When Andy Meisner left elected office after 12 years as Oakland County treasurer and six years in the Michigan State House of Representatives, he wasn’t in the mood for settling into a comfortable job. And while he has a law degree and could have practiced, the pull in his heart was to fill a different need.
Through his time speaking with multiple constituents over the years, he was convinced there was demand in metro Detroit for a locally owned community bank. Upon leaving the treasurer’s office in 2021, he started working to pull together the assets and the regulatory approvals to launch what officially became, in June 2023, Community Unity Bank in Birmingham.
“As county treasurer for 12 years, I worked really closely with the financial institutions in and around Oakland County, and what I observed was a great deal of absorption, where a lot of banks were purchased by larger banks,” Meisner says, citing examples that include Level One Bank, Main Street Bank, and Lotus Bank, among others.
Between the consolidation and the subsequent branch closures, Meisner believes the community was lacking a locally owned institution to serve individuals and businesses alike. “Our hypothesis was that we need to repopulate Oakland County with some community-based small banks that can provide the latest services and that personal touch in a way the large banks can’t,” Meisner says.
The inaugural branch of Community Unity Bank has between $9 million and $10 million in deposits from 120 depositors, a total of around $26 million in assets, and 14 employees. Meisner serves as president and CEO, while co-founder Maria Dubiel, a 39-year veteran of the banking industry, serves as chief credit officer.
More branches could be part of Community Unity’s future. Acquisitions of other banks aren’t out of the question, either. But none of that can happen during the bank’s first three years, when regulators classify a new bank as a De Novo institution, placing considerable limitations on its ability to take on new overhead.
That’s fine with Meisner and Dubiel, who can focus on marketing the bank to new depositors and mastering their approach to customer service. After all, starting the bank was enough of a challenge in its own right.
Meisner, 50, lives in Huntington Woods with his wife, Sarah, and three sons ages 10, 8, and 3. A Berkley High School graduate, Meisner has the unusual distinction of having attended two years of classes at Michigan State University and then two years at the University of Michigan to complete his undergraduate degree. He went to the University of Detroit Mercy to earn his law degree.
Following law school, Meisner spent five years in Washington, D.C., working on the staffs of Congressmen Sander Levin and David Obey before returning to Michigan and spending time as the corporate communication director for Farbman Group, a full-service real estate firm in Farmington Hills.
Upon his election to the Michigan House of Representatives in 2003, Meisner worked his way to the chairmanship of the House Commerce Committee, where he got a crash course on issues facing small businesses. He furthered that education from 2009 through 2021 as the Oakland County treasurer.
Eva Yaldo, Malcolm Hurry, Mikey Hale, Ryan Oliver, Nita Cohen, Lee Davey,
(front row) Gus, Jennifer Villemure, Andy Meisner, Mary Grace Medini, Michelle Spear, and Maria Dubiel.
When Meisner was getting ready to leave Oakland County at the end of 2021, one of his first calls was to Dubiel, who had just announced her retirement from Huntington Bank. She was ready to walk away from banking, but Meisner’s plans intrigued her.
“There’s definitely a niche we felt for customer service, for me coming from a larger bank and knowing the way customer service is at a larger bank,” Dubiel says. “A smaller bank can deliver that a little more quickly and a little more personally than a larger bank can.”
To get started, Meisner and Dubiel worked with attorney Brennan Ryan, who had been connected to Dubiel during her time at the former Talmer Bank, along with the consulting firm FinPro, to file their joint application for a Michigan state bank charter and FDIC insurance.
As part of the application process, completed in January 2022, the prospective bankers listed the amount of assets they expected to be able to raise to open the bank. If the regulators accepted the proposed amount — and in this case they did, to the tune of $25 million — the raising of that specific amount would become a condition of the charter being approved.
But that’s just one of many requirements. A new bank also has to secure its key staff and vendors, set up its technology, and build all the primary financial products it will be offering to its market. And this is all without any guarantee the charter will be approved.
With the help of investment bank Donnelly Penman & Partners, Meisner and Dubiel were able to raise $28.6 million through private investors. The added funds were used to secure a bank branch location, hire staff, and contract out for professional services, among other requirements.
To help advance the application approval process, Meisner approached the regulators and asked them, point blank, if they believed the market needed more local banks that could provide higher priority to smaller and mid-sized borrowers.
“They said, ‘We’re seeing the same thing you’re seeing,’ ” Meisner says.
With the capital and the staff secured, and with the products and the technology in place, the bank was ready to open for business in June 2023, when the charter was approved and FDIC insurance was granted.
Rather than make a big splash, the team chose a “soft opening” at that time, in a bid to fine-tune its operations and prepare for a more high-profile opening later in the year with a ribbon-cutting and a community reception.
While they had always believed in the market’s need for a bank like Community Unity, Meisner and Dubiel had to be sure they knew their competitive distinction. In their minds, they provide a compelling combination of strong technology and personal service. The bank also offers an online banking app that Meisner describes as clean and intuitive.
“It’s easy to navigate,” Meisner says. “It’s very quick and has some efficiencies built in that other institutions don’t have.”
He gave an example of app users who have more than one account being able to access everything with a single user name and password.
“A lot of existing banks are working on very old technology platforms,” Meisner says. “One of the nice things about starting a bank right now is we were able to choose from the cream of the crop for digital technology.”
Meisner knows that technology alone doesn’t set a local bank apart; every bank has some sort of app, especially larger institutions. Above all else, he wanted Community Unity’s staff to make customers feel like they’re known and understood at a personal level.
“A lot of the time people go into a bank and the staff may look at them angrily, like they’re doing them a favor giving them their own money,” Meisner says. “I think in my time in public service, I had a reputation of being very approachable and friendly. And that’s the personality of our bank.”
He also emphasizes a priority to create a “calming aesthetic” within the bank branch. That includes an outdoor patio where bankers can meet with customers when the weather cooperates. Other features also help set the bank apart, with a quirky type of décor with desks and other items made of salvaged wood from the former Hazel Park Raceway. The bank contracted with a nonprofit called Architectural Salvage Warehouse of Detroit to create the furniture.
It was a good fit for Meisner, whose old House district used to include Hazel Park. While he acknowledges he’s “not a big gambling fan,” he also recognizes that, as a legislator, it was his job to advocate for everyone in his district.
The establishment of a new bank in Michigan, especially in the metro Detroit region, is a rare occurrence. The Michigan Department of Insurance and Financial Services noted, upon Community Unity’s opening in June 2023, that it was the first new bank in the region in 10 years.
Community Unity Bank was one of only five new banks established in the entire United States during 2023. The others were:
• Adelphi Bank in Columbus, Ohio
• Beach Cities Commercial Bank in Irvine, Calif.
• Icon Business Bank in Riverside, Calif.
• Zenith Private Bank and Trust in Scottsdale, Ariz.
That speaks to the challenges involved with starting a new institution. Plus, once a bank is open for business, it has some catching up to do with the rest of the market.
With assets of under $30 million, Community Unity is limited in the loans it can make; nothing beyond $2.5 million is allowed. If a customer needed a larger loan, Community Unity could partner with another bank to complete the deal, but it can’t make the loan solo until it grows its asset base.
That’s certainly the goal, Meisner says, outlining plans to reach an asset range of $230 million to $250 million within its first three years of operation.
“The regulators want us to act in a manner that’s focused on safety and soundness, and not take on (the type of) undue risk that we might be able to take on when we’re at $250 million,” Meisner says. “If we had a $1 million loan that went the wrong way at some point, it would have a big impact on us. That will be less so when we’re at $250 million.”
While the banking industry is new to Meisner, it’s old hat to Dubiel, seasoned staff members, and the Community Unity loan committee.
“I haven’t experienced the regulatory component, although I did come from government,” Meisner says. “I was familiar with the governmental prerogative, but there are just nuts and bolts to the banking business, and I’ve learned a ton from Maria. Part of my approach is not pretending to be an expert. I don’t need to do that. I have experts here. My model is surrounding myself with lots of experience.”
Dubiel acknowledges that Meisner needs that experienced support, but says he also brings critical things to the table.
“With all the contacts and experience he gained in the Oakland County market, knowing all the folks he knows, that’s been huge,” Dubiel says.
Meisner says he’s marveled at how precise the banking industry is, with countless overlays of policies, procedures, and regulations. For someone with years of experience dealing in legislation and finance, he has found it to be an especially complex and multidisciplinary industry that he’s worked hard to understand.
And as if the complexity of banking wasn’t challenging enough before, in recent years the emergence of cybersecurity has made things more challenging.
Between electronic wiring services, ACH payments, and the basic ability to pull up an app and move money between accounts, customers today demand the speed and convenience of banking in a digital environment, which is why Community Unity invested so heavily in its app. On the flip side, digital banking activity gives hackers greater opportunities to compromise the financial and operational integrity of banks and their customers.
Meisner and Dubiel know how critical it is to be many steps ahead of cyber-attackers. “It’s an obsession of ours,” Meisner says.
Community Unity has undertaken a number of steps to secure itself, including the use of a system called Positive Pay, which requires anyone receiving a payment from an account holder to be pre-approved by that account holder.
“It serves as an additional check on every transaction, so if there’s a transaction initiated that you haven’t affirmatively told us it’s OK to pay these people, then it’s blocked,” Dubiel says.
The bank also has an outside company periodically perform what’s known as a “white hat” attack on its systems. These are “good guy” hackers who attack the system in order to show the bank its potential vulnerabilities. They also lead the bank through a process known as penetration testing, in which the bank can see what a hacker can do once he or she gets inside the system.
Additionally, the bank chose as its domain suffix the more specialized .bank, instead of the traditional .com. The suffix is only available to financial institutions.
But how is that a cybersecurity measure?
Because the majority of cyber-attackers get into a company’s system with deceptive emails from domains that appear to be friendly — tricking recipients into opening attachments or clicking links that, unwittingly, give the hackers an entry point to access the enterprise system.
By using a .bank domain, Community Unity makes it a little more difficult for hackers to use that technique. And every advantage counts when it comes to cybersecurity, especially considering that some organizations have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to ransomware attackers.
What’s more, some hackers can disable a company’s entire digital system and refuse to release it until they receive a ransom payment.
“Part of what we do to promote a culture of cybersecurity is to constantly address it,” Meisner says, noting that even one mistake by an employee can compromise the system. “We recently went through some penetration testing and had a third party send a tempting email to us. We passed. This is about cybersecurity not only for us, but for our customers.”
It’s a lot to take on for a guy who could have taken a corporate job or run for another public office. But it’s clear from talking to Meisner that nothing else would have satisfied him.
“I see community banking as a public service, and it’s a continuation of a number of themes that were prominent in my public service career,” Meisner says. “I was always a booster of large, middle, and small businesses, as well as entrepreneurship, and I always wanted to do something entrepreneurial myself. And we really did perceive there to be a need for a community bank.
“If you think of small business as the backbone of the economy, and you think of capital as the lifeblood of small business — I’ll cop to a mixed metaphor, but you get the idea.”
Meisner also is enthusiastic about doing something he used to challenge other bankers to do when he was Oakland County treasurer, which is to make investments pursuant to the Community Reinvestment Act.
“For some institutions, CRA ends up being a ‘gotta do’ instead of a ‘want to do’ it,” he says. “Maria and I and our team really want to do it. As county treasurer, I was the chief investment officer of the county and I managed about $1.5 billion, and I would go to the banks and credit unions and say, ‘Hey, I’m depositing this money with your institutions in Pontiac. That invokes the CRA. What are you going to do to get an excellent rating?’ ”
Like so many other things about his new venture, the question is now turned on Meisner. And that’s just how he wants it.
Sidebar
Community Unity Bank
Products: Banking services and digital offerings
Headquarters: Birmingham
Assets: $26M
Depositors: 120+
Employees: 14
President and CEO: Andy Meisner
