The Most Powerful Women to Watch: No. 16, Jeane Vidoni, Penn Community Bank

As the head of a mutual savings bank in a highly competitive market, Jeane Vidoni balances growing her business with giving back to the southeastern Pennsylvania community.  

Penn Community Bank in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, was created in 2015 with the merger of two banks, and Vidoni was CEO from the start. Forty miles north of Philadelphia, the mutual resides in an area in which Revolutionary War tourism sites help drive the local economy.  

Hear her speak at The Most Powerful Women in Banking Conference in New York City, October 22-23.

Penn Community's assets have climbed sharply during its existence, from $1.8 billion after the merger to $2.9 billion last year, a leap due to pursuing strategies similar to a commercial bank, Vidoni said. These include adding salespeople from publicly traded banks and collaborating with national lenders on economic development projects.

In April, Penn Community broke ground on a physical branch in a township outside Allentown — Pennsylvania's third-biggest city and home to an influx of new manufacturing projects. The bank plans to open a second Allentown-area branch later this year. It is a prime market for Penn Community's transportation and manufacturing loan product offerings, Vidoni said.

But growth for its own sake is not all-encompassing. A self-described servant leader, Vidoni employs management techniques for a bank "whose stakeholders are its customers and the community, not investors and shareholders."

The mutual has "never had incentive goals on selling products and services to customers," Vidoni said. A team of over 300 employees work with human resources to develop qualitative targets they will be evaluated on. With "the lack of internal competition from widget-counting incentives," she said, bankers better collaborate.  

Penn Community reports providing nonprofits with over a million dollars a year in charitable giving. And the bank launched a special purpose credit program last year to give modest-income borrowers a mortgage loan with no down payment, insurance or minimal credit score. The program originated 27 mortgages totaling $6.6 million as of early August, the bank reported.

The community lending program works with Philadelphia residents, a market that includes Penn Community customers but none of the mutual's 21 branches. Vidoni is beginning to work with Philadelphia nonprofits, including the Urban League, to boost the city's affordable housing stock, she said.

"We are not going to solve the housing problem at Penn Community Bank, but we can make a little bit of a difference," Vidoni said.

Vidoni has spent her career in southeast Pennsylvania after graduating from Muhlenberg College in Allentown. She entered banking in 1983 as the profession was starting to move away from making women "wear dresses, perm our hair and have silk ties with the bank logo on it."

She started at Meridian Bancorp, a one-time regional powerhouse that taught her marketing, finance and strategic planning skills.

"I feel that I have been able to be unique and authentic," Vidoni said. "I have never studied books on how to behave like a successful banker."