Shanika Rogowski
Title: Senior Vice President and CRO, Mansfield Bank
Age: 38
Experience: 20
Shanika Rogowski is a classic success story. She entered banking 20 years ago and worked her way up, literally, from the mailroom in Bank of America’s mortgage processing center in Portland, Ore. While she’s modest about it, she was promoted in about three weeks and sent away for three months to attend the bank’s mortgage training school. She later moved to Boston, and almost immediately landed a contract gig with Citizens Bank. She then accepted a management role at a mortgage brokerage firm, and, after a few years, moved on to Cambridge Savings Bank, where she served as vice president, residential and consumer lending. Three years ago, she joined Mansfield Bank, where she oversees the mortgage lending and servicing operations, as well as the bank’s community reinvestment department.
Q: For starters, how did you wind up as the community reinvestment officer?
A: Being on the real estate side, you are involved in the communities. You’re meeting different types of professionals in the communities, people who are giving their time to their communities, and you’re lending money to those communities. So, being in real estate is kind of a natural “in” for being the community reinvestment officer (CRO). But really, I was surprised … I hadn’t had that role before. The previous CRO had left, and somebody nominated me, so I’ve been in this role for about a year.
Q: You’ve told me your mortgage loan closings at Mansfield Bank almost doubled last year – how did you do that?
A: Well, the rate environment wasn’t that different from 2011 to 2012, and we’re very saturated on the retail side. People were already coming to us for deposits, or they had personal and commercial loans. But on the mortgage side, not so much.
So, we went out there and started building relationships with people and different businesses.
We hit the road. We started really embedding ourselves within the community and started networking with realtors, financial planners, attorneys, architects, builders, developers, home designers. We probably started that in 2010, and it took time, but the relationships really started to take hold and we started seeing the fruits of it. We went from just under $60 million in mortgages in 2011 to $110 million in 2012.
Q: Do you think there’s still room for growth in that area?
A: Well, I can’t imagine rates going much lower. But we still have so much room for comeback in the real estate area for purchase transactions. Consumer confidence has been so low, a lot of people have been shying away from it. It just hasn’t been an environment where everybody can refinance. So, even though a majority of people out there are refinancing, there’s still so much more to be had.
Q: What else is going on at Mansfield Bank?
A: We converted our main banking core system, which is a huge project. It took two years between the research and the conversion itself, and the conversion has brought a ton of new technology options for the bank. We already have online banking and bill-pay, but we’re going to have mobile banking.
I’m really excited about that because it’s coming at the end of first quarter. Since we’ve expanded into Boston [with the opening last fall of a loan production center on Arlington Street], we’re certainly focused on lending here, but I’m all about the full circle relationship with the bank. If we’re tapping into lending customers, I would love to be able to bring them full-service into that relationship. We don’t have a branch in Boston, but with the mobile banking, you don’t need a branch.
Shanika’s Top Five Places to Bring Business Colleagues for Drinks:
- Cibo Matto, Mansfield
- TPC Boston, Norton
- Bar Louie, Patriot Place in Foxboro
- The Beehive, Tremont Street in Boston
- Davio’s, Arlington Street in Boston
