Community Bank President Visits, Surprising Customers

By JIM KEVLIN : COOPERSTOWN

Cooperstown Friday, May 6, Community Bank President/CEO Mark Tryniski, left, pops a pizza into the oven at Sal’s on Main Street.  Next to Tryniski is Joe Sutaris, the bank’s Oneonta-based regional executive, and proprietors John and Sal Grigoli.

If you’re in business, every once in a while your banker may stop by.  But your bank’s president?
So you can imagine that proprietors Sal and John Grigoli were a bit surprised when Mark Tryniski stopped by Sal’s Pizza Friday, May 6, with his hand outstretched.
Tryniski, president/CEO of the Dewitt-based Community Bank, which bought Wilber Bank in April, was in Otsego County for the day, touring his new branches with Joe Sutaris, his Oneonta-based regional executive.
Sipping a Coke and munching on a slice, the executive said the transition from Wilber to Community – it involved changing 500 signs over the weekend and shifting computer systems – went off with few hitches.
That was partly due to intense training in advance of the shift, and partly to a “buddy system” – a Community veteran was posted in Wilber branches to help Wilber’s former employees with new procedures in the interim.
A big part of that training was in customer service, said Tryniski.  Lots of companies give lip service to that concept, he continued, but Community’s efforts caused Forbes to rank it the seventh-best bank in the nation two years in a row.  J.D. Powers put Community on its Top 10 list for three of the last five years.
When the merger happened, the executive continued, Community happened to be offering higher CD rates than Wilber.  The buyer didn’t have to, but immediately raised former Wilber customers to the higher level.
Plus, the new customers receive free checking – “completely” free checking, Tryniski emphasized – and access to more extensive Internet-banking and cash-management systems.
Local customers may also notice that branch managers such as Cooperstown’s Janice Eichler will have broader authority to approve loans.  “In our system, we expect them to function as bank presidents in their towns,” the president said.
As it happens, Community Bank was founded about the same time as Wilber, 150 years ago, and expanded through a “combination of organic growth and high-value mergers with other banks,” Tryniski said.
“Wilber was not the largest in branches,” he continued.  “But the largest in terms of deposits and assets.”
While Community is not among the mega-banks, it is 130th among the nation’s 8,000 community banks which, plotted, would result in a graph that looks like a barbell, Tryniski said:  Big banks at one end, small banks at the other, and banks like Community in the middle.
Wilber had 250 employees; Community has 2,000.
With the increase in bank regulation – mortgages use to require a stack of forms about an inch thick; now, it’s 6 inches, he said – “you’re going to see more and more smaller banks looking for alternatives.”
A native of Fulton, Tryniski received an accounting degree from SUNY Oswego and spent 18 years with Price Waterhouse’s Syracuse office before joining Community as CFO in 2003, winning promotion to the top job three years later.