How Webster Bank Serves Community and Shareholders Alike

Steve Odland: Welcome to C-Suite Perspectives, a signature series by The Conference Board. I'm Steve Odland from The Conference Board and the host of this podcast series. 

And in today's conversation, we're going to talk about corporate responsibility and specifically how Webster Bank has built up its own portfolio around corporate responsibility. And joining me today is Marissa Widener, the Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer at Webster Bank.  

Marissa, welcome to the program. 

Marissa Weidner: Hey, Steve. Thanks so much for having me.  

Steve Odland: Yeah, Marissa, your background and experience is really interesting. People often wonder because nobody's born being a corporate responsibility officer. Tell us about your background, and how did you get here?  

Marissa Weidner:It's interesting. I actually began my career in commercial property management, commercial real estate property management And then I moved into economic development in both the Hudson Valley and Westchester County. 

And eventually I made my way into the financial industry, and I joined what was then Sterling National Bank about almost 10 years ago. So I joined the bank, and I made my entrance into the banking industry being part of a municipal banking team. So I learned about banking as part of that team. 

But what it was all about was building relationships and maintaining relationships. And that's a space that I was comfortable in. I had various different roles, Steve, across my career at the bank. And just prior to our merger, which is now three years ago with Webster Bank, I was overseeing human resources. 

Steve Odland: This is really important because, I think your experience, first of all, dealing directly with customers in the community and understanding their needs, dealing with the credit needs in the case of the bank, and then the marketing aspects of it, and then the internal employee aspects of it. It really has given you a broad-based look at all the constituencies of the bank and hence, the corporate responsibility part of it just comes naturally to you.  

Marissa Weidner: Absolutely. And so when we merged with Webster Bank three years ago, we decided to create and shape an office of corporate responsibility, bringing in all of the areas, if you will, that really help us drive community vitality and engagement. 

So today I have the privilege of overseeing this office of corporate responsibility encompassing our corporate philanthropy, community investment and engagement, inclusive vendor engagement, sustainability, government affairs, CRA, which is the Community Reinvestment Act, fair and responsible banking, and also corporate communications and corporate marketing. 

So I have an exciting day filled with all different areas of the organization that impact our community.  

Steve Odland: So corporate responsibility at Webster really encompasses all those areas. It's multifaceted. I think sometimes people think of it as strictly philanthropy but it's not, in the case of Webster. 

Marissa Weidner: No, it is not, in the case of Webster. We made a decision to bring all of these different areas that had been siloed in various areas of the organization previously together under one umbrella. We do take the work very seriously. I am a direct report to our CEO and chairman of the bank.  

So it demonstrates the commitment to this work, in my opinion, and as part of it, we did pull together a community investment strategy. It's a multi-billion-dollar community investment strategy that touches every community that we serve in a myriad of ways, from affordable housing to inclusive vendor representation, supporting low- and moderate-income communities, financial empowerment programs.  

It'sa great role. I have to say in all my experience throughout my career, and I've had a lot of great opportunities and terrific roles, but this is the one that drives me. This is where my passion is, and I get the opportunity to do something that I love and make a meaningful impact. 

Steve Odland: And I think that your early experience in the core of the business, really, has helped that , and I wish that all people involved with corporate responsibility have some aligned experience in it because I think it really does help you deal with the work. And Webster is not unique, but it is really a leading edge in terms of its integration of its corporate responsibility strategy and the strategy of the corporation. They are not two different things.  

Marissa Weidner: That is correct. They're intertwined every step of the way. In fact, so much of the work that I do is working with each area of the business, each line of business, functional units of the business. We're joined hip at hip.  

Steve Odland:Yeah. And so how does that work within the bank? Who sets the corporate strategy? What group is that? What role do you play? And then how does that influence the strategy of the work that your group does?  

Marissa Weidner:So in terms of corporate strategy, we have an executive management committee that makes up the top leadership of every area of our organization. And we work together to develop the strategy. We do have a chief strategy officer. That helps facilitate that process, but we work together. Each area of the business has what they would like to accomplish, makes sure that rolls up to the corporate strategy. And then that helps us develop what our community investment strategy is, because it needs to be aligned. 

This work, itcan't happen in a silo. It needs to take into account what the business is trying to achieve while we're also taking into account what the community needs are.So I will say, in terms of our community investment strategy, that work doesn't happen in a silo, either. We do go out to the community. It is informed. We have community advisory councils in each of our core market areas that help us understand what the needs are, so that we can make sure that whatever programming or initiatives we're putting into place can help satisfy the needs of the community while also helping to grow our business. 

Steve Odland:Yeah, now this all falls under a rubric of ESG, environmental, social, and governance. Everybody calls it something different, but ESG, became the label over the years. And your work pretty much centers and focuses on the E and the S part of it, I think, and whereas governance Is more in the corporate secretary area. But all of it is intertwined here. 

Marissa Weidner: So yeah, I mean, we work absolutely hand in hand with folks in the general counsel office, as well as our risk management teams, cybersecurity, all of the work that we do Is intertwined with every area of the business, and we're also the team that is pulling together our corporate responsibility report every year. And so that work is—obviously, the data and the information is collected with all of these folks. We're trying to drive home messages that we hear from every constituency, whether that's our shareholders, our communities, our clients, or our colleagues from within the organization. So we take those four stakeholders and make sure that our strategies are in line with what their needs are. 

Steve Odland:Yeah, and this is really important, this is why I think your role is so important because we're in a multi-stakeholder world, where you have to balance the needs of all of these stakeholders. I used to remember it by my title—customers, employees, only—CEO. But then, community and environment and all of that.So you can't just favor one or the other; you have to balance the whole thing.  

So what I hear you saying is really a best practice, which is, yeah, you're focused on implementing a couple areas, but you're really coordinating across all of these constituents. 

Marissa Weidner: Everything we do is cross-functional, collaborative, and taking into account those four stakeholders of community, client, shareholder, and colleagues.  

Steve Odland: Now, there's been a little pushback on ESG, not as much as DEI. And some of it's political, some of it's investor groups arguing about greenwashing, and there's been all this stuff out there, this noise. Has any of that impacted your work? 

Marissa Weidner:There's been a lot of talk about ESG as part of the political and social conversations taking place today. It is not impacting the focus that we have on our work, which is to expand access to capital, provide loans and investments, technical assistance, financial services to individuals and small businesses in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods across our community.  

That work is integral to who we are as an organization. It's important for us to strengthen the communities where our footprint lies. It will only help our business long term. We have Finance Lab initiative that is continuing to provide opportunities for young people to help gain the skills to have economic empowerment and financial success, which will then later help them be contributing members to society and potentially start small businesses, develop generational wealth. Those are all good things for the banking industry. We launch products, helping people obtain their first home.  

Marissa Weidner: Here's what I'd say, Steve, regardless of the political environment, at the end of the day, Webster Bank is a values-driven organization, and we're going to continue to support the communities with our focus on economic inclusion, financial empowerment, and just driving economic vitality in our communities.  

Steve Odland:Yeah. And I think this is really important for our listeners because, despite the noise and what's happening, all this, whatever happens around the periphery, the best companies are staying true to their values.They're staying true to their external goals and their strategies. And. They're continuing to move forward and make progress on all these dimensions. And Webster is a great example of that. Marissa, thank you for all your work in that. Maybe we can dive into a little bit more detail. Part of what you talked about is your environmental goals. Talk about some of your key initiatives there.  

Marissa Weidner: We are a bank so, unlike some businesses, we don'tgenerally have as many opportunities to reduce the carbon footprint. We're not manufacturing or transporting or extracting anything, but we are working very closely with our corporate real estate team to encourage upgrades and enhancements to help us utilize less energy. In fact, we just implemented a pilot solar installation and EV charging station. 

So those are some things that we're excited about advancing our initiative there. We are a bank, so we're working with our commercial and business banking teams to grow our portfolio of commercial environmental loans. These loans fund renewable energy, efficient components, and environmental remediation. In fact, as of 2023, we had more than $757 million in loans for these areas. So those are some of the areas where we're focused on.  

Steve Odland:Yeah. So even, even if you're not manufacturing something or mining something or the big environmental impacts, you really can think through all of your strategies and what you're doing. You still can have an impact. I think one of the top emitters of carbon are commercial real estate installations, which you have some, so you're thinking through all of that in your world. And that, again, is a best practice. 

Marissa Weidner: Absolutely.  

Steve Odland: So going beyond the traditional environmental work, there's also the whole social element. Now, social can mean a lot of things to different companies. What does social mean for Webster?  

Marissa Weidner: So social for Webster is how we are showing up in our communities and how we're showing up within our organization. At the end of the day, we built this community investment strategy, which is very much focused on how we're showing up in the community. 

It's about supporting affordable housing. It's about promoting engagement. In our community, increasing access to banking services, investing in small businesses, launching a women- and minority-owned-business banking team to meet the needs of the community launching multicultural campaigns to make sure that we're, again, meeting the community where they are. People speak different languages. Making sure we have colleagues in our banking centers who are certified to speak the languages that are within the communities that we serve.Sothere's all different ways, from a social perspective, that I think we're trying to tackle.  

Steve Odland:We're talking about corporate responsibility at Webster Bank. We're going to take a short break and be right back. 

Welcome back to C-Suite Perspectives. I'm your host, Steve Odland from The Conference Board, and I'm joined today by Marissa Widener, Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer at Webster Bank.  

OK, lots of great stuff going on at Webster. We talked about environmental and some of the social elements. Does community come under social, or do you have a whole separate community effort on top of that?  

Marissa Weidner:SoI guess we view them as intertwined to some extent, right? And, I know I've been talking a lot about our community investment strategy, but it does guide a lot of the work that we do within corporate responsibility. 

I think I gave you the four pillars of our community investment strategy, but we've been doing a lot of work around providing opportunities for low- and moderate-income people to make sure that they have access to banking services, to make sure that they can find that first home and be able to have the down payment to obtain that first home. So yes, they're intertwined.  

Steve Odland:Yeah, and they're integrated, and it's all one fabric, it's one strategy, which is why I hit each one of them because Webster is so interesting, what you've created there, because it's not like there are all these different initiatives. It's all one thing, and it's interlinked with your strategy. Soit's really a brilliant way to go about it.  

Your title is corporate responsibility. There's a lot of different titles out there for the kind of work that is done in companies. Corporate social responsibility. Corporate responsibility, as you've done it. Corporate citizenship. It goes on and on. How did you choose? I know you chose the term corporate responsibility very deliberately and after a lot of thought. And responsibility means, you take it seriously. You view this as a responsibility beyond just making money for the shareholders. Soit's a responsibility I'd be interested in anything you could share with us on the terminology and how you decided to focus on corporate responsibility as the umbrella. 

Marissa Weidner: Sure. And it's a great question. With responsibility comes accountability. And we really felt that it was important for us as a business, as a bank, to be accountable to the communities that we serve to make sure that not only are we delivering for the shareholder—obviously we have that accountability—we need to deliver for the clients and we have that accountability. The clients are part of our communities. We need to make sure we're delivering for our clients. And then, of course, our colleagues. But really the impetus behind it, like I said, with responsibility comes accountability. And that was our way of demonstrating to ourselves, to our clients, to the community, and to the shareholders, that we're going to take responsibility to do just that, to be accountable.  

Steve Odland: And with accountability, you have to have KPIs—key performance indicators—or metrics that you use. Talk about how you measure things?  

Marissa Weidner: We are measuring our loan production to LMI in the LMI residential space. Multifamily lending. We're measuring loan production from a community development lending perspective to small businesses, increasing the access to capital to small businesses. These are all metrics that we're tracking. Volunteer hours in our community. Philanthropic dollars that are being given out for programmatic initiatives. And then now we're going to start looking at the impact, right? So that's easy to track those things. And now this year, we're going to put together our first impact report. We've been doing this for three years. So what is the actual impact on our corporate philanthropic programmatic initiatives, if you will. 

Steve Odland:Yeah. And there is a return for this. So this isn't just, let's give away the shareholders money. This is an investment in order to drive returnthat's consistent with your values and everything. It's not one or the other. And sothere's an ROI here that you're measuring, as well. 

Marissa Weidner:Yeah, absolutely. And when you think about our philanthropic giving, we have that. Also focused on key areas which are in alignment with our community investment strategy.So we provide grants that promote job creation and strengthen small-business development in our workforce development pillar. 

We've got a community development pillar to support the creation of affordable housing, and that would include home ownership counseling and foreclosure prevention, first-time homebuyers support, credit remediation. We support community development financial institutions and community development corporations. 

And then we have another pillar of financial empowerment, which supports organizations whose main mission is financial empowerment and inclusion through financial literacy programs, and I love to tell you about our Finance Lab program.  

And then, of course, we've got the basic needs and human services. But again, even in those areas, you could put so many things in that category. But in staying true to who we are as an organization and what our strategy is, that's primarily addressing hunger and homelessness. Because those are critical pieces that need to be addressed in order to drive economic vitality in the community. 

Steve Odland: Now that you've teased it, you have to tell us about the Finance Lab.  

Marissa Weidner:It's one of the things that I think we're most excited about and certainly most proud of. So we launched a Finance Lab initiative. And in that initiative, we essentially partner with a nonprofit who has a proven track record, demonstrated ability to serve the stakeholders in the community. 

And at the end of the day, what we're doing is we're partnering to deliver programming to empower young people and their families to make financially sound decisions, to have the economic empowerment, and be able to, over time, understand the impact of the decisions that they're making financially, potentially learn how to put their money to work for them. 

One student who went through the program, my favorite story, said to me, “I will tell you one thing I got out of the program. While I'm not going to become a finance major because I love engineering,” she said, “I learned an important lesson.” And I said, “What is that?” 

And she said, “I learned how to make my money make money.” And I said, “There's no better validation of the work that we're doing than to have a young person say that they learned how to make their money make money.” Because that's, at the end of the day, a fundamental principle of how you're going to one day generate wealth.  

Steve Odland:You've really brought this program a long way in just a few short years here. 

Where do you see corporate responsibility going in the next few years at Webster?  

Marissa Weidner:There's various programs that we're excited about. We're going to continue with our Finance Labs. We have three more that are launching this coming year?—this year, actually. We're in 2025 here. So we have three more Finance Labs launching this year. We have a multicultural campaign that's just launching. We've certified many bankers across our banking centers to be able to meet the needs of the community and the language that they're accustomed to.  

We've got a lot of exciting things on the docket, and what it's about now is and that's really making sure that we stay close to our community partners, close to understanding what their needs are. Their needs are evolving and changing. The climate is changing. Their needs might be evolving and changing. And we need to make sure that we're able to meet those needs in a way that's going to stay true to who we are as an organization and continue to drive our business forward.  

Steve Odland: So then, to wrap up, any anything else that you want to share with us? 

Marissa Weidner: I think what I would say is we'revery proud of how we show up in the communities that we serve. We've got many years, a long-standing history of community engagement and community support. We'revery proud to be aligned with The Conference Board and all of the good work that you are doing. We've been a member for several years in different capacities, but specifically with the Governance & Sustainability Center over the last three years, and it has really helped us elevate the work we're doing. 

At the end of the day, I want to say thank you for the work that you're doing and how you're shining a spotlight on companies that are doing this work.  

Steve Odland: And we have to say thank you back to Webster and to you, personally, for bringing this strategy together and really leading it to the cutting edge, the best practices in corporate responsibility. 

Marissa Weidner: Thank you.  

Steve Odland: Marissa Weidner, thanks for being with us today and sharing. your thoughts and everything that you're doing at Webster Bank.  

Marissa Weidner: Great to be with you. Thanks so much, Steve.  

Steve Odland: And thanks to all of you for listening to C-Suite Perspectives. I'm Steve Odland and this series has been brought to you by The Conference Board.