Ponce Bank

3 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 6 AT A GLANCE PONCE BANK WHAT: A Minority Depository Institution, Community Development Financial Institution, and certified Small Business Administration lender WHERE: Branches in Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens (NY), and Union City (NJ) WEBSITE: www.poncebank.com Bronx, when businesses were shutting down and people were abandoning the community. It was started as a Mutual Federal Savings & Loan Association by a group of mostly Latino businesspeople and community activists to help fund the community’s needs. I became involved as their regulatory counsel in the 1980s and in 2014 I joined the board. Then, when the Bank’s founder, Erasto Torrez, passed away, I was asked to become President.” At that time, it was a $650 million bank with 13 branches that had done very well. But the Board recognized the need to get much bigger and become more competitive. With so much consolidation in the industry, there were bigger banks to compete against, so Ponce Bank set out to raise additional capital by doing a first-step mutual-to-stock conversion in 2017, where they sold a little less than half of the company through a depositor subscription process. Naudon reports, “We were able to raise significant funds that allowed us to grow. Last year, in 2021, we got to about $1.6 billion in size, at which point we felt that we needed additional funding. So we did another sale to our depositors and we were able to raise $130 million in January of this year. That has allowed us to really focus on what we do best.” Ponce Bank is proud to be a Minority Depository Institution (MDI), a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), and a certified Small