28 - Rooted in Community: Why Local Decisions Matter

Your money has power—not just for you, but for your entire community. In this episode, Daniel and Shanna explain what it actually means to be "Rooted in Community" at First Century Bank. We trace the "Life Cycle of a Local Dollar" to show how your deposits fuel local dreams, and we compare the human-driven decisions of our Loan Committee—comprised of senior management who live and work right here—to the cold algorithms of national mega-banks. Tune in to learn why choosing a local bank is a vote for your neighborhood, and get a simple challenge to help you support the "circular economy" in your own community this week. 

Take a quick photo of your local find or that morning coffee and post it on social media. Use the hashtag #rootedincommunity so we can all share in supporting our neighbors. 

Is your sensitive financial data sitting in an unsecured mailbox? Switching to e-Statements is one of the easiest ways to protect yourself from identity theft. Moving your records from the street into our high-security digital vault provides faster access, clears the clutter, and keeps your information safe. 

Subscribe today, wherever you listen to your podcasts (Spotify, Apple Podcast, etc.) and send your questions to podcast@fcbtn.com.

Transcript

Shanna Browning 0:00

All right, Daniel, I want to do a little thought experiment with you today.

Daniel Hill 0:05

Okay. I'm intrigued. What's the setup?

Shanna Browning 0:08

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Imagine a business owner right here in our area. They've been a staple in the community for a decade. They have a solid plan to expand and they've spent 20 years learning that trade. But they decide to call a 1-800 number for a big national bank because that's where they've always had a personal credit card.

Daniel Hill 0:28

Okay. I see where you're going. They spend an hour on the phone with someone in a different time zone. They upload their tax documents to a generic portal and they wait. Right.

Shanna Browning 0:39

And when the answer comes back, it's a no. Not because the business isn't successful and not because the owner isn't capable. When you've spent that many years doing your trade, you know what you're doing. But simply because their specific type of business or the age of the building they want to renovate doesn't fit into a pre-programmed risk category on a server hallway across the country.

Daniel Hill 1:01

To that computer, they're just a standardized data point that doesn't fit the mold. That's right.

Shanna Browning 1:07

But now imagine that same person walks into one of our first century bank branches. They sit down with a lender who is actually shopped at their store, who knows their family, and who understands that the neighborhood is practically begging for this expansion.

Daniel Hill 1:23

That is what we call the rooted in community difference. It's the difference between being a data point and being a neighbor. Today, we're going to pull back the curtain on where your money actually goes when you deposit it with us and why local decisions are the heartbeat of a thriving town.

Shanna Browning 1:59

And hello friends, I'm Shanna Browning, and we're closing out April with an episode that is very, so very close to our hearts. At First Entry Bank, we often talk about being rooted in community. But today we want to explain exactly what that looks like in practice.

Daniel Hill 2:17

Banking can sometimes feel like a cold world of numbers. But at its core, community banking is about relationships.

Shanna Browning 2:26

Absolutely.

Daniel Hill 2:27

It's the fact that the person making the decision on your loan might be the same person you see at the grocery store or the high school football game on Friday night.

Shanna Browning 2:37

Which I love. And today we're going to talk about the life cycle of a local dollar, the history that built our foundation, and why choosing where your bank is actually a vote for the future of your own neighborhood. So, Daniel, when we say rooted in community, so often that I think it's important to stop and define it. To us, community isn't just a place on a map. It is a verb. It's an action. It's something you do.

Daniel Hill 3:03

That is a great point. If you walk into any of our branches, you aren't just seeing employees who are there to process checks. You're seeing people who are deeply invested in the life of their town. We have little league coaches, people active in local civic and service organizations, and team members who spend their Tuesday nights serving on the boards of local nonprofits in food pantries.

Shanna Browning 3:29

And I love every bit of that. And it's really about sweat equity. It's one thing for a bank to write a check for a sponsorship. And we certainly do that to support our local schools and band programs, but it's another thing entirely for the staff to be the ones that are out there flipping the burgers at the high school fundraiser or volunteering at the community festival.

Daniel Hill 3:50

That presence is what gives us our roots. And if you think about an oak tree, the part you see is above the ground, the branches and the leaves. That represents the shelter and the sponsorships we provide. But the part underneath the roots, that is the personal time our team spends building those relationships.

Shanna Browning 4:15

And what I love about those roots is that they mean we're sharing the same life as our neighbors are. Whether we're running into each other at the grocery store, cheering on our local teams, taking our families to church on Sunday mornings, that shared connection means we aren't just observing the community, we are part of its fabric.

Daniel Hill 4:35

It changes the entire perspective of our bank. While a national bank might focus purely on spreadsheets, we focus on the potential of our neighbors because we're right there with you. We have a front row seat to the dreams and successes of the people around us. We aren't just here for the safe moments. We're here as a proactive partner to help the community grow and flourish year after year.

Shanna Browning 5:04

And when our neighbor walks in with a big dream, they aren't talking to a stranger. They're talking to someone who's rooting for them. We're rooting for these people to succeed because when they succeed, we succeed. And that shared growth is what makes being a community bank so rewarding. It's about building a foundation where everyone can thrive. The active presence is fueled by what we call the life cycle of a local dollar, just as you mentioned previous. So when someone puts $100 into a savings account at First Century Bank, what happens to that money?

Daniel Hill 5:40

Well, your deposit stays local. It becomes the fuel of our local lending.

Shanna Browning 5:48

And I love that theory. So my deposit of $100 might be part of the loan for a young couple building their first home three streets over.

Daniel Hill 5:58

Exactly. Or it might be helping a farmer upgrade his equipment, or a local restaurant owner adding a new patio. When you bank locally, your money stays in the local ecosystem. It creates jobs, it builds homes, it grows the tax base that pays for our schools and parks.

Shanna Browning 6:17

And so let's compare that to a national huge mega bank. If you deposit there, that capital might be sent anywhere in the world to fund a corporate project that has zero impact in our area or your area. Wow.

Daniel Hill 6:32

That is what we call the capital leakage problem. When money leaves the community, the community gets weak. But when money stays rooted, the community gets stronger. Every time you deposit a dollar here, you're essentially investing in your own backyard.

Shanna Browning 6:55

That local investment only works because of how we make decisions. So if I apply for a loan at a big national bank, who is actually deciding if I get it?

Daniel Hill 7:07

Well, in many cases, it's not a who. It's a what. It's an algorithm. They plug your score and income into a program and it spits out the answer. There's very little room for context.

Shanna Browning 7:21

But as we know, life isn't always a perfect credit score. People have stories.

Daniel Hill 7:27

They do. At first century, our our algorithm is a group of people, our loan committee. And that committee is made up of the senior management of the bank, people who live, work, and play right here in our neighborhoods.

Shanna Browning 7:42

And we love our loan committee people because it's a huge distinction. If a borrower had a dip in their credit because of a medical emergency, but we've known their family for years and we know that they are hardworking and reliable, our committee, our loan committee is going to take that into account.

Daniel Hill 8:00

That's the common sense lending we always talk about. We have the flexibility to look at the whole person, not just the three-digit number. We already know the neighborhood because we're part of it.

Shanna Browning 8:13

And that human connection is the heart of everything we do. And we see it play out every day in the questions our neighbors bring to us at our branches.

Daniel Hill 8:24

It really is different. One of the most common questions we hear is what does day-to-day work at a community bank actually look like compared to the big national chains? Is it really that different?

Shanna Browning 8:35

Oh, Daniel, it's night and day. And we know that. In a big chain, employees are often very specialized. But here, we wear a lot of hats. Oh, yes, we do. Our relationship bankers know their customers by name. We aren't just processing transactions. We're solving problems for our neighbors.

Daniel Hill 8:55

Another question we get, especially from people just starting their financial journey, is what are some lessons you've learned the hard way in banking that we can learn the easy way?

Shanna Browning 9:06

And I'd say the biggest lesson is that price isn't everything. People often chase the absolute lowest interest rate they can find from some random digital lender online. But then when something goes wrong, and it will, they can't get a human being on the phone.

Daniel Hill 9:24

We've seen that frustration many times. They come into our branch because they've been on hold for three hours with the call center. The lesson is the value of a local relationship becomes very clear the moment you have a problem. Having a banker, you can actually look in the eyes is worth more than a tiny difference in a rate.

Shanna Browning 9:45

You're speaking my love language here, Daniel. It's perfect.

Daniel Hill 9:49

All right, Shanna. Let's wrap this one up with a simple way for our listeners to put this rooted philosophy into action this week.

Shanna Browning 10:00

All right. Your actionable tip for the week is to support local first. It's so easy.

Daniel Hill 10:09

So easy to default to big online retailers or national chains. I mean, let's be honest here. We all have Amazon Prime, we all have Walmart Plus. I mean, and it's so easy to pull the app out, shop on the app, submit your order. And I mean, in most cases, it shows up on your doorstep. I get that. I do. But this week, we want you, we want to challenge you to make one intentional purchase at a local small business in your community.

Shanna Browning 10:39

Deal. And I think this is easy to do, whether it's grabbing a coffee at a local cafe, buying a gift at a neighborhood boutique, or getting your hardware supplies at the local shop.

Daniel Hill 10:52

And remember, when you spend that dollar locally, that money pays a local employee who buys groceries at a local store, and the taxes stay here. You're literally building your own community with the swipe of your card.

Shanna Browning 11:07

We can talk about this all the time because it's something that's so important to us. Absolutely. And we want to see it. So when you do this, we want you to take a quick photo of your local find or that morning coffee and post it on social media. We want you to use the hashtag rootedincommunity. Again, hashtag rooted in community so we can all share in supporting our neighbors.

Daniel Hill 11:34

And we'll put that hashtag in our show notes so you can see it there as well. It's a small way to show some big love for the people who make our community unique. Oh, they really do. Next week, we're moving to the digital world. Oh, the world of digital. We're going to deep dive into the new frontier of fraud. This is going to be a little, a little eye-opening. Yeah. But we're going to be talking about AI, voice cloning, and how scammers are using technology to try and get around those relationships that we've built.

Shanna Browning 12:18

It's a serious, serious topic. And we want you to be digital, but we're going to give you ways that can help you be preventative for doing those things. So we're going to give you tools to stay one step ahead. Subscribe now so you don't miss that update.

Daniel Hill 12:35

Thanks for being part of our community. Now go out, make some sense of your cents.