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Diane Arnold: New President at Essex Savings Bank

As part of the process of choosing the Dali Lama, a team of worthies visited a young Tibetan boy who had a series of objects placed in front of him and they determined on the basis of what the child reached for, that he would be the next Dali Lama.

If they had done a test like that for Diane Arnold when she was a young girl, her career path would have been clear. One of her favorite toys was a miniature cash register with its own fake bills; she began to learn how to play Monopoly when she was three.

“I always loved to play with money,” she says.

And money is still the basis of her professional life, but it’s not fake these days. Diane, the senior vice president of Essex Savings Bank, will become its first female president at the end this month with the retirement of Greg Shook, who has been the bank’s leader for some 22 years.

Nothing, however, in all those years could have prepared her for the banking responsibilities brought on by the consequences of COVID 19, specifically the PPP or Paycheck Protection Program. Essex Savings Bank made 347 PPP loans.

“That’s huge for a bank our size, along with our regular customer responsibilities,” she says.

What made the PPP program even more complicated, was the initial lack of clarity in government regulations.

“They kept changing in the beginning. There were no hard and fast guidelines,” she says. “Our team did a remarkable job.”

The rapid switch from in-person to remote banking was also a challenge. The bank lobbies in all six of its branches closed on March 16, 2020. The drive through windows, however, remained open.

“We had to go to remote overnight,” Diane recalls.

At first, not all the bank’s customers were familiar with electronic banking, and one of those unfamiliar customers was Diane herself. She didn’t use mobile banking until the pandemic. But then, the pandemic made unusual banking the usual.

“We even opened accounts in the parking lot,” she says.

Diane, then Diane Hoadley, started in banking in a summer job as a teller in Branford, where her family has lived for some 11 generations.

When she graduated from Quinnipiac College with a degree in economics, Shook, who had known her at the Branford bank, was then working at Southington Savings Bank and recruited her. Some four years later, Shook, now at the Essex Savings Bank recruited her again.

Shook was starting a management trainee program and wanted Diane to be a part of it. Over her two decades at the bank, Diane started the bank’s commercial loan department and is today in charge of all the bank’s loans.

Banking has changed in significant ways since she started out. She recalls when the third of the month was the busiest day for tellers, because that was the day people deposited Social Security checks. Now those checks, like pay checks, are electronically deposited. But Diane says that though some banks have gone to automated tellers, that is not something Essex Savings Bank plans to do.

“We will always have human teller, not automated tellers, and we also want a human voice answering the telephone,” she says.

In 2017, Diane received at woman of FIRE award from the Commercial Record, not a prize for combustion, but recognition of being one of the key local players in finance, insurance, and real estate.

The award also recognized her for community service. She was the board president of the Elderly House Development of Old Saybrook at the time the organization broke ground on 15 added housing units, known as Saye Brook Village South, as part of Saye Brook Village elderly housing complex on Sheffield Street. Now she is a board member and treasurer of the Estuary Council of Seniors.

“We are a community bank; we live and work in the community. We are a part of the fabric of the community,” she says.

The bank has branches in Essex, Chester, Old Lyme, Old Saybrook, and Madison. Diane points out than in Essex, where the bank has two branches, the bank is now the only one on Essex Main Street since Liberty Bank closed its branch there. The bank also has an Essex office on Spencer Plains Road.

Diane and her husband, Gary, live in Ivoryton. She loves to cook, and since his retirement, Gary has made garden work a priority.

“Our lawn has never looked better,” Diane says.

Still, they are seldom around to look at the lawn on summer weekends. They’re on their 38-foot Sea Ray boat.

“We see a lot of Long Island over the summer,” she says, noting the farthest they have gone is Martha’s Vineyard.

There is one thing, often standard on powerboats, that no one will ever find on theirs.

“There are no fishing poles,” Diane says.

But that’s not something she misses.

“The boat is an absolute sanctuary,” she says.

Essex Saving Bank is a mutual bank, which means that is depositors are also its owners. That is important to Diane as she looks to the future of the bank and her own role.

“My hope here is that the bank is thriving. Being a mutual community bank is part of that. Raising up talent and mentoring the next group of people,” she says. “If I can pay it forward, that is the best.”