PBN 2021 Leaders & Achievers Awards
Harold M. Horvat | Chairman, CEO and President, Centreville Bank
Harold M. Horvat has been at the helm of Centreville Bank in West Warwick as chairman, CEO and president for the past seven years. A community bank, Centreville adapted during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide much-needed resources to its customers.
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“Centreville Bank is truly invested in our community,” Horvat said. “We want to play an active part and we know that we make a difference.”
Centreville employees credited Horvat with guiding the bank through the pandemic and said his leadership showed them they could accomplish their goals by working together.
Once it became clear that business as usual was no longer enough, Horvat made changes that would allow his employees to focus on new areas of growth, mostly while working with customers remotely. He put his team first and maintained positive, encouraging communications that kept staff motivated, engaged and confident that they would get through the crisis by working together.
“We adapted our staffing so that our employees could continue working,” Horvat said. “When we had to close our lobbies, we redeployed our retail employees in different ways, focusing on opportunities with PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] loans and mortgage loans.”
Knowing that small businesses would need help to survive, Horvat focused on working with business owners to help them access PPP loans so they could pay their employees and keep their doors open, even if virtually. Thanks to his team’s efforts, many companies survived the worst of COVID-19 and came out stronger.
“During the pandemic,” Horvat said, “we played an active role in helping businesses and organizations access PPP money so that they could remain open.”
Looking back at the past 18 months, Horvat is proud of what the team at Centreville Bank has accomplished.
“We were forced to quickly adapt to a different environment, but now we can look back proudly at all that we accomplished in our community,” he said.
