Business View Magazine | June 2022

124 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 6 PONCE BANK Business Administration (SBA) lender. The Board is predominantly Latino, and its primary markets are Latino and immigrant markets and low-to- moderate income markets in New York and other areas. “Being a CDFI, about 86 % of our deposits are poured back into the community as loans,” Naudon says. “If you look at all CDFI Banks, we consistently rank in the top ten, and in housing orientation we are the number one in the country.” During the pandemic, the team at Ponce Bank went above and beyond with PPP (Payroll Protection Plan) loans – really standing up to help communities that most other larger banks didn’t serve. According to Naudon, “We didn’t just make loans to our customers but we went out of our way to make loans to non-customers. It’s been great – we retained a lot of deposits from those new customers and built relationships with them. We ended up with around $260 million in PPP loans, which was pretty substantial given our size and that we originated them ourselves.” Ponce Bank was particularly helpful to a segment of the population called ‘solopreneurs’ – taxi drivers, people who work on their own, often without employees. There is great difficulty for them to get into the banking system. Naudon quips, “We partnered with a lot of the taxi alliances and I joke that sometimes our parking lot looked like LaGuardia Airport with all the cabs. We also partner with community-based organizations and non-profits, whether it’s the Women’s Chamber of Commerce, or the Latino Restaurants Alliance… groups that are really grassroots and have members that need services. We tend to associate with them and it’s a very effective way of getting to the actual population. That’s really our bread and butter.” Ponce Bank has now expanded by using alternative underwriting measures. This includes