by Jess McCuan / photos by Rebecca D’Angelo

It’s a tough time to be a banker. In the last six months, Americans have watched the country’s banking system crumble, with Wall Street investment bankers emerging as the 21st century’s most cunning new national villains. Last fall, for the first time in 80 years, bankers around the country faced the specter of a nationwide bank run, as panicked customers walked into their lobbies and offices demanding to know if their money was safe. “No training could have prepared a banker for the financial crisis of the last year,” says Suzanne DeFerie, who was promoted to president and CEO of Asheville Savings Bank in January 2008 after spending 16 years as the bank’s executive vice president and CFO. Last year, DeFerie, who grew up in Lenoir, held a public meeting called a Fireside Chat, reminiscent of FDR’s radio addresses from the 1930s and ‘40s. Her staff even rustled up a DVD of a crackling fireplace to play in the background as DeFerie spoke to a crowd of nervous customers.

While Wall Streeters were hard at work making themselves into full-fledged public enemies, community bankers were working just as hard to keep the public’s trust. Annette Coleman, a Leicester native who has been in banking for 42 years and is now a vice president and financial services manager at Asheville’s First Citizens, says her profession has certainly taken some recent blows. But she believes most people understand that banks support communities—through loans and critical business services, for example. “We need the money system,” she says. “It’s a few bad eggs that have put a damper on [our industry]. It’s a well-respected job. We just need to tighten our belts and get back to basics.”

Suzanne DeFerie, 52
President and CEO, Asheville Savings Bank
 
There are no banker’s hours for Suzanne DeFerie, who was promoted to president last year after working at the bank for 16 years. In fact, this Blackberry-checking executive believes banker’s hours may be a thing of the past everywhere, especially in 2009. “A misconception is that the bank president sits in the office and then plays golf,” she says. “That’s absolutely not true. We roll up our sleeves and work at the business of the bank.”

This year, the “CEO” in her title could easily stand for Chief Education Officer, as she’s spent more time than usual educating the public about things like bailout funds and bank types. Asheville Savings Bank did not accept federal bailout money. And unlike big commercial banks, it did not get mixed up in Wall Street boondoggles like credit default swaps. “The economy is in a recession—we have issues like everyone else,” DeFerie says, “but we don’t have the other layer of problems, with exotic investment instruments.” According to DeFerie, Asheville Savings was in the black last year, though it did not pay employee bonuses—something she, as a manager, regretted. But being a “homegrown” bank president, someone who moved up through the ranks, helps her communicate with employees at all levels, and with customers, too. “We’re here. We’re local,” she says. “People can walk in the building and I’m upstairs.”

Shalon Pierce, 31
Retail Market Executive, Carolina First

For years, people knew her only as Charlie’s daughter. Her father, Charlie Messer, owns a Fletcher gas station, Charlie’s on the Creek, and he’s been a member of the Henderson County Board of Commissioners since 2000. After high school, Pierce struggled with what to do with her life, dropping out after a year and a half at Blue Ridge Community College. But in 1999, when she took a job as a teller at the Fletcher branch of Carolina First bank, she knew she had found something to suit her. It made use of her people skills and her attention to detail, and besides, when dairy farmers and other locals came trudging into the bank (occasionally wearing smelly boots), she could strike up a conversation with just about anyone by talking about her family. If they didn’t know her dad, they knew her mom Sheila Messer, a hairstylist in Fletcher for more than 30 years. “You can learn so much about somebody just listening to what they say in a few minutes. They talk about what’s important to them,” she says.

Pierce didn’t stay a teller for long. She was promoted to head teller at the Fletcher branch and then to a customer service position by 2002, branch manager in 2004, and, last year, to retail market executive, which means she oversees 11 branch offices. “I have a story to tell for anybody coming into the banking field,” says the mother of two. These days, she also has a slightly different personal story to tell. While people still recognize her as Charlie’s daughter, they’re starting to treat her like a grown-up professional. “I am a successful banker who’s worked hard and proven myself to be a reputable person in the community,” she says. “Now, it’s more like, when they see me, they recognize me as who I am.”

Vicki Widemon, 53
Teller, Bank of Asheville

With her experience, Vicki Widemon could have moved on long ago from her position as a teller at the Bank of Asheville’s drive-up window. But she likes being a teller. And besides, she doesn’t want the responsibility of managing other people. In the past, when senior teller jobs opened up, her bosses nudged her to take them. Now, they don’t even mention them. “I like the brief encounters at the drive-through,” she says. “I love people. I really do. It’s important to me to be kind and patient.”

Widemon, who has been with Bank of Asheville for ten years and worked as a teller at Wachovia for about five, says she has, of course, come across a few rude people. But if you’re nice to her, she will go out of her way to help. (And if you’re really nice, you might get a lollipop.) Once, a man in the drive-through told Widemon he was stressed out and upset because he hadn’t had any lunch that day. So Widemon, who had an extra yogurt and a plastic spoon at her desk, sent it out to him through the drive-through chute. (The man later emailed bank president Gordon Greenwood saying he had never been treated so kindly by a teller.) She has befriended a few longtime customers and recently spent a Saturday with one woman who needed a shopping companion. Widemon says it’s nice to be needed. “I pray and ask the Lord—please help me to help somebody,” she says.

Over the years, she’s made an effort to treat everyone the same, whether they drive up in a Mercedes or an old clunker. She knows customers watch the tellers’ reactions to their account information, and that people are often embarrassed when they’re overdrawn or don’t know how to fill out a deposit slip. But Widemon, an Asheville native who learned to count money at her grandmother’s grocery store at age seven, has had her share of rough spots in life, including facing subtle and not-so-subtle forms of discrimination. “I’ve been around. I’ve had to sit in the back of the bus,” she says. “To know that I can help somebody is my whole goal. That is how I want to be treated.”

Annette Coleman, 59 (or thereabouts)
Vice President and Financial Services Manager, First Citizens Bank

You never forget your first loan. Annette Coleman was a branch manager and loan officer with the old Bank of Asheville (a different business entity than the current Bank of Asheville), when a young man who had just graduated from dental school came to her looking for $10,000 to finance his first piece of equipment. She remembers he looked a little nervous. “Now he’s doing well and could probably buy and sell me,” she says. “It is so gratifying to make [a loan] happen and to guide that process along.”

Coleman grew up the daughter of dirt farmers in Leicester, long before it was a true Asheville suburb. One of her first jobs was as a sales auditor for Harry Winner, then owner of Winner’s department store in downtown Asheville. Winner saw that Coleman was good with numbers and people but was also tenacious. A few years later, as a retail banker at the Bank of Asheville, she was not afraid to drive around and make sales calls, though in the ‘60s it was less common for women to do so. “It’s okay to say no to me,” she says. “There’s always someone who will say yes.”