Fireside Chat between NCRC Chief of Community Engagement and Institutional Accountability Catherine Crosby, Sr. EVP and Head of Community Banking at M&T Bank Michael Keegan and President of Consumer and Regional Banking at Huntington National Bank Brant Standridge at the Just Economy Conference on March 26, 2025, in Washington, DC. They discussed how community partnerships through NCRC’s community benefits agreements (CBAs) have redefined their business practices.
Panelists:
Michael Keegan, Sr. EVP, Head of Community Banking, M&T Bank
Brant Standridge, President, Consumer and Regional Banking, Huntington National Bank
Moderator:
Catherine Crosby, Chief of Community Engagement and Institutional Accountability, NCRC
Transcript:
NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.
Crosby
All right? Well, I am really, really excited about this conversation today. I’m an NCRC veteran, and over the time that I’ve been with NCRC, we’ve had some really good partnerships with financial institutions, and I was a part of the first CBA agreement with Huntington Bank, so I’m really excited for Brant to talk about some of the work that we’ve been able to do as partners. And then I’m getting to know Mike, and it’s been a great partnership. I was in Buffalo last week talking to community partners who think very highly of M&T and that’s what we want to hear when we go into community. So…
Keegan
Well, you said you loved buffalo.
Crosby
I did love my experience in Buffalo.
Keegan
Well, that’s your appropriate way to look at it.
Crosby
I loved my experience in Buffalo.
Keegan
They say the snow will be out in August.
Crosby
Well, I’ll be back in August, in August for that one day that there would be no snow.
Well, first, Mike is with M& T Bank, and he is the Senior Executive Vice President and Head of Community Banking. And then we have Brant, who is the president of Consumer and regional banking at Huntington. And so we’re going to spend a little bit of time talking about their experience with the community benefit agreement process, and talking a little bit about how that’s changed, the internal culture of their institutions and some of the things, the products and services that have come out of that experience. And then we’re going to ask them to give you at least one tip to lead with, or to lead with as an institution or a community partner that are working together in the local community. So I’ll start. I’m going to start with Brant, and then I’m going to Mike, if that’s all right?
Keegan
I’m still going to be over here.
Crosby
I’m just going in alphabetical order so I won’t forget about you. So Brant, why don’t you tell me a little bit about how the the partnership with NCRC has changed, or changes the way that you deliver products and services, and share some examples of things that have happened with the internal culture.
Standridge
Well, listen, first of all, Katy, thank you for having me. We really appreciate it. It’s great to be here with Mike. We have a really strong partnership with M&T, and we do a lot of things together, and we share ideas. And fundamentally, we believe that companies working together and partners working together, and talking and collaborating and communicating is important for all of us. And so Mike, it’s great to be here with you. And I would just say, This is my first year coming to this conference, and just being in the hallways, the energy in the room and the optimism that you can feel just being here is really, really positive and uplifting. And so thank you all for being here. As it relates to our partnership with NCRC and how does it affect? First of all, this is our third community benefits agreement. This current, yeah, this, this current agreement, we actually have a year and a half left. We made a $40 billion commitment and Stacy Glenn Short, who leads that for us, is sitting in the front row. She says we’ll be done by July. I say we’ll be done by June.
So anyway, it’s a really important part of what we do. And I think M&T and Huntington both share this common view, which is our businesses ultimately revolve around the communities that we serve and the success, frankly, of our businesses revolve around the success of the communities that we serve, and so our business is all about being local. And I will tell you that these agreements that we have create reporting and accountability for the company, and it creates accountability within the organization, but it’s also core to just what we do every day. And the more successful we are with our agreement, the more successful we are in delivering, the more successful our communities will be, and ultimately, Huntington can be more successful. We have formed as a part of our agreement, a National Advisory Committee, NCAC. There’s a number of you that are here today, and I just want to thank you for your service there, and I will tell you everything that we do from a product or delivery perspective we vet with that committee. And so we have a number of examples of things that we’ve done over the course of the last three or four years that have all originated from feedback we’ve received from that committee. We have a program where we lend to end from a small business perspective to underserved communities. We call that Lift local. We committed originally $20 million we’re now at $200 million. We’ve served 1700 businesses through that. We have a mortgage program that offers home buyers assistance. It is, it is our portfolio. It’s not dependent on one of the agencies. And we have through that what we call ‘Home for Good’ program, which was created through our NCAC committee. We’ve served 2,000 homeowners, and so that would be just two examples of things that we’ve done, but every product or service that we provide, we use that committee as a sounding board, and frankly, we then take their feedback, you know, as we think about developing products or services that are going to better serve the community. So I would say that our agreement and then the committee that we have around it has had a big role in how we serve communities, and I think made the organization a lot better. I just want to say Katy is the chair of that and does a super job. And is that every one of our board meetings and I will tell you as we’ve had, as we’ve had circumstances arise in an individual community we’ve we’ve frankly leveraged our committee to help us advise us on how best to handle it. We actually had a situation in our Cleveland community where we had to deal with a specific branch and some things related to crime in the area around the branch, Katy and our NCAC board got involved, helped us get to the right place. And it’s just another example of taking advantage and really utilizing the partnership that you have with each of you and the leaders in the community. So that was a long answer to your question. We really appreciate the partnership.
Crosby
Awesome. Thank you. We appreciate it too. So how about you, Mike?
Keegan
I’ll start by saying, Brant, first of all, glad to be with you. And Katy as always, she’s on our advisory board too. So with all our board members, the community advisory board for M&T folks here today, no?
Crosby
No, actually, we have a few. Come on. Don’t be shy. Don’t be shy.
Keegan
I think there’s two people in the audience, either I’ve got glaucoma or something. Oh, there you are. So when we first had started this conversation, which was a few years back, one of the things we were told was, pay attention to the way Huntington Bank does it. So I just we, we’ve just met over the last few days, and I know Steve Steinour very well. And what I realized right away was that this is work that matters. It’s not an obligation, it’s what we do. We just need to do it better. So when we first started these conversations, one of the most impactful things for me was our senior leadership team. Almost everyone participated in those five, two hour calls. So 10 hours, Renee Jones was in every one of them. And what was great for our leadership team to hear is that not everyone loves banks. I know it’s shocking. I mean, I was like, What do you mean? You don’t like banks and you don’t serve us. And it was very apparent to us in that moment that when we talk about being a bank for communities, we weren’t reaching every community, and how could we think about that differently? And how could we think about that better? So my view of this is it’s a partnership. We get together with the advisory board twice a year, and it’s a session in which we engage actively in what’s going on. What are the things that are important to you? What are the things that we should be focusing on? And what we do is we take those insights and then we activate on them, whether it’s renewable energy, whether it’s meeting with partners in the state of Connecticut that might want to do something, bank on products in Connecticut, where our former institution that we acquired doesn’t offer them, and something as simple as… So how many of you are familiar with there was a there was a massacre at a top supermarket in Buffalo, New York. People familiar with that? So one of the aha moments for me, beyond the tragedy was we have a branch right across the street. And it was fascinating how all of our employees from across the footprint, started putting stuff in cars and delivering them, literally to the branch, whatever people needed. And we decided that we needed to come up with a sustainable way to support that community. But the real issue was when I went to the branch and I met with Sydney Johnson, who was the assistant manager at the time, I said, tell me what’s going on. And she said she talked a lot about the community the east side of Buffalo that the challenges, but she said we only have a mortgage banker who shows up here one day a week and spends a couple hours with us. And I said, Now this shows how stupid I am. I said, So what’s what’s wrong with that? She goes, if we want to put people in homes you can’t show up for two hours and think you’re going to write a mortgage application, you need to show up differently. So Brad and his team, most of the folks, are here today. We went on a real intentional mission of hiring CRA mortgage bankers that actually would sit with people and walk with them as opposed to wait to them to come to us. So that’s one of the elements of our partnership that I think is special.
Crosby
Thanks, Mike, I will say on Thursday, we’re going to be meeting with some of our CAC members. We actually have about 50 CAC members with different institutions, and one of the things we are talking to them about are best practices. And we’re going to be creating tool kits for other banks who are entering into these partnerships, and both of you have portions of the work that you doing that will be a part of that tool kit, so thank you.
Keegan
Is that the new best practice: don’t have me on stage?
Crosby
So you both touched on this a little bit, but I want to go a little bit deeper into how some of the CBAs have led to some unexpected business opportunities and new market expansion. So I’ll start with you, Mike.
Keegan
So a few things that they’ve led to is just, it’s a heightened level of awareness. So again, this is my learning journey. In the last three years, my eyes have been open to things that were in front of me, but I didn’t see. You know, if you think about appraisals, and the appraisal issue that goes on and how people’s homes are valued differently, clearly a discriminatory practice. How we access business communities, simple things like, don’t bring them into an institution where you try to intimidate them by dressing up and having them in the office, but meet people where they are, hire people from where they are. And when you start to do that, thank you. When you start to do that, what you find is you generate enormous amounts of business. The other thing I found in this work is this isn’t, we’re helping someone, or it’s philanthropy, or it’s giveaways and all that kind of crap. This is just basic economic sense. Really smart people live everywhere. They have great ideas, and if we create an opportunity to convene, connect, collaborate and communicate, we all win. And so that’s kind of the moment where I think we’re at. I was incredibly naive. I used to have red hair. I had an afro, and I’d make an onion cry, as my mother used to say. But the whole idea that I was walking around thinking, Yeah, we serve our communities, was false. If we don’t walk with people and learn what’s around us we won’t see it. So that was a moment.
Standridge
So I give a couple of examples. One, as I said, we have we vet everything that we do from a product or service perspective with our National Advisory Committee. There were two that, two things that jumped out at us that, frankly, were surprising. One, and this is very granular, but specific, is that 25 or 26% of the US population deals with a dependent adult, yet banks aren’t really well equipped or set up for caring for those that may be caring for another dependent adult, whether it’s shared access or protection or fraud against them. And so that is an example, very simply, of an insight that we received and kind of these conversations that’s then translated into how we think about building and we’ve now built an entire suite of products around ensuring that caregivers are in a good position to support those that are providing care for. That’s a very specific product example. The other component I would mention this goes to the point Mike was making, is that as we think about how we communicate things our marketing team, everything that we do from a brand perspective, everything that we do from a communication perspective, we use our NCAC, our advisory committee, to vet that, to say, Okay, how, how is this? Are we communicating in the way we want to communicate? Is this landing in the way that we want it to land? Are we really sending the message that we want to send? So I think those things are incredibly helpful. And I couldn’t agree more with the point that we have to represent our communities and how we show up. We should represent our communities and how we hire and we work very, very diligently to do that across the company. And I believe that these partnerships only enhance our ability to do it.
Crosby
One thing I will say that’s consistent with both M&T and Huntington Bank is that the learning is both ways. So you know, when Huntington has a CAC, there’s always a workshop and there’s a topic Stacy and I will usually talk before the meeting about, you know, what’s a good topic to create a learning opportunity for the CAC members. And then with M&T, I remember I was trying to figure out this whole environmental tax credit situation that was just totally mind boggling to me. I had an opportunity to meet with one of your team members over coffee here in Virginia. But then you also had a special session for members to come and learn more about those text tax credits and the benefit to the community. So I think that’s the other thing that’s really important about the partnerships, is that there’s this two-way learning opportunity you are listening to community and using that to help reshape how you provide products and services. The other feedback is also like the internal culture of cross-collaboration. We hear a lot about that, but then there’s also this opportunity for our CAC members to learn and take that information back to community. So I appreciate that.
So in this environment, and we’re seeing a lot of folks community partners dealing with the federal freeze and trying to figure out how to sustain their organizations. Tell me a little bit about your approach to continuing community investment and how that remains a priority regardless of shifts that are happening.
Standridge
I mean, I would say that it goes back to the point I made at the beginning, which is we view this as to core the success of the company. The more we can invest in the communities that we serve, the more successful they are, the more successful will be as an organization. So while the climate could change, there’s clearly uncertainty that I know everyone in this room is dealing with and we’re all dealing with, but that doesn’t change the fact that our communities need to be successful in order for we as a company to be successful, and we want to contribute to that. And so that core mission we have of investing back, understanding our communities and doing our best to serve them as well as we possibly can, hasn’t changed.
Crosby
Mike?
Keegan
Yeah, this is certainly a moment, and I think it’s a theme that we should continue to repeat. One of the greatest gifts that M and T are. Many of our folks already saw this, but many of our employees didn’t. Is the work that each of you do every day changes so many lives, and you do it, always resource-constrained, always trying to find different ways in which you can actually get your job done. But people who are purpose-built and mission-driven, of which all of you are, it’s a real gift. And the more that other people see that, like when I come to these sessions, and I sit through and I hear about how we’re trying to address an issue around affordable housing. And you know Steve Glaude, and what he’s doing in DC. I mean, all that you think about is, how can I help him do more? And I think the capacity of banks not just to provide capital, but provide connection, bring other people in to see the work is one of the greatest drivers. I think for me, this is kind of related to what you had just brought up, Katy, is we made a contribution, iss if Dan Bettencourt’s here? I don’t know if he’s around. Dan, are you here?
Crosby
Yeah, he’s here. Where you at, Dan?
Keegan
He’s probably not on this session. He’s like, I don’t want to listen to Mike Keegan, but I remember meeting with him and his team, and he said, we want to form a credit union in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and we’re going to move into North Philly. And what we learned early on in banking, I don’t know if you were trained the same way, is that banks can’t like credit unions. It’s like this, you know, evil, enemy-type thing. And so I listened to what he was talking about, and what I realized in that moment is, if we supported that cause, he would bring people who were unbanked or under-banked into the financial system. And if we have a collective goal, safety and security and access to capital is critical. Banks want that. So I don’t care what the channel is. We have to earn the right to get those folks business. But I would rather see someone start somewhere. So that was another version of how this collaboration really helped out. So we’re in really interesting times. Is probably the most unemotional way to say it, but it doesn’t mean that collectively, we can’t carry on this work. And it doesn’t mean that for the 160+ years that we’ve been doing this, not me personally, even though I look like crap, but that we’ve been doing this work, that we are going to fundamentally go in a different direction. This is what we do, and this is how we do it, and we need your help to kind of show us where we need to do it better.
Crosby
Thank you. The last month or so, this book called, The Sum of Us, has been coming up over and over and over again, so I finally downloaded it and read it, and I think the message that you both are communicating is that you aren’t successful without us, and we’re not successful without you. And so I think that’s a commitment that whenever I meet with you all, I hear that through and through, and so that’s what I’m hearing from your comments today. So one last question for you all, if you were to talk to community members about how to engage with institutions in the local community or to other institutions, we have a few that we’re working on, and I’m excited about an announcement later on today, but other institutions that are considering partnering with NCRC to go through this process. What are some points that you’d like to leave them with?
Keegan
Reach out and find someone that you can connect with. I mean, you don’t have to reach out to the CEO, per se, but just, connect with someone and start to share your story. I think we live our best version of our lives by telling stories, because we can all relate to a story. So the work that you’re doing and why it matters is probably the best way to access it. So there’s this woman who’s probably not in the audience, Simone Crawford, and we got a bunch of…
Crosby
Simone is here too. She actually texted me right before we got all up here.
Keegan
Alright. So I love a lot of things about Simone, but one is we both are from Dorchester, or Dodd Avenue, as we like to call it. But there was this one opportunity for us to join this program called One Plus and One Plus Boston, and we dropped the ball. It was technology and all sorts of issues. She did not let us off the hook. So I remember, for one of the dinners, she pulled me, I ran it over to her because I didn’t want her to tackle me. And I said, I want you to meet this mortgage person, because we’re working on it. And she said, Listen, I put myself out there for M&T, and I need you to do the same for us. This is an important program, and Simone, we finally got there. But to me, that’s the power of persistence. Don’t back away from trying to connect with us and invite people to come here and observe the sessions and understand that when you start to take a session or two away, the power of what we can create, both in terms of helping people and creating economic opportunities, is crazy positive. Sorry, I went too long. I do want to say one other thing: we did follow Huntington, so the work that Brant and his team did, we followed that model, and I think we’re better off for having done that. And the way you engage with the groups, particularly the advisory board, is model behavior, and we’re trying to get there.
Standridge
Awesome. Well, thank you. And first of all, just thank you all for what you do every day. I think Katy just said it exactly right that we can’t be successful without you, and we believe that we can play a role in everyone in this room’s success as well. So thank you all for that, I would just say, and it’d be very similar to what Mike just described, is that engagement is really important, and investing the time to meet people and get to know the organization, whether that’s one person locally or whether that’s many people in the organization, investing the time to do that and our team, we all want to do exactly the same thing. Be willing to be transparent with each other about what’s working and what’s not working, but also be solutions-oriented. What can we do to solve the problem, and how we how can we solve the problem together, and how do we create a path to a solution? I think that type of conversation is, you know, clearly really important. And I also believe that the more that we collectively understand about each other, the more we can easily, we can work together to make our communities better. And so that knowledge of each other is, I think, really, really important. So, I would ask, I think Mike, you’re kind of saying this too, is, you know, be patient with us, because I do believe that as an industry, independent of just Mike and I here representing Huntington and M&T, our industry wants to see communities thrive and so we but we don’t always get it right. I can give you many, many examples of us as a company, or we as an industry not getting it right. And so that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t still come together, because I do believe that both of us working together is a part of this journey that we’re all on. And so we would just ask for your grace and patience as we learn together.
Crosby
I will say this, it is a relationship. You know, most of our CACs are either three years or five years, and with any relationship, the experience grows. And what I’ve found is that on the CACs that are the strongest. There’s that ability to have that dialog, and there’s the ability, as you said, you know, for Simone to say, Mike, what’s up?
Keegan
You know, she didn’t say it that nicely.
Crosby
She is so sweet.
Keegan
She’s awesome.
Crosby
No, but, but I think you but you know Simone well enough. Because of that experience, to understand that it is about making the bank better and helping to make the community better. And I think that’s been the experience with all of the CAC that I’ve been on, particularly with you, with you all. So I want to say thank you again for being great partners. The last thing that I would leave with is what I’ve gotten from you all and with some of our other partners, is how it has changed the internal culture of the organization in terms of, I don’t know if this has been your experience, but with some of the institutions we talked to about that, about cross-collaboration.
Standridge
Well, Katy, one thing I would add to what you’re saying is, when we think about recruiting colleagues to our company, this is one of the things that our colleagues is most are most attractive to I mean, our colleagues take a tremendous amount of pride in knowing that our company is committed to making a difference and so we view it as the most important part of the company. And the company’s success is culture. And one of the big attributes of culture is this concept of care, of really caring about the communities that you serve, caring about the people that you work with. And so this work that we do actually allows us to attract people that are passionate about it, because they want to be a part of a company that thinks like, you know, both of our companies think.
Keegan
So, we did an acquisition a few years ago, and it didn’t go perfectly, but it went okay. And we had this one guy, the first guy I met. He was a state representative from Connecticut, and it was the first of probably 1,000 conversations I had, and he said to me, my grandfather, my father and I all bank with peoples united and you don’t represent my community. That was the first phone call. It was a WebEx during during the pandemic. And I’m like, holy cow, this is what we’re in for. So over the course of the next year, I got to know him a lot better. I walked the neighborhoods that he served. I got to meet folks, got to meet his family. His son actually came and worked for us, and he’s become one of our biggest advocates, because we said something very simple, and I think it’s very applicable for the environment we’re in today. Judge us by what we do. Hold us to that standard, because people are saying lots of things today, but it’s what we do that matters. So each year, or often, more often, we gather just just hold us to account. We should hold each other to account in terms of the progress we make. But the irony of hiring Chris’ son, who’s Christopher, was during this conversion that didn’t go well. People were upset with us, and he was at this event, and he took out his M&T debit card. You can get a Huntington one as well, but you can get an M&T but you can brand it with different flags. And his family is from Puerto Rico, so he had the Puerto Rican flag on his debit card. And someone who was complaining about M&T said, Where did you get that? He goes, I got it at M&T, I can get you one. And I’m like, What a great leveling when you actually go into communities and you hire really talented people who can then carry the culture, which is what you’re saying, forward, because we all want to do the right thing, we just need to be reminded of what that is sometimes.
Crosby
Well, that was perfect timing. We got all zeros now, so our flashing red line, yeah, well, I will say this, thank you very much for sharing your stories. You know, I welcome any institution in the room to, you know, pull Brant and Mike aside to talk about their experience. Feel free to come and talk to me, but, but thank you very much. It’s been a great partnership.
Keengan and Standridge
Awesome. Thank you.
