Chris Martin, President & CEO, Sewickley Savings Bank
Chris Martin, president and CEO of Sewickley Savings Bank, spoke with Invest: about becoming a trusted financial partner for residents and businesses in the Pittsburgh region. “We are coming out of our shell, and customers are seeing all the different things we can do for them,” Martin said.
Over the past year, what significant changes have affected Sewickley Savings Bank’s operations, and how has the organization adapted?
I assumed the CEO position on Jan. 1. Myself and my predecessor spent 2024 transitioning, and he remained as CEO until he retired on Dec. 31. It was an opportunity for me to learn the rich history and culture of Sewickley Savings Bank and build relationships with our employees, board of trustees, and customer base in the communities we serve. My predecessor was here for over 20 years, and he was CEO for almost 14 years. Anytime there’s that type of leadership change, it is a big transition. Our vice president and COO also retired on Dec. 31, 2024. We were successful in hiring a senior vice president and COO to join us in May 2024 to transition into the role. Embedded in that, we made structural changes. We had a third executive retire in July, and hired a new, local community banker responsible for our residential lending and branch network. We are successful in bringing in talent with depth of experience and an understanding of our culture, helping us evolve into the modern banking ecosystem.
What have been your main priorities, and what is the vision guiding you forward since you took over as CEO?
The main priority is getting our team acclimated to the culture, board, and communities. We work together to remain relevant in the communities we serve. We want to be the first bank people think of. For example, one of our branches which includes our headquarters shares the same name: Sewickley, which is a suburb of Pittsburgh with its own culture and identity. We also have locations in Coraopolis and McKees Rocks/Robinson Township. Despite the Sewickley name, we’re not the first bank that comes to mind in the town. We have to engage more with the community while developing and evolving our products and services into a more modern and competitive offering than we had previously. We are investing more into our business model to become a more relevant bank, down to the most basic levels.
How is Sewickley Savings Bank applying technology to stay competitive, and what have been some initiatives for banks like yours?
We’re not quite there, but we are well on the way. We are investing, alongside our core products, in more modern competitive products and services. In 2025, we implemented bill pay and mobile deposit for our retail customers, and are developing the same offering for our business customers. We updated our website. As we incorporate these products and services, we are incorporating a new digital experience for our customers. We are exploring, and will likely implement, more modern payment options that are now in higher demand among businesses and consumers. Including these products and services will enhance our mobile banking, especially when bundled with cybersecurity and fraud protection tools. This will create for us a competitive and relevant digital presence. We don’t have the financial resources to compete with the likes of Bank of America or JP Morgan and the sophisticated products they offer, but our bank will be able to deliver on outstanding competitive products and services for the everyday consumer.
What trends in the broader banking and financial services industry are having the greatest impact on your business?
Customers are very interested in self-service. They want to do their banking when and where they want. It’s not new. It’s an elongated trend. As an industry, we are challenged to continue to meet that demand of the customer. Customers want to be able to carry their bank with them in their phone and access balances and transfers, and make payments. These demands are challenging banks to have these services available 24/7.
On a macro level, we are all looking to gather deposits and build relationships, make more consumer and business loans to support the customers needs. We are not interested in just selling products and services. The more we can enhance our digital presence, the stickier we become to that customer. There is a significant trend toward aggregation, which is a relationship profile in which the customer can log into our banking system and aggregate their most if not all of their financial relationships, including those from other providers. AI is another emerging tech that is challenging our industry in terms of how to incorporate it into our everyday lives. It could be in the form of online chat capabilities, predictive modeling, and predictive customer behavior. AI is the hottest button right now, and it’s vital to understand how to use it to serve and protect our customers.
What are the major opportunities in the marketplace and in the banking industry at large?
We’ve been around over 141 years and are a stable, trusted organization that is extremely well-capitalized. We are also a mutual savings bank. We don’t have stockholders and are not influenced exclusively by return on equity or a dividend requirement, giving us flexibility. It gives us the opportunity to become more relevant, because we can be flexible in the relationships we build. We aren’t going to compromise things like fair lending or equal credit, but we have the ability to build and price products and services fairly to our entire customer base in a competitive way. The push for profitability is there, but doesn’t have to meet the demands of a shareholder. That translates into pricing our deposits and loans more aggressively than competitors because margins aren’t quite as pressing.
Our fee structures can be more customer-friendly. Southwestern Pennsylvania is a vibrant, robust and stable economy. We have fantastic medicine, education, technology, and manufacturing. The diverse economic base creates relative stability in housing prices. Even though prices are rising, we don’t see extreme highs or lows. It’s a growing economy and there’s plenty of business to go around.
As an industry, globally, the advent of AI and digital platforms allows our industry to serve more people. Larger banks operating in 50 states can be comfortable to spread out globally. It’s not a safe practice for a smaller bank like ours, but across the industry it provides for serving a broad base of customers across the globe.
How has client demand for your banking services evolved, and which segments or products are seeing the strongest growth?
We’re seeing growth across all of our products and services. There was a period of time when we were going through additional transition in our leadership base. We found a different type of talent and changed our model. We didn’t evolve the products we needed to evolve and didn’t do as much lending as we had done in the past. It became more efficient for us to invest our proceeds in a bond portfolio. Now that we are comfortable with our bond portfolio, we are investing more money into loans, deposits, and relationships in the community. All of our products are in demand. We are coming out of our shell, and customers are seeing all the different things we can do for them.
Looking ahead five years, how do you envision the role of Sewickley Savings Bank in the region’s financial landscape, and what strategic priorities will guide your growth?
I envision our influence on the market being greater than it is today. In five years, we will have invested in more talent and built out our teams to be engaged in the small-business market lending and deposit gathering environment. We will do more residential and home equity lending. We are going to be enhanced and our brand will be strengthened. We currently have a quiet brand, and we don’t go out looking for attention. We draw attention through hard work. Our brand will become more established as a full-service, relevant community bank. If we accomplish that on the retail and business platform, we will experience growth. We don’t focus on how much growth we want. That’s a lagging indicator. We don’t assign a number that would take our eye off doing the right thing. We’d rather do the right thing than do something fast. Five years from now, we will experience growth, our influence in the market will be enhanced, we will be serving more customers across a broader demographic, and we will be serving more community organizations.
