By Evan Sparks

Dorothy Savarese tells a story about a humbling discovery she made shortly after moving to Cape Cod and how it reflects the heart of community banking. She already had 16 years of experience in economic development and at a large regional bank in the Midwest.

She had taught credit analysis on a national basis. So when she arrived on the Cape and started work as a commercial lender at the Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank, "I looked at the credits here and the way they had been written up in the past, and they certainly didn't meet my standards of documentation or credit underwriting," she says—noting that they were short on financial analysis and long on character analysis.

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Source: http://bankingjournal.aba.com/