Harry P. Doherty, the incoming chairman of America’s Community Bankers, says he “gets goosebumps” thinking about the year he will spend leading the trade group.
That may seem surprising coming from someone who headed a multibillion-dollar bank for 14 years and has spent nearly four decades in banking. But that’s just it – he has done nothing like this in those years.
“Becoming a CEO was something I aspired to,” Mr. Doherty said in a telephone interview this month. “Heading ACB was something I never aspired to. I was asked to serve, and that felt very good. I’m honored to follow in the footsteps of so many people I’ve admired.”
Diane Casey-Landry, ACB’s president and chief executive, said it is clear “Harry is really into” the chairman’s job.
“He wants his legacy to go beyond just his institution and benefit the entire industry,” she said. “He’s promised me as much of his time as I want, and he means it.”
Mr. Doherty, who is 61, has an advantage over his predecessor in that respect.
William W. Zuppe split his time between two Washingtons – in Spokane, where he is the president and chief operating officer of Sterling Financial Corp., and the District of Columbia, where ACB is headquartered. Mr. Doherty lives and works in New York, on Staten Island. Moreover, he has been free of day-to-day responsibilities since presiding over the sale of the$7.6 billion-asset Staten Island Bancorp to Independence Community Bank Corp. of Brooklyn in April for $1.8 billion.
Mr. Doherty, who is the $18 billion-asset Independence’s vice chairman, started his career in 1967, at Staten Island Bank and Trust. Until the sale in April, he had been the chairman and CEO of the bank’s parent company since 1990.
His first official day as the trade group’s chairman is tomorrow. He says he plans to focus on education, proposed rules that would require Federal Home Loan banks to register their stock, and credit union competition.
Ms. Casey-Landry said Mr. Doherty has worked closely over the past year with Mr. Zuppe, who was also big on education, and she noted that Mr. Doherty is a graduate of the National School of Banking, ACB’s flagship training program.
Mr. Doherty stopped short of repeating ACB’s threat to sue the Federal Housing Finance Board to stop it from making the 12 individual Home Loan banks register their stock with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But he did say that the group would continue to monitor the situation.
“We want to make sure” that SEC registration has “no unintended consequences,” he said, adding that most ACB members own stock in their local Home Loan banks.
Credit unions may well become Mr. Doherty’s top priority. Indeed, he said he decided to target them after a number of ACB’s state affiliates expressed concern.
“It was a constant refrain: You’ve got to do something about credit unions.”
He said large credit unions are “pushing the envelope” and asking for powers that Congress never intended credit unions to have, such as business lending and the ability to raise capital from investors.
“This is really a grassroots issue that’s being pushed by our members,” Mr. Doherty said. “I was very surprised to hear how strong their feelings were.”
Fred Becker, the president and CEO of the National Association of Federal Credit Unions, said that until recently ACB had never been in the forefront of the banking industry’s battles with the credit union industry.
Now, “ACB has jumped up there with the American Bankers Association,” Mr. Becker said. “It’s very unfortunate that bankers continue to divert resources into attacks on credit unions, rather than using them to better serve their customers.”
At the American Bankers Association’s annual convention in New York this month, former Comptroller of the Currency John D. Hawke Jr. said banks’ campaign to stop credit unions from increasing their business lending has little chance to succeed and that its bid to end the industry’s tax exemption has no chance.
Mr. Doherty said bankers are determined to keep fighting.
“It’s very hard to hear him say we shouldn’t be concerned with what the large complex credit unions are doing,” he said of Mr. Hawke.
With the exception of a nearly three-year stint in the Marine Corps in the early 1960s, the tail end in South Vietnam, Mr. Doherty has spent his entire life on Staten Island.
His parents immigrated to the United States from Ireland, and opened a bar when he was a boy.
“When I was in the seventh and eighth grades, I used to come home from school and work in the bar,” he recalled.
Associates say Mr. Doherty has scores of funny anecdotes from his time spent at his parents’ bar — Ms. Casey-Landry calls them his “tavern stories” — but he says he learned about community service there as well.
Mr. Doherty remembered that on several occasions his father and others in the bar prepared large trays of sandwiches and salads.
“I always thought that they were doing some catering work on the side,” he said. It wasn’t until years later, he said, that his father was sending the food to grieving families to serve after a funeral.
“He did that out of the goodness of his heart. My parents always told me, charity begins as home, and you expand the circle from there.”
