Condo Media - January 2020 - 32

VENDOR SPOTLIGHT

Northern Bank

Big Bank Services with a Personal Touch
[by Pamela Schweppe]

What do two entrepreneurs do when
they can't get the loan they need to start
their own business? They establish their own
bank. That's what brothers James and Thomas
Mawn did nearly 60 years ago. Today, that
bank has twelve branches throughout metrowest Boston in addition to its Woburn, Mass.,
headquarters; offers online banking to customers nationwide; holds $2.1 billion in assets;
and remains one of the top-performing banks
in New England year after year.
Now known as Northern Bank, the institution founded by the Mawn brothers was based
on a simple idea: instead of expecting customers to think
like a bank, create a bank that thinks like a customer. That
means that, rather than insisting customers conform to
their way of doing business, Northern Bank works in partnership with customers, so it can get to know them, fully
understand their business, and meet their unique needs.
GAME-CHANGING TECHNOLOGY
Banking with Northern Bank is easy and personal.
The Cash Management team has a decade of experience
in working with property managers and associations
in the condominium industry. Their team focuses on
building relationships and providing banking solutions
that include deposit accounts, business online banking,
treasury services, business payment, and collection
solutions for rent and homeowner dues, to simplify
customers' day-to-day activities.
"When we work with specific industry groups, we're always trying to see what's working well for them and then
try to make it even better," says Warren Brown, Northern
Bank's head of emerging markets. "We have all the things
you expect from a big bank, but we try to say, 'How can we
go one step further for our customers?'" With that guiding principal in mind, Northern Bank focuses on developing technology that makes condominium associations'
and property managers' lives a lot easier.
For example, suppose a property manager has
multiple associations in their portfolio. Many of those
properties might have a number of cash transactions
or a lending relationship that requires them to use a

Left: Oscar Moreno, Senior Vice President
and Director of Cash Management Sales and
Business Development. Above: Northern
Bank Headquarters in Woburn, Mass.

small neighborhood bank. Having to
manage multiple relationships with
a mishmash of disparate banks creates a complex and
time-consuming situation for the management firm's
back office.
The team at Northern Bank has come up with the
ideal solution: intelligent assistant back-office automation. When Northern is the management company's
primary bank, this proprietary, patent-pending tool lets
that property manager see all those varied accounts
together in one place and check balances, pay bills, make
transfers or loan payments, and reconcile accounts from
one convenient location.
Launched this year and continually being refined and
enhanced, this innovative intelligent assistant software
even goes a giant step beyond, managing external accounts dynamically to adjust the level of funding in
an association's accounts to accommodate upcoming
payments-something that typically is done manually.
"What we're building into the software is, you tell us
how much the payment is and when it's due, and the
software automatically sets aside the amount required,
so you know it's going to get paid on time. That works for
loans, for taxes, and for a range of big-ticket expenses
that happen periodically, so you're not all of a sudden
scrambling," says Brown. "For associations, a lot of the
work is often done on a volunteer basis. So we try to
streamline that process by looking at what tasks are
done on a routine basis that we can automate and simplify. Our job is to make life better for our customers."
Another way that Northern Bank is working to facilitate time-consuming tasks for associations and property

Condo Media - January 2020

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