Mount Kisco resident and Westchester County native Cathie A. Schaffer has been named regional president of the recently formed tristate region of First Niagara Financial Group Inc.
She will lead a team at First Niagara Bank responsible for business banking, middle market lending and corporate lending in the lower Hudson Valley, Fairfield County, Conn., and northern New Jersey. Schaffer, former senior vice president and division manager at JPMorgan Chase & Co., also will oversee the alignment and collaborative delivery of all consumer and commercial products across the region.
Since acquiring HSBC Bank USA”™s network of banks throughout upstate New York and the suburban metropolitan area in 2012, First Niagara operates 26 branches in the seven-county Hudson Valley region and 14 branches in Connecticut. First Niagara’s insurance business, Pierson & Smith, a division of First Niagara Risk Management, also operates in the region with an office in Norwalk, Conn.
Schaffer will divide her time between the company’s central regional office in Nyack and its Norwalk office. She will report to David V. Ring, managing director of enterprise banking at First Niagara. Ring is responsibility for commercial business lending activities in all markets where the bank operates.
Ring in a statement said Schaffer “knows this market and its needs inside and out and has a proven track record of strengthening customer relationships, delivering top-notch sales and service results and providing innovative solutions to meet customer needs” in what he called an important growth region for the Buffalo-based bank.
At JPMorgan Chase, Schaffer managed middle market banking in a territory that spanned the Hudson Valley, Westchester, the Bronx and southern Connecticut. She began her career of more than 20 years in New York City with The Bank of New York, where she rose to the position of senior vice president and group head of commercial banking for the bank”™s Westchester-Putnam-Bronx region.
Schaffer has served on the boards of the Business Council of Westchester and the Food Bank for Westchester.
“I am excited by the opportunity to help make a real difference for customers in a market that I know so well,” she said in a statement.
First Niagara Financial Group, through its wholly owned subsidiary, First Niagara Bank N.A., operates nearly 430 community-oriented branches with about 6,000 employees in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The bank has approximately $38 billion in assets and $29 billion in deposits.
First Niagara officials last month announced the “mutually agreed upon departure” of John R. Koelmel as corporate president and CEO. Gary M. Crosby, executive vice president and chief administrative and operations officer of First Niagara, was named interim president and CEO while the bank board seeks a permanent replacement for Koelmel, whose forced resignation reportedly was linked to the company”™s HSBC deal. .
