Most Powerful Women in Banking | Top Teams: Centric Financial

October 6, 2021 12:00 AM

Enjoy complimentary access to top ideas and insights — selected by our editors.

As part of American Banker's Most Powerful Women in Banking and Finance program, we have selected five "Top Teams" for 2021. Centric Financial is one of the team honorees.

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To see the evaluation criteria for the Top Teams category, please scroll to the end.

Centric Financial
Headquarters: Harrisburg, Pa.
Assets: $1.1 billion
Female representation among corporate officers: 66%
Female representation on operating committee: 63%

Diversity initiative

Centric launched a comprehensive diversity, equity and inclusion initiative last year. It partnered with Georgetown University to study its organizational culture, develop diversity training and create measurable goals.

All short-term goals have been achieved, including creating a vision statement; using more inclusive language in all communications; and stressing why diversity is important to growth to Centric’s stakeholders.

Work on medium-term goals is underway, with the company now identifying and developing diversity champions to support its efforts and setting diversity targets for its recruiting. It is also implementing a first-time-homebuyer program focusing on people of color.

Centric already stands out for its gender diversity. Five of its eight executives are women, including its founder, chair and chief executive, Patricia Husic. Meanwhile, an initiative at the board level to seek more diversity led to the selection of a third female director, Jessica Meyers, in June. Meyers is the founder and CEO of JEM Group, a commercial construction company in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.

Selected executive highlights:

Leslie Meck

Chief Retail and Customer Experience Officer

Meck was instrumental in pivoting operations throughout the pandemic. She led the design of an automated appointment service, reducing wait times and ensuring social distancing at branches. She also helped implement initiatives to increase customer messaging and outbound calling by 72%, developed a strategy to assist customers transitioning to digital banking, designed a Skip-A-Pay program for retail consumer loans, and marshalled resources to help customers and noncustomers apply for Paycheck Protection Program loans.

In a two-month period, Meck’s team added 1,400 new deposit accounts, 1,200 of them from new small-business customers drawn to Centric by its decision to extend the Small Business Administration’s emergency lending program to noncustomers. In 2020 overall, her team generated 2.5 times more accounts than in 2019.

In addition, a Customer First program that Meck created improved branch efficiency by eliminating redundant and outdated procedures, drawing on the help of a committee of employees from retail, operations, compliance and training.

Kimberly Turner

Chief Risk Officer and CRA Officer

Turner’s Community Reinvestment Act efforts helped drive a tenfold increase in the number and volume of loans made to businesses in low-income neighborhoods last year, with 271 loans totaling $28 million. She also oversaw financing for the addition of 62 housing units with affordable rents for those with low-to-moderate incomes through 12 loans totaling $3.3 million.

In anticipation of Centric topping $1 billion of assets, a milestone that puts it in a new regulatory class, Turner spearheaded two years of compliance preparation. Her work culminated in a biennial Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. exam in which regulators acknowledged the enhanced compliance management system.

Turner was promoted to an executive vice president in the first quarter and assumed expanded responsibilities for consumer litigation, Bank Secrecy Act compliance, fraud and information security.

Christine Pavlakovich

Chief Human Resources Officer

It was one of the most intense pivots Pavlakovich ever managed. With a C-level promotion coinciding with the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, Pavlakovich oversaw the effort to shift Centric’s 138-person workforce from in-office to work-from-home within 48 hours. She also created a hiring process to ensure sufficient staffing to support the PPP loan pipeline, including hiring temp workers and retired Centric employees.

Pavlakovich has a critical role in Centric’s diversity, equity and inclusion strategy. She helped design its ambitious new initiative in partnership with Georgetown University. She’ll also be key to implementing the goals that have been set, which includes incorporating DEI principles into performance management processes such as succession planning and talent management. To achieve the new targets for recruiting people of color, she is looking to tap into diverse talent pools through minority chambers of commerce.

Veronica Rodgers

Operations Manager and Director of Enterprise Applications

Rodgers was an instrumental part of the team tasked with rolling out a new online banking platform. She also partnered with other Centric leaders to develop new processes, procedures and documentation to facilitate a high volume of PPP applications. Centric ultimately approved and disbursed 2,000 PPP loans in 2020.

Other initiatives completed by the operations team last year included automation enhancements to the bank's internal collateral and insurance tracking processes, return deposit item processes, and long-term document storage indexing processes. These provided more accurate reporting, fewer manual tracking requirements, and in the case of the indexing effort, saved the bank from needing to hire a full-time employee.

Rodgers also supports several Centric Bank committees, including the Tech Steering Committee and the Compliance Committee.

Sandra “Sandie” Schultz

Chief Financial Officer

At the start of the PPP initiative, Schultz recognized an issue with a third-party provider and stepped in to get familiar with the entry portal set up by the Small Business Administration. She then organized a group of Centric employees to directly enter applications in the SBA portal. This eliminated the need for the third party and saved Centric more than $944,000 through the end of 2020.

Schultz used the ultra-low-cost and no-cost deposits from that influx of small-business borrowers to significantly reduce the bank’s cost of funding. The bank had a 97-basis-point reduction in the cost of deposits, to 0.43%, in the fourth quarter of 2020, compared with the same period a year earlier, a savings of $450,000.

Schultz also was instrumental in implementing a stock repurchase program, boosting Centric’s earnings per share and book value per share by about 8 cents.

Patricia “Patti” Husic

Chair and CEO

Under Husic’s leadership, Centric ended last year with $1.1 billion in assets, an increase of $286 million, or 34% from 2019. It also reported net income of $9.1 million for the year, up 24%.

Its quarterly net interest margin of 3.69% ranked at the top among its peers in central Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia area.

For the past several years, Centric has been in American Banker’s ranking of the

top 200 publicly traded community banks

as well as the ranking of the Best Banks to Work For.

(See where Centric ranked on the Best Banks list for 2021 and 2020.)

The team

Mary Anne Bayer, Stacy Beeler, Maura Cohen, Julie Conway, Jacqueline Fahey, Flow Glucksman, Jan Hastings, Patricia Husic, Catharine Krugh, Leslie Meck, Molly O’Keefe, Christine Pavlakovich, Veronica Rodgers, Paulette Rovito, Cheryl Sakalosky, Sandra Schultz, Jennifer Torpey, Cheryl Tucci, Kimberly Turner, Gethen Wilson

Centric also had a Top Team win in 2019.

See other 2021 top teams:

What it takes

In the Top Teams category, each bank is evaluated based on:

The presence and influence of women in the senior ranks
The performance of women-led business units
Demonstrated commitment to and progress toward fostering diversity (and specifically female participation) in senior leadership and key roles with P&L responsibility
Improvements shown in the representation of women in the pipeline
Programs, policies and practices that are effective in fostering success in the areas above