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Cristin Reid understands the art of pacing.
A former ultra-marathon runner and cross-country coach, she's learned that endurance requires strategy—a quality she's learned to apply to the world of community banking.
"When you're running distances, you've got to keep moving," she said. That mindset has guided her since she was brought in to helm the bank in 2019 from Access BIDCO, a regulated financial institution that provided financing and management consulting services to small businesses, primarily in the State of Michigan.
Capitol National Bank had been founded by her father decades earlier. Without his involvement when she joined, the business had just emerged from a consent order and was regaining its footing after the financial crisis. Her first priority was to ask "how do we move forward and grow?" Reid knew from the start that turning the bank around would be a long-term project.
She began with an expansion plan, adding three new hires in lending, but just months later, the pandemic upended everything all over again.
Instead of scaling back, Reid saw COVID-19 as an opportunity, committing the bank fully to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Unlike some institutions, Capitol National served any small business in need, not just its existing customers. The result: a community-focused bank, processing PPP loans in 30 states. Reid says the PPP program carried Capitol's earnings for the following two years. Its deposits increased from $104 million in 2019 to $162 million in 2024. The bank now has $195 million on its balance sheet with a net income of $4.2 million and a net interest margin of 5.52% in 2024.
Now, she's playing a longer game to try to sustain that growth trajectory. Last year, the bank launched a 10-year strategic plan to look for further avenues of sustainable growth. A key part of that mission is reducing the average age of the bank's customer base by 10 years by 2034.
"We take it one transaction at a time, figuring out how we can move forward and develop," she said.
To do this, Reid is investing in talent pipelines through an internship program designed to bring in smart, nontraditional candidates who may not have considered banking as a career. She also created a program to bring directors under the age of 30 onto the board for a one-year term as fiduciary members. It's all part of creating a culture and customer base built for the next generation, Reid said.
Recent successes in products have included the implementation of a
Also on the deposit side, Reid is testing ideas that reflect her belief in banking as a force for good. She is looking to nonprofit organizations, offering them higher interest rates simply because, as she puts it, "it's the right thing" to do.
"I love working in an industry where you have the ability, if you take the time, to help so many businesses," she said.
