ShoreBank Blog

If you’re reading this, you’re part of community banking

by Karen on January 16th, 2009

35 years ago ShoreBank was founded on the South Side of Chicago to provide people unfairly denied credit with access to financial resources and information.  And next week a new President with be sworn in – one who started his career in the same areas ShoreBank has been active.

ShoreBank has always been committed building sustainable communities That mission continues today as ShoreBank is one of the nation’s only triple bottom line financial institutions.

Communities, of course, change . As Joel, our manager of triple bottom line innovations, noted in an earlier post, all he has to do is look out his window to see the transformation that has taken place in the local community – other banks have appeared on many street corners.  But not just the neighborhoods have changed – the way people want to bank is also evolving too.

When I speak at events here in Chicago I often meet people who are very interested in the way ShoreBank does banking.  And they want to invest in this work.  They love the stories of local entrepreneurs creating green collar jobs , green businesses, and of homeowners making energy efficient improvements  – and they love that we work with borrowers in-person.  But like people across the nation they want to manage their savings from a computer at home.  And on a freezing day like today I am definitely in this camp.

Banking online is part of “green banking” and it supports our mission to preserve scarce resources and leave as small an environmental footprint as possible.  We provide statements electronically instead of in the mail and we don’t need to build extra branches to serve our customers.  But how do we create a sense of community when, increasingly, we like to bank alone?

We saw this same challenge in politics this year as now President-elect Obama found a way to engage people using technology – but he still met with countless individuals face to face.  We too are working to broaden the ways we connect with the community of people interested in supporting our traditional personal, one-on-one lending.   So our online presence is changing.  You have already seen some of these initiatives; in fact, you may have opened an Online High Yield Savings Account because of them.  We have created a website with stories and videos of our customers and we have included features that make it easy to share items that interest you.  We launched this blog and welcome your comments.  We hope these stories and information are useful, so please share with us your comments and what other features and subjects you would like covered here too And don’t forget to visit our new Facebook page (Admittedly it is not as well known as the Obama page). This is all relatively new for us and somewhat unusual for a bank.

Even with these new electronic channels, ShoreBank continues to partner with borrowers with traditional personal, one-on-one service.  Our ability to be a part of the community – working with potential borrowers, understanding their stores and finding them the best product for long term success – is, and will always be at the heart of what we do.

But in a world were my friend’s three month old daughter already has an email account we know online capabilities will be a significant part of the our future.  We look forward to building community in this space too.

Tags: community development, green banking, high yield savings, ShoreBank Direct, social media, socially responsible investing, triple bottom line

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 and is filed under Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.