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Jonathan Dowst
President and CEO, Pentucket Bank
Age: 58
Industry experience: 36 years
Jonathan Dowst had just retired after nearly 30 years at Fleet Bank and Bank of America when Pentucket Bank’s then-CEO Scott Cote called. A friend and former colleague from Fleet Bank, Cote was preparing a leadership succession plan ahead of multiple executive retirements, and he wanted Dowst to be part of plan. Dowst, who had started his banking career at community banks in New Hampshire, gave up his short-lived retirement and joined Haverhill-based Pentucket Bank in 2019, becoming president in 2020 and CEO this summer after Cote retired from that role.
The $929 million-asset Pentucket Bank has six branches in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The bank will reach $1 billion in assets in the next 12 to 18 months, Dowst said, and is about to embark on a rebranding process.
Q: What are your goals for Pentucket Bank?
A: To understand our goals, we need to start with our mission and who we are. As a community bank – a mutually-owned community bank – we are mission-oriented. Pentucket Bank exists for its community and customers and employees. We started to talk about being “a bank with heart,” meaning we go the extra mile for our communities, for our customers, for our employees. And we’re very human. So, our goals are all about tending to that mission and doing that over the long haul.
In order to do that over the long haul, it’s important that we evolve with our market and with our customers. That evolution is what we have to tend to every day. That change is all about technology and access. While respecting the roots and the history of the bank, we absolutely have to appeal to the future. We’re evolving our brand at the same time. We need to take care of our existing customers and the evolving market. It’s not either/or – you don’t pick one or the other.
As part of that evolution from a goals perspective, especially as a community bank, we need to reflect our market. It becomes more and more diverse every day. We need to reflect the diversity of our community at the board level, at the corporator level, at the employee and leadership level, with our community partners we engage with. We’ve started, but it’s a long process.
Q: What will be some challenges in going through that process?
A: All employers right now have challenges with recruiting and retention. We’re no different. But we also have the opportunity to use our mission and our corporate social responsibility to do the things that help us with recruiting and retention. All the literature talks about – and we’re seeing the same thing – that we need to create meaning with jobs, we need to be flexible. Being mission-based, being smaller, we can do both of those things perhaps more readily than some of our larger peer and competitor banks.
Q: What are some opportunities for Pentucket Bank in rebranding?
A: As part of our goals, we talk about: “We make money to give it away.” We’ve always had that ethos. I don’t think it’s been obvious in our branding. “Bank with heart” – we really do mean it. You could bank with us forever, and if you weren’t engaged with us in some deeper way, you might not ever see that. The brand should probably shout that out a little more loudly than it does.
Q: What plans do you have to achieve that?
A: We do have a very specific branding exercise that kicks off this month. And that’ll be probably a year-long process. It wouldn’t be obvious to the public until well into next year, but it starts with focus groups and feedback from customers, from employees, from non-customers in our market.
One investment we’ll be making is in our branches. We’re proud of our branches. They’re full service; they’re kind of classy branches. We put extra money into landscaping and making sure they’re well-furnished and always clean and painted. And they’re pretty old-fashioned. As we again look forward to the future, we’re talking with some companies that specialize in branch transformation about modernizing the look and feel and functionality of the branches.
Q: What are your thoughts on mergers and acquisitions?
A: We have a really strong balance sheet. We run 12 percent capital, so we generally double the regulatory requirements of capital that you need, which means a few things. One, you have the capital to maintain steady lending criteria through the cycle. Meaning we don’t tighten our loan standards when there’s a recession. We’re not afraid of making loans when times are tough. It also means that if opportunities present themselves with banks that might not have the same type of excess capital, we would be able to jump on them. It’s not core to what we do, though. Our mission is about taking care of our community, our customers and our employees. We make money to give it away. Now if we’re bigger, we can make more money, and we can give more money away. If you’re not growing, you’re dying, so we will make sure we don’t get squeezed out of the market. If you looked at our strategic plan, acquiring other banks isn’t high on the list.
Q: What are some challenges that Pentucket Bank is facing?
A: Every bank, every company is challenged right now with all the information security, ransomware attacks and all that going on. We do spend a ton of time on it. An increasing amount of our budget – human and technology budget – is dedicated to information security, technology security, network strength, redundancy, all of those things. It’s interesting. It’s a competition. The bad guys are trying to get you, and you’re trying to make sure that they don’t get you. Part of our brand as we evolve has to – and will – reflect how secure we maintain our environment.
Dowst’s Five Favorite Songs to Perform as a Drummer
- “Train Kept A Rollin’” by Aerosmith
- “Danger” by Eric Clapton and J.J. Cale
- “Ride On Josephine” by George Thorogood
- Both Stevie Ray Vaughan’s and Stevie Wonder’s versions of “Superstition”
- Any of several Rolling Stones songs
