representatives from the palli the chamber of commerce the school district mysterians p t a not other organizations and private individuals in our community our goal is to try to address a lot of the problems  community faces such as drug and alcohol abuse bullying for sportsmanship even speeding through a number of ways primarily through programs we conduct a lot of programs both on on cable as well as at different in different venues throughout the community and we also have our character console wars program twice a year where we try to identify individuals that show good character traits to their everyday lives all over object is to deal with these programs on a positive event and its continued with problems in the investment industry the mortgage financing a lot of different product even continued today on a national basis  know vice president for audit risk compliance and legal have all the boring jobs at the bank but the banks that are out since eighty ninety nine we've been in the townships about one hundred sixty eight we have two branches here in the township and we're about two hundred fifty million dollars in assets area and that is twenty one itself we've been a member of the franchise now for twenty five years and century twenty one is right now in one hundred forty four different countries ok all right let's get into the discussion know peters is even though we've been growing we're small community so we all know each other we've dealt with each other on a lot of different community events and issues and i'm sure the three do internally so i'm familiar with you but and plus worldwide i also serve currently is the vice chair of the peters township sanitary authority board i've done that for a little over a year now and very interesting job what we're trying to do what's right for the for nonprofit so what type of events are activities of a dozen our community or in the region well we've had we have assemblies that are throughout the country a little pockets of a membership in you know going to the communities and do many different kinds of things such as clean up projects this year locally we're going to try to get involved with the special olympics as volunteers were recruiting our members to come out and help out with the special olympics in the past we worked on clean up projects such as the road projects that kind of thing  and we have some plans now to get involved more with sending boxes over to our military overseas care packages with the goodies in it for them so that's that's in the plans right now mike mike  have given away ten percent of our after tax profits every year back into the community so that number's about four million dollars given away since ninety ninety one and that doesn't include our scholarships which we give certainly every year some local peter township students so that's about four hundred eleven thousand dollars over the past twenty years and interestingly your bank has a program where the customers who are community members can vote to select where that money should go yes we just wrapped up our customer their easter seals of western pennsylvania were on the board for easter seals we do a lot of sponsorship through them in factory town that our company listen sells we donate a portion of our commission back to easter seals there are largest sponsor that we represent an annual basis and then also a sponsorship of numerous sporting events and teams locally from as dave mentioned not just financial support but also coaching and whatnot for the local junior sports programs and associations ok well thank you you know  we all have to deal with ethical issues in our businesses and especially in your businesses because when your business is work you need the public to have trust in you to be able to invest in your bank to to buy from you by real estate addresses ethical issues it faces if you have policies and you have ethical training programs if you can just address some of those issues let's jump in first we have approximately a thousand independent agents that throughout the country that's our products and one of the things that probably would could be a problem is is the turning of business were were an agent would go in and just move your business to another company just to get the commission maybe not doing the exact right thing for the member to prevent that kind of thing we have a form that must be filled out it's got a nice suitability form and then it's optional to for the person to fill it out they give us their finances if we don't want  an older person putting all that money into an annuity that's going to have a penalty if they would take it out and it's not the right thing for them we require our agents to continue continue my education have to earn x amount of points throughout the two year period to get there monitored by the state insurance departments we also have an ethics code that we have them signed that they will do the right thing for our members so we use the moniker and assess at n s f life family matters and  it's not just a saying it's it's how we run our business we treat all our members as if they were family you know obviously as an insurance for your having invest that money has to be able to be able to provide the product there are any specific practices that you have in place for us how you invest that money for the well we only invest in investment grade products class one and two products we don't buy any junk bonds  ninety nine percent of our stuff is quality stuff sometimes you buy it by am on in two or three years later maybe the company has no problems and it does go done but for the most part quality stuff it's very safe  we sell our new products i tell the member that you know when you you know best in our new teas they don't it goes up it's not based on the stock market it's it's a minimum guarantee rate in their money safe they can sleep at night i sleep well  government tries to keep us honest but now thankfully we have a culture where i don't think we have to ever worry about that even if we don't have that better oversight so jim would not your company through our company were also very strict on the ethics  all of our agents are required to here to a strict code of ethics not only through the national association of realtors but also through our local board within our company and every two years we have continuing education requirements that all of our agents are required to go through the testing and get for renewal if not you know they're no longer permitted to work within our offices so you know hearing it a strict code of ethics is very important for our business and most importantly for our clients ok obviously you all work in a competitive environment and so there's a lot of pressure to keep up with your competition and sometimes of the competition doesn't always work in an ethical manner because that created in my business there's about ten for colonels life insurance companies in the in the tri state area and and we don't look at them as competition there are brothers and sisters and many times we share ideas with each other i have no problem calling my to gain business share no not at all and you compete with the other types of h d you know the for profit insurance companies are well we do compete with them but when we have a special mike we can handle that smaller policy ten fifteen twenty thousand maybe final expense insurance type thing lot bigger companies don't want to touch it unless it's a hundred thousand two hundred thousand face value life  peter's township we'd like to see really more competition on it but you know it's tough i think that especially now dodd frank is the big bill in banking now and it's twenty five hundred pages long and it's requiring us to really revamp some of our products and doing that you know we sit around of a big table and we try to figure out what's the right thing to do because the easy thing to do would make us a lot more money and there are some of our competitors and they go out and they try they try these things and they find out that the customers it's to their detriment i mean for us as i mentioned earlier we're locally grown so are our president brian smith and our chief financial officer john malone which both live here and peter's we all three of us have said it numerous times we get complaints at giant eagle so i mean if people don't like what we're doing they don't think that we're treating them ethically they'll tell us so for some of our competitors who maybe don't live in the area it's maybe a little bit easier to duck and high perhaps we don't have that luxury sometimes but what about the rules and i know it's real estate entities a lot more competitive now with the  downturn in the economy and i'm going to thank you yeah i mean we have you know hundreds of agents competing for similar type business on a daily basis and so yes it's a very very competitive industry however you know ethics and doing everything correctly is  utmost importance i mean just these two gentlemen have you know locally businesses are i said before we're a family business been here for forty nine years and one thing about the real estate business is it's definitely word of mouth business so there will always  out there very competitively in the marketplace we only do business in an ethical way that's ultimately in the benefit of our consumers but if i'm just curious you know know i the mortgage crisis has been part of the big problem we've been facing purchase a property or not because you know their financial situation oh yeah absolutely i mean every time that we meet with a customer one of the things we require of them is to go out and get pre approved with a lender of their choice if they don't have any lenders that they're working with we typically give them a list of what we consider to be approved lenders people that you know meet the certain code of ethics and standards in the banking industry just as you said you know in the last five years there's been a tremendous change especially from the more very mortgage brokers side and  you know the governments regulating them much differently today than they had in the past a lot of loans for what they called like no doc loans and things like that they're definitely all a thing of the past documentation verification of income and assets  definitely more prevalent today than they had been but you know we truly feel it's a much better thing that we were able to put people in the homes that they can truly afford therefore we've had a very small amount of foreclosures and short short sales in the local southwestern p a marketplace there about your banker i know you didn't run into the problem that a lot of banks did a few years ago with the mortgage crisis why is that we've had very few write offs thankfully but really works the two of us working together i jim we see a lot of business from from jim's business and we are glad to partner with them because it really takes two sides you need an unscrupulous laundering and need an unscrupulous realtor to get people in a lot of messes and take them out and so on big homes and they show them that they can afford big everybody has to use and how is that hurt or help your ability to manage ethical practices if at all for anybody trying to figure out what's china getting more and more involved with the internet and we have a web site for organization and it shows our products on their and as time goes on society is using the internet more and more to purchase all kinds of products it's definitely keep getting larger in our businesses and what changes have you had to do because of that i might for example i know you guys changed your name you no longer a federal bank you're a state chartered bank correct part of the reason why mike i'm going to take the assumption there are federal regulators watching this i will be kind to my comments but i think that you know certainly the pendulum has swung for regulatory burden and i call it burden some consumers may call it protection but you know really it's  when you have twenty five hundred pages written that are trying to protect the consumer and people writing in a short amount of time they don't think about the ramifications i mean some some customers that we've dealt with for fifty years we've had their families for a long long time  customers anymore not because we don't want to not because it's even a money issue it's just because we're getting pressured to not have these types of individuals in our bank so for us you know that burden for us which was meant which was meant to protect  is not really doing that so i think that ethically whenever you try to have larger bodies of people kind of impose ethics upon you it doesn't work it doesn't fit your culture and so i will be kind ok leave it at n came and spent three three months of their time and we pay for this to happen i think it's all good stuff we want to be doing the right stuff in the right things for our members and  as time goes on i think you're going to see more and more regulation the insurance department doesn't want to see a company fail under their watch and that's why they keep people testify and it's they're they're sort of a branch of the same organization that monitors the anything i mean on the real estate sales whether it be residential commercial industrial we haven't really seen a whole lot of you know change from regulations a little bit more from a disclosure standpoint from the sellers and whatnot which is you know all to the benefit of the consumer but really it's been more on the banking and then what you know from our industry i think you know everything that we talk about today you know just between whether it be real estate or from the lending or the insurance i mean i think you know all of our business are regulated you know from a governmental entity and all of us are doing a great job and hearing to those ethics and you know ultimately protecting the consumers that we represent ok i generally want to thank you for on behalf of chamber of commerce carriage counts committee for taking the time to participate in this panel today i know  you're very busy and that it takes a lot from your you're your job to do this this panel is one of a series of episodes that the character counts committee is producing on a variety of topics and if you have