my impression in 1995 that technology was much more prevalent than reality, and when I got into the bank in 1995, I realized, “Oh, my God!” I worked in the finance area and we used to type checks on a typewriter, and put the check in an envelope, and then type on the envelope when we had to pay the bank’s bills. When I got in the bank and I saw that, I was like, “You got to be kidding me.” I thought there’s got to be some automated system. That was the beginning of automation, so to speak, and where we are today is just light years ahead of where the industry and PeoplesBank was in ’95.
Q: What has been the biggest technological advancement during your time in banking?
A: It’s online. Payment systems are entirely digital, and access and transfer of money is just so fast and so immediate. There’s non-bank competitors in all those fields. Look at Apple. Look at Apple Pay. Look at Venmo. Look at all these payment systems that are not banks, but provide the same services that banks provide. ATMs are not quite obsolete but they’re not as readily used as they once were. You don’t hear or see too many banks putting in ATMs. Some other banks have taken the strategy of eliminating branches and putting in ATMs in close markets, geographically. [Many customers] literally only go into branches when they have problems, when they have questions, when they want to do an application, but they are doing payments or withdrawals or deposits less and less. You can do all those with your phone.
Q: What do you think has allowed for PeoplesBank to have this sustained growth?
A: When we announced the [holding company] merger with Cornerstone Bank – they’re in Western Mass. and Northern Connecticut – we agreed that we both want to grow south to Connecticut and east towards Boston. We will continue to look for opportunities in the M&A space either direction, but in the meantime, we will continue our organic growth in both those markets. Massachusetts has way more mutual banks than Connecticut does, and with some of the Connecticut mutuals going public or gone we think there’s an opportunity for us to compete at our size, at around the $7 billion level.
We’ve grown in Connecticut, probably 60 percent of our commercial portfolio from word of mouth. We don’t do commercial advertising in the Connecticut market, but I have heard several times from our customers that they just really like doing business with us. The one reason they like it is we make decisions upfront. We don’t string our commercial customers along. We’re pretty good at saying “We’ll do the deal, these are the deal terms and conditions,” and we stick to our commitment. Cornerstone Bank has the exact same culture, I think that that culture helps, especially with commercial businesses, who need certainty and they need commitment, and they don’t want to be strung along. I think that is what differentiates us in that marketplace.
Q: Looking back, whether it’s an initiative, a change or something else, what was the biggest thing that PeoplesBank was able to achieve in your time there?
A: I’m going to expand on our partnership with Nimbus [a cloud-based core provider]. Seven years ago, we started talking about it. Five years ago, we committed to it. It’s taken us five years to build this core system and that’s not to say it didn’t come with any bumps and bruises – it did – but it came through the way we wanted it to. The intuitiveness, the ease of it, is all worth what we went through.
We had seven full-time people committed to this core conversion – seven plus 40 people from Nimbus committed over the last five years. It’s an enormous resource commitment to do this. I probably would have retired earlier, but I’ve been holding off because of this, and I’m glad I did.
I’ve been told by several other bank presidents, “Why the heck would you do this at your age?” I said, “If I don’t do it, no one will.” Being a lame duck, all your decisions as a lame duck can be made, because there’s no ramifications. Could it have been a career-threatening move if it didn’t go so well? Yes, it could have been. So I’m really proud of the fact that we came through with it, and I’m glad I can say to my competitors and the naysayers in the marketplace that we did it.
Senecal’s Five Favorite Golf Courses
- Augusta National
- Pine Valley
- Pebble Beach
- Old Sandwich
- Shinnecock
