- Joseph D. Roberto at PCSB’s new Yorktown Heights headquarters.
Delivery truck crews unloaded boxes of new office furniture in a lifting morning fog as Joseph D. Roberto began the work week in his new corner office in his company”™s new headquarters in Yorktown Heights. Framed photos of New York Yankee greats on the walls of his CEO office were among the few adornments already in place in the 25,000-square-foot headquarters of PCSB Bank. The bank”™s colorful new logo, featuring blue lettering and a green-leafed blue tree, was newly mounted behind the reception desk in the small front lobby.
Roberto led a visitor on a tour of the single-story office at 2651 Strang Boulevard in Northern Westchester Executive Park as bank employees in the first wave of a staggered relocation settled into their departments”™ new quarters and learned to navigate an initially confounding maze of corridors. Roberto, the bank”™s president, chairman and CEO since 2012, said about 65 to 70 employees will work in Yorktown Heights when the relocation is completed in mid-January.
Built 50 years ago, the approximately 150,000-square-foot building originally was occupied by IBM Corp., said Roberto, and later by Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield, but has been largely vacant for a few years after the health insurer relocated in the Hudson Valley. Mercy College is the building”™s only other tenant.
The office park”™s landlord, GHP Office Realty LLC, last year acquired the two-building property, the former Taconic Corporate Park, after a previous owner defaulted on a $14.5 million mortgage. GHP said it invested $6 million in capital improvements last winter. PCSB officials said the landlord gutted the space and redesigned it for the new bank tenant in a 4-month buildout.
Roberto opened a door and pointed to a long conference table. “We finally have a boardroom that will fit everyone” on the bank”™s nine-member board, he said. The new headquarters also has an employee training classroom that Roberto said might be made available for community uses.
“It seems like a lot of space, but it will be filled,” he said of the still largely empty office.
“This was the perfect location, because two miles up the highway, you”™re up in Putnam County,” where many PCSB employees live, said Roberto, an East Fishkill resident. The Yorktown location also puts the bank”™s headquarters at the center of its expanded geographical footprint.
Until a few months ago, PCSB operated as Putnam County Savings Bank, a state-chartered mutual savings bank based in Brewster that has operated in that county since 1871. The name change and the move of its corporate operations center to northern Westchester follows the bank”™s expansion into southern Westchester County this year with its acquisition of CMS Bancorp Inc. in White Plains and the publicly traded holding company”™s five CMS Bank branches in Eastchester, Greenburgh, Mount Vernon, West Harrison and Mount Kisco.
With the acquisition, PCSB has $1.2 billion in assets and a total of 182 employees, up from about 145 employees previously. PCSB”™s main banking office will remain in Brewster.
The formal name change ”“ the acronym already was commonly used by the bank and its established customers ”“ with the bank”™s new logo ”“ the tree”™s 15 leaves only coincidentally match the number of PSCB branches in four counties ”“ “kind of symbolizes the rebirth of the bank in terms of what we”™ve tried to accomplish,” said Roberto. “Putnam has always been the sleepy bank. It existed for 143 years but no one knew about it.”
For Roberto, the CMS acquisition has been more than a strategic business move he opportunely pursued. “Personally, I”™ve kind of gone full circle,” he said.
A Mount Vernon native, Roberto opened his first bank account at the former Mount Vernon Savings and Loan with earnings from his newspaper delivery route. That bank later became CMS. PCSB now operates its southernmost branch in Mount Vernon.
Roberto”™s own start and rise in a nearly 43-year banking career seems a story from a bygone American era.
A 1970 graduate of Mount Vernon High School, he was pursuing business studies at Pace University with no clear career ambitions and packing groceries at the former Ashburton Food Center in Yonkers, where Roberto”™s father was store manager. A vice president of Yonkers Savings and Loan Bank shopped there every Saturday, Roberto recalled, and the Pace student was regularly rewarded with a 10-cent tip for carrying the banker”™s groceries on a three-block uphill walk to his home.
The banker one day offered the grocery clerk a job as a teller. “I never thought I was going to get into banking at all,” Roberto said. “I looked at it as an opportunity. I said, why not? I took the job.”
At 20, he began work at Yonkers Savings and Loan. He never completed studies for a college degree.
“I grew with the bank,” he said. Twenty-three years after his hiring, he was named CFO when the Yonkers savings bank went public in 1996.
By 2002, when the bank was sold to Atlantic Bank of New York, it had grown from one branch and $50 million in assets at the start of Roberto”™s career to nine branches and $650 million in assets.
“Back then with a small community bank like that, you were allowed to understand all aspects of banking,” he said. “You really weren”™t specialized in any one area. Today, everybody”™s a specialist. It”™s a little tougher today to have to ability to grow with the bank.”
Leaving the Yonkers bank after its sale, “I bounced around for three years” in posts at four banks, Roberto said. “I wanted to find a spot where I could spend the rest of my career.”
Roberto had sent his executive resume to Daniel Ryan, president of Putnam County Savings Bank. Three years later, he heard back from Ryan.
“I said, ”˜I”™ve been waiting by the phone for your call for three years.”™” Roberto in 2005 was hired as CFO at Putnam County Savings Bank. After Ryan”™s retirement in 2011, Roberto the next year was named to succeed him as president, chairman and CEO.
“When I took over the bank, I had a different vision for the bank,” he said. “I thought we had something special here.” With its footprint in Putnam, northern Westchester and southern Dutchess counties, “I believed the bank had the potential to be a force for banking in the Hudson Valley” that could compete with larger regional banks.
Consolidations in the industry had caused a “dramatic decline” nationwide in the number of banking institutions, leaving a void in the community banking sector, Roberto said. The Westchester Bank, which opened in 2008 in Yonkers, had filled the void left by Yonkers Savings and Loan. Greater Hudson Bank, founded in 2002 and recapitalized in 2008, had similarly stepped in to meet a need for community banks in the region, he said.
“That”™s what we looked at as a great opportunity for us,” Roberto said, “believing that our size ”“ almost $1 billion ”“ gave us some nice flexibility” to make larger commercial loans of up to $15 million and compete with regional banks while providing the smaller business loans, home mortgages and personal service of a local bank.
PCSB in 2013 opened its first Rockland County branch in New City. But Roberto had visions of expansion in his native Westchester, where the Brewster-based bank had three branch offices.
Opportunity came when CMS Bancorp”™s announced $20.8 million merger deal with Customer Bancorp Inc. in suburban Philadelphia was terminated in 2013. Roberto said he began negotiations with CMS after that deal fell through. Putnam County Savings Bank in 2014 agreed to acquire CMS in an approximately $25.4 million all-cash deal completed earlier this year.
“The merger with CMS Bank did give us a nice solid footprint in the White Plains area and south that we did not have before,” Roberto said.
As a community bank, “We will still maintain the philosophy that person-to-person customer service is important, and a good portion of our customer base. We realize that not everybody embraces technology in the banking world today.”
Does PCSB plan to further expand in Westchester and the Hudson Valley?
Not in the near future, Roberto indicated. With the CMS deal and the move to new headquarters, “It”™s one of those things now where you”™ve got to let everything settle in,” he said.
“If there are opportunities, we”™ll just extend our footprint,” said Roberto. “It has to make business sense for us.”
