Business View Magazine | June 2022

129 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 6 have internship programs with local colleges, and many of those interns take jobs with the Bank after they graduate, and progress very well. Career building and helping employees grow their income and sense of self-worth is a key tenet at Ponce Bank. When it comes to technology, Naudon admits, “When I came here, we realized that many of our technologies were antiquated and not in our strategic game plan. So we added mobile banking, automated debit cards, online banking, etc. We are now implementing Salesforce, which is pretty unusual for our size of an institution. We’re automating all the loan processes and we’ve gone paperless, everything is digital including the internal operations of the bank. Summit Technology Group has been great to work with, they helped us tremendously with the PPP loans. We’re also automating all of our SBA lending processes through their software to increase efficiency with SBA loans. For both consumers and small businesses, a large part of our efforts is to take our micro-loans and convert them into digital customers. Almost 60 percent of those loans are in low-to-moderate income areas and more than half of the borrowers are minorities. That’s really our sweet spot of what we’re trying to do.” Looking ahead, the future path for Ponce Bank is laser-focused on growth. Naudon shares, “In order to be a competitive force in New York City and be a gamechanger nationally, we need to bulk up, get more technology, more analytics people, and really be able to deliver the product to the customer with a very personalized service. Because that’s what Ponce Bank is all about.” PONCE BANK