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Dave Mansfield
Dave Mansfield
CEO, BankProv
Age: 60
Industry experience: 30 years
When he took over as CEO of The Provident Bank in 2013, Dave Mansfield saw a need in the market to work with small and midsized businesses not just on commercial real estate, but as a commercial and industrial lender as well. Since making the pivot to C&I lending, the Amesbury-based bank has expanded regionally and nationally with specialty products, including those focused on alternative energy, business mergers and acquisitions and now cryptocurrency – markets where Mansfield said he saw a need that a community-sized financial institution could meet.
After spending six years in the Navy, Mansfield got a degree in accounting and worked for a decade in bank regulation, first at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and then at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. He joined The Provident Bank as chief financial officer in 2001. The bank, which has $1.5 billion in assets and seven branches in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, rebranded last year as BankProv.
Q: How did your interest in cryptocurrency banking come about?
A: Pre-COVID, funding at banks was pretty competitive. It would have been very easy to just go and throw out the highest rate and bring in deposits, but I don’t believe that adds any value to the franchise, and frankly, it’s not very fun to do. We were looking for areas where we could meet an underserved market need. I had been following the cryptocurrency markets, and at that point it was Silvergate Bank that was leaning in very early and very hard, [plus] Signature Bank and a couple of other banks. I went out to San Francisco for a “blockchain week” and met with some of the top players in the market. These were very tech-driven companies led by very smart people that wanted to do things in a very compliant manner. They were just struggling to get traditional banking relationships. We embarked on building out a program to service that – just traditional checking accounts, payment services, wires, ACH. I give Silvergate and Signature Bank a lot of credit for the networks that they’ve built. So, we embarked on building that technology. We call it ProvXchange.
Q: What do you offer on the lending side?
A: There are quite a few early investors that have significant Bitcoin and Ether holdings and want to access that liquidity without having a taxable event from selling it. They want to be long, whether they’re trading the market or just accessing their liquidity. We’ve been able to build products that are essentially margin loans. It’s actually turned out to be one of our best products because of the controls and the partnerships and procedures that we have around it. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s very, very new in the banking sector, and the regulators are, appropriately, heavily scrutinizing this. We’re a little more than two years into this venture. It took a lot of hard work at the board level, hiring consultants in the BSA/AML area, hiring some of the best attorneys that have experience in the lending side, and just taking the feedback from our examiners, our auditors, others to really have a very compliant program.
Q: Did your background in regulation influence your approach to crypto?
A: I got my start really being a techie. I was working on fighters and bombers in the Navy, working on the aircraft carrier deck and fixing electronics, so I’ve always been a technology guy. I had my CPA, I am a CFA, so I’m very focused on financial aspects also. What I’ve learned as an examiner and now as a banker is that banks are in the business of taking calculated risks. That’s how we make money. I’m hoping the examiners see that when they come in. I wouldn’t recommend this to a typical community bank, but there are banks that are out there and doing this and doing it well.
Q: Do you think more community or regional banks will try to get involved in this space?
A: I think so. The chairwoman of the FDIC was out at Money20/20 [a fintech conference]. The FDIC is trying to figure this out. There still tends to be the feeling that the primary use of being in digital assets and cryptocurrency is for illicit activities. Does that take place? Sure. We do a lot of vetting upfront, due diligence and ongoing monitoring, because we only want to deal with people that take the compliance as seriously as we do.
Q: What has been the response to the rebrand to BankProv?
A: The Provident Bank is a great name. We’ve been around since 1828. But when you really looked at our branding – it was just a traditional green oval and gold lettering. And we’re on a national basis now, so there are Provident Banks throughout the country. We just knew we were going to run into issues of potential infringement of other Provident Banks in other regions. It just made sense to rebrand, refresh, be a little more tech-focused. So, we went through all that, and we were ready to roll it out, and COVID hit. We said, “Not the right time,” but then we really started thinking it through and saying, “Hey, the world isn’t ending.” One of our core values is courage, and we just had the courage to bring this out. It’s been very well accepted.
Q: What are some other initiatives at BankProv?
A: The other thing that we’re doing is our partnerships in the banking-as-a-service space. We use a company called Treasury Prime, they’re out in San Francisco, and we got introduced to them through their work with the former Radius Bank that was acquired by Lending Club. We have quite a few people from the former Radius working at BankProv. They had great experience in the space, so we were not starting from scratch, which is very important. We have a good relationship with another company called Modern Treasury. They both facilitate payment services. Soon we are going to be announcing two very noteworthy partnerships in this space. A lot of banks are worried about their next year, what’s going to happen with growth and margin pressure, and I’m actually really excited about 2022 and what that’s going to bring to us.
Mansfield’s Five Favorite Books
- “The Advantage” by Patrick Lencioni
- “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” by Verne Harnish
- “Good to Great” by Jim Collins
- “Traction” by Gino Wickman
- “Blue Ocean Shift” by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
