The B corporation designation is sometimes called one of the gold standards for identifying companies, no matter their industry or nationality, that put bettering the world and its people at the center of what they do. iStock illustration

When you ask Martha’s Vineyard Bank President and CEO James Anthony what becoming a certified B corporation earlier this spring changed about the bank, the answer may surprise you. 

“It’s not as if it represented a tectonic shift for us,” he said. 

If the designation is unfamiliar, the B corporation designation is sometimes called one of the gold standards for identifying companies, no matter their industry or nationality, that put bettering the world and its people at the center of what they do. 

Maintained by the nonprofit B Lab, getting certified as a B corporation involves a months-long assessment process that could be compared to a traditional bank examination, where every claim a company makes about how it benefits the environment, does right by its workers and improves its community must be verified.  

Not only that, but companies must submit to a recertification process every few years, under standards that rise over time. 

“If you’re main goal [in pursuing certification] is because you want to bring in new customers, that’s not a reason to do it…It’s not for the faint of heart,” said Samantha Pause, chief innovation and brand officer at White River Junction, Vermont-based Mascoma Bank, a B corporation since 2017. 

Natural Fit for Mutuals 

Instead, the payoff for all the resources that executives at mutual bank B corporations interviewed for this story poured into the certification process was a better way of showing their stakeholders and the public what they were all about. 

“A lot of what the B corporation certification is about are things the bank has been doing for its entire 114-year history,” Anthony said. 

While B Labs’ online registry of certified firms clocks in at 6,717 in over 70 countries, it only contains 51 deposit banks, 14 of those being American and just one bank – Martha’s Vineyard Bank – residing in Massachusetts. That makes certification a rarity, and even if it’s clear only a minority of consumers are familiar with the certification’s circle-B logo, it’s a powerful way of communicating a bank’s values to those in the know. 

“Folks have been approaching me in random places to congratulate me on our certification, which surprised me,” Anthony said. 

That awareness has an added benefit when recruiting talent, Pause said. Unusual for a $2.73 billion-asset bank with a significant presence in rural towns, Mascoma has a large staff of programmers and software engineers, 30 in total. 

“We’ve attracted some really amazing talent to come work at this bank,” she said. “Coming to work for a bank is not the most sexy thing in the world and I’ve had a couple of them say the fact the bank is a certified B corp. – It wasn’t the only thing – but it made a difference.” 

Certification Changes Companies 

But as consistent as the idea of a B corporation can be with most mutual banks’ sense of mission, the process of becoming one can change an institution. 

First, on a formal level, earning the certification requires changes to a company’s charter that widen the definition of the factors its board must consider when making decisions beyond profit and to encompass the environment, the communities the company operates in and its employees. In the case of banks, those changes require extra negotiations with state and federal regulators to make sure they don’t fall afoul of safety and soundness rules. 

But it also can alter how a bank thinks about any number of different parts of its business. 

James Sanna

“When we became certified it took on a whole new life” after certification in 2019, Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based Piscataqua Savings Bank Joan Gile said.  

Senior Vice President Antone Cabral agreed. 

“It makes you think about the different components when making a business decision,” he said. “We treat our customers well and we try to treat our employers well, but…you’re now thinking about all of your stakeholders and the vendors you use – is this a minority-owned business? Is this a woman-owned business? – to the environment. We now purchase renewable energy credits, for example.” 

The B corporation certification works its way into company culture, too, Mascoma Bank’s Sure said, in a self-reinforcing cycle. Being a force for good within its footprint gives the bank a powerful tool to achieve its strategic goals, so the bank dedicates significant resources to inculcating new hires in that mission. But Mascoma employees take the bank’s status to heart, Sure said, to the degree that once, some employees at a branch in a down-at-heel community lobbied to add washers and driers to their office’s lobby when the local laundromat went out of business.  

That idea was nixed because it didn’t feel like it wasn’t a good use of Mascoma’s strengths as a bank, compared to longer-term projects like advising small entrepreneurs as they built their businesses, Sure said. But that’s also the same passion that fuels several employee resource groups dedicated to helping Mascoma figure out how it can make a difference locally as a B corporation bank. 

“Does [B corporation certification] attract leaders who are committed to mutuality? Yes. Does it make it easier to market ourselves? Yeah. Does it bring in some customers? Yeah, a few,” Sure said. “But that’s not why we did it. We truly want to be best for the world.”