At 41, Matt Sosik is a young man – doubly so for a bank president. And he seems younger still when he notes he’s been leading Webster-based Hometown Bank for 15 years.
Immediately after graduating from Bentley University, the Sturbridge native was hired as an FDIC bank examiner, but by his mid-20s, he had taken the reins at a one-branch, $34 million bank that had no ATM and no drive-up window. Today, Hometown bank has five branches and assets of roughly $300 million. Here, Sosik talks about what prompted him to make the jump from the FDIC to bank leadership and about the challenges facing mutual banks.
Matthew Sosik
Title: President, Hometown Bank; Webster
Age: 41
Experience: 15 years
Other than regulation, what are the greatest challenges facing small, mutual banks?
Advertising is a huge challenge. When we’re looking to advertise, where do we turn? To the papers that have circulation in our area? Who’s reading them?
And it seems like consumers are less prone to pay attention to your advertising no matter what they see.
We’ve totally retrained the human mind to almost ignore it. It’s really, really difficult. Even when you turn to direct mail, which has been sort of a fallback position for us – because at least you know you’re getting to their mailbox – even that is dicey because the American mind has become an instantaneous switch that just goes.
And I think consumers are more aware now of the fact that they’re being sold something.
My kids [are] 8, 11 and 13; I think it was my 11-yer-old, the other day I was watching a Bruins game and that… spray can of rubber sealant comes on, and just very honestly, she wasn’t trying to just be sarcastic, she looks at me and says, ‘Who the heck would buy that?’ This guy is entirely trying to sell me something that I could never see a need for, and she just got the biggest kick out of it, because that was just foreign.
Another problem in banking is what do we have to market? What does Hometown Bank specifically have to market? Well, we’ve got this wonderful customer service machine that we have put in place and our employees just drive it down the road. We have all these incentive programs and we have customer care programs. We really do focus a ton of our energy on creating this customer service machine. Well, as it turns out, technology is eating into that every step of the way now, and not only are we allowing it to happen, we’re sort of along for the ride.
As examples of that: Mobile banking and online banking, online bill-pay, all of that stuff. We have all that technology in place here. Every time we participate in that, we are just taking chunks out of the value of the customer service model. A 24-year-old kid, he’s got a job, he’s out there working. They don’t come into our bank. No way. And they don’t want to. And not only that, they don’t want to pick up the phone and talk to somebody… They expect it all to be handled online, they never want to discuss this with anybody.
What made you, as a 25- or 26-year-old, say, “I’ll give this a shot?”
Well, a couple of factors. I was working for the FDIC out of college, and it takes a certain amount of enforcer mentality to work for the FDIC. You have to have a little police officer in you – which I didn’t have. Not that I wasn’t good at the job, but it really wasn’t for me a perfect fit by any stretch, so I wasn’t going to be a lifer there. So, I was always, in the back of my mind thinking, ‘You know what? I’m going to work for one of these banks, or a bank in general.’ And that opportunity came up, and I would say the reason I went to work for a very small bank was I was young and dumb. I really didn’t know any better that this was or wasn’t a good opportunity. I was confident I could make something good happen there. We’ll call it youthful exuberance.
Did any of the enforcer mentality you needed at the FDIC help you lead the bank? Does it help you deal with the FDIC now?
To give credit where it’s due, the FDIC puts a ton of money into training. So, I came right out of college. That training, what they spent to train me, and then unleashing me into the bank world, that definitely helped me a ton.
We hear bankers grumble about “all this regulation.” But at the same time, they say, “We know it all means something, we just wish they would get rid of some of the others that are being duplicated.” Is that, to you, the crux of the problem?
It’s part of the problem. They never take anything away, and what happens is they actually do an incredible disservice to the consumer, not just the banker who’s attempting to comply. If you’ve gone for a simple deposit account opening, you are dumbfounded at the amount of information, the amount of paper we give you that is of very little value, and it’s because there’s never anybody saying, ‘Why don’t we simplify this so the average guy sees one piece of paper instead of piles?’
To me, the bigger problem is the regulatory compliance environment. When the crisis hit, and there was an outcry about consumer protection, the pendulum swung against banks very, very far to one side, to the regulatory side. The examination tenor, the overall environment became one in which it became nearly impossible for banks to win no matter how many resources, dollars, people, [or] knowledge you threw at the compliance problem. It became an uphill battle, and these compliance officers, their morale was broken. When you put someone on a treadmill and you don’t give them an endpoint, and you keep raising the height of the thing, eventually the person breaks, falls down and gets thrown off. The third leg of that is … I understand that I could be doing something else right now. If I don’t like the fact that I am in one of the most highly regulated industries in the world, I can pack up my stuff and go do something else. So, I’m not going to sit here and complain about that. But if you look at what a bank charter really is, and what we’re trying to do, it’s enforcement of all these ancillary things: The bank secrecy act, the anti-money laundering and all these things that somebody has said, ‘You’ve got to go do this otherwise you’re going to get in major trouble.’ And they really throw the book at you for not doing it. We’re not paid to do all kinds of enforcement work. Give us a tax credit, give us something for us to say we’re asking you to do stuff we have no business asking you to do, but here’s a little bone, just a little something.
Matt Sosik’s Five Best Albums Of The Past 12 Months
Wilco – The Whole Love
Kathleen Edwards – Voyageur
Bon Iver – Bon Iver
Radiohead – The King of Limbs
Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
