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‘Culture is the fabric of resilience’: How Quontic Bank’s core values helped it navigate through the pandemic
- Quontic Bank is a $400 million bank based in New York.
- The firm's CIO Patrick Sells describes how culture helped the firm navigate through the uncertainty of the pandemic.

Patrick Sells didn’t come up the ranks in community banking. As the CIO of $400 million Quontic Bank, he had started his own digital marketing firm in college. Unsuccessful in wooing banking clients, it’s now that he realizes why he wasn’t able to land financial services firms.
“I never did work for a bank because I didn’t understand all the regulations and what it means to be a bank,” he said at Tearsheet’s inaugural Resilience Conference.
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QuonticBank and Patrick Sells show us a great example of how strong cultures need to be adaptive in real life. Some new work from Jenny Chatman and Francesca Gino in HBR show that these types of companies can earn 15% more in revenue vs. peers who are less adaptable. This is great news for the disruptive fintech industry, well suited to quick pivots. But, you need to manage your highly adaptive and resilient workforce to avoid burnout in the WFH environment. It may have been fairly easy for tech companies to go remote but work-life balance is getting crushed. A lack of boundaries means work-from-anywhere has turned into work from all-day-and-night. Leaders must lead by example and find ways to ensure their employees aren’t always-on or they risk wiping out any edge gained during the pandemic and ruining their adaptive venture.