NEFMA 2026 Spring CONFERENCE AGENDA
May 14-15 | Omni Mt. Washington Resort, Bretton Woods, NH
*Schedule subject to change
DAY 1: THURSDAY, MAY 14TH
7:30 AM - 5:00 PM
REGISTRATION OPEN
7:30 am - 8:30 am
BREAKFAST & NETWORKING WITH EXHIBITORS
8:30 AM - 8:45 AM
WELCOME AND CONFERENCE OPENER
SPEAKER: Kerri Madnick, President, NEFMA
8:50 AM - 9:40 AM
Family Networking: The Most Overlooked Marketing Engine in Banking
SPEAKERS: Billie Connally & Carie Kelly
Banks spend heavily to reach new audiences, yet one of the most effective growth drivers already exists inside their customer base: family connections. As the largest wealth transfer in history moves forward, most families still lack a will and have no clear plan for where important documents live. This gap creates stress for customers—and a missed opportunity for banks.
In this session, Billie Connally, VP of Partnerships at Paige, is joined by Carie Kelly, SVP of Digital Banking at Claremont Savings Bank, to share how legacy planning can become a practical, low-cost marketing channel. Using real bank examples, they’ll show how normalizing planning helps customers invite spouses, adult children, and trusted contacts into the banking relationship—driving qualified leads, stronger loyalty, and longer-lasting connections. Attendees will leave with clear messaging ideas and simple steps to support customers without adding strain to internal teams.
Billie Connally
Paige
Billie Connally is Vice President of Partnerships at Paige, a digital estate and legacy planning platform that helps community banks and credit unions show up for their customers at life's most important transitions.
With 25 years of community banking experience spanning digital strategy, retail operations, sales strategy and enablement, fintech evaluation, and learning & development, Billie brings both the banker’s perspective and the strategist’s eye to Paige’s partnership model. Her work sits at the intersection of the Great Wealth Transfer and the sandwich generation — the Gen X adults managing their parent’s financial lives while building their own. She is based in the Midwest and passionate about the role community banks play in the financial lives of real families.
Carie Kelly
SVP, Digital Banking
Claremont Savings Bank
Carie Kelly brings two decades of leadership experience in the financial services industry, specializing in data‑driven digital transformation and customer acquisition strategy. Throughout her career, Carie has guided dozens of financial institutions across New England through the evolution from traditional banking models to high‑performing, digitally focused organizations. Recognized for her ability to identify and cultivate emerging markets, Carie is deeply committed to growth-oriented, innovation‑led banking. In her current role as Senior Vice President of Digital Banking at Claremont Savings Bank, she oversees the Bank’s retail branch network while driving the expansion of the CSB brand beyond its traditional geographic footprint. Carie is a Certified Blockchain Expert and holds Google AdWords and Google Analytics certifications. She previously served as Vice President on the Board of Directors for the New England Financial Marketing Association.
10:10 AM - 11:00 am
Mastering Marketing ROI: How to Prove Value and Drive Bank Growth
SPEAKER: Dean DeCarlo
Dean DeCarlo
Managing Partner, Growth & Strategy
Dean DeCarlo is a digital marketing strategist, A passionate educator and speaker, he delivers tactical, actionable insights on analytics, digital ad strategies, and best practices for increasing website conversions. He has spoken at credit union and financial marketing events, sharing data-driven strategies that help marketers attract new members, deepen relationships, and drive long-term growth in an evolving digital landscape.
11:45 am - 12:55 pm
LUNCH & NETWORKING WITH EXHIBITORS
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
The Media Multiplier: Building Brands, Driving Sales
SPEAKER: Tom Hickey, Tom Holmes, HMC Team
HMC will lead an interactive session that will highlight the importance of the creative brief and its role as the foundation for media strategy and creative campaigns that build and strengthen brands — and, accelerate performance.
We'll start with the most meaningful way to define the target audience. Spoiler alert — it has very little to do demographics and geography. Because while the basics matter, the mindset of the audience is far more important than age, gender, and address when it comes to maximizing the value and impact of our media.
We’ll workshop different strategies for connecting with our audience — such as where in the marketing funnel the most effective brand-building and performance-driving messaging should be focused.
Tom Hickey
HMC Advertising
Tom is a well-versed communications pro with experience working on some of the largest and most respected brands in the world, including Audi, NASDAQ, Sony, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and the Quaker Oats Company. He marries his large-brand experience with plenty of time helping smaller companies and brands find their voice in an increasingly complex and cluttered world.
Tom has spent his career determining the most appropriate opportunities for brands to connect with their best customers or prospects, relying on a sharp sense of what motivates (or discourages) someone from forging a deeper relationship with a brand. He is a creative thinker with an extensive history of finding unique, innovative and effective solutions to marketing challenges based on relevant, supportable and distinctive insights.
When asked what differentiates his approach to comms planning, Tom said: “We don’t pick up a pencil to write a plan until we have clear alignment on a campaign’s core objective. It still amazes me that there are media planners crafting recommendations without knowing exactly what determines success.”
Tom Holmes
HMC Advertising
Bio Coming Soon!
3:05 PM - 3:55 PM
A Brand Story from the Inside Out. The 3 A’s: Awareness, Alignment, and Activation.
SPEAKER: Kelly Doherty
Kelly Doherty
Lowell Five Bank
Kelly Doherty is currently Senior Vice President of Marketing at Lowell Five Bank where her primary focus is leading an organization-wide rebrand and reinvention of marketing as a strategic revenue function. The rebrand has been instrumental in the Bank’s recent growth.
Prior Kelly led marketing and creative for Ace Hardware’s innovation and e-commerce unit, The Grommet. She was also head of marketing and creative for the University of New Hampshire and oversaw the marketing and communications for Southern New Hampshire University during their explosive growth and ascent to the largest provider of online education.
Kelly spent the first half of her career on the agency side at top-tier firms such as Young & Rubicam and Landor, advising senior executives on advertising and direct marketing.
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Keynote Session: Bank Marketing in an AI-First World: New Rules for Growth
SPEAKER: Jim Perry
The old rules of bank marketing assumed predictable customers, linear journeys, and a reasonably stable competitive set. None of those assumptions hold anymore.
Generative and agentic AI are changing how consumers search, compare, and choose financial providers, often before a bank ever enters the picture. And the institutions capturing those moments? The biggest and best-known brands are winning new relationships at a disproportionate rate. For community-based institutions, that's not a reason to panic. It is a reason to rethink what "competitive" actually means when brand awareness and AI-driven discoverability are working against you.
In this keynote, we'll name the rules that no longer apply and the ones replacing them. You'll walk away with a clear-eyed view of where AI-driven marketing is heading, what high-performing teams are actually doing differently, and a practical roadmap to improve your marketing maturity, tighten cross-functional alignment, and compete more effectively in a marketplace where relevance is the new reach.
Jim Perry
Market Insights, Inc.
Jim Perry is the Senior Strategist at Market Insights, where he helps financial institutions across the country make smarter decisions and unlock new paths to growth through custom research and data-driven strategy.
A trusted advisor to banks and credit unions coast to coast, Jim brings clarity to complex challenges—and a fresh perspective to conversations about growth, innovation, and relevance in a rapidly changing landscape.
Named one of the "Top 100 Fintech Influencers" by Onalytica, Jim is a regular on the speaker circuit at industry events of all sizes, from local associations to global conferences. He’s also a familiar voice on top podcasts like Breaking Banks, Banking Transformed, One Vision, and the American Banker Podcast. Jim co-founded the Fintech Book Club and serves on the board of the National Alliance for Financial Literacy and Inclusion, championing broader access and opportunity in financial services.
Thousands of community bankers and credit union leaders follow his daily posts and weekly emails for fresh takes on the latest in fintech, AI, marketing, M&A, and more. Deluxe named him one of the 20 leaders in modern banking every community banker should follow.
Whether he’s consulting, training, or speaking, Jim is known for making make complex concepts easy to understand and simple to apply.
5:30 PM - 7:00 pm
COCKTAIL RECEPTION & NETWORKING
DAY 2: FRIDAY, MAY 15TH
7:45 AM - 8:45 am
BREAKFAST & NETWORKING WITH EXHIBITORS
8:45 AM - 8:55 am
WELCOME REMARKS
SPEAKER: Kerri Madnick, President, NEFMA
9:00 am - 10:00 am
POwer Session
The AI Impact on SEO and Search Behavior
SPEAKER: Ryan Young
Five years ago, ranking #1 on Google was the finish line. Today, your clients are asking ChatGPT for mortgage advice, getting retirement planning tips from Gemini, and making financial decisions before they ever click a single link. The search landscape has fundamentally changed — and the financial marketers who understand this shift first are the ones who will own their market. In this session, we'll walk through the data behind the behavior shift, explain why your traffic reports look different than they did two years ago, and make the case that your compliance culture, your regulatory credentials, and your institutional credibility are actually your biggest AI-era assets. Come ready to rethink what visibility means — and leave with a clear plan to build it.
Ryan Young
BankBound
As Director of Business Development, my focus is on understanding your goals and matching them with the right strategies to drive long-term, measurable success. With more than 12 years of experience in digital marketing, I’m passionate about building strong relationships and delivering solutions that make a real impact.
Strategic Social Content for Financial Marketers: Driving Trust, Engagement & Growth
SPEAKER: Jordyn Swanson
At a time when authentic connection matters more than ever, financial marketers must harness social media not just for visibility but for measurable business impact. But what, exactly, does that look like? This session provides practical, applicable dos and don’ts for social media content and strategy. That means insights on creating social content that builds trust, strengthens community relationships, and drives tangible outcomes like deposit growth and advocacy.
Jordyn Swanson
Social Assurance
Jordyn Swanson heads up business development at Social Assurance, where she works with community banks and financial brands nationwide. Jordyn is particularly adept at helping financial brands navigate their unique challenges when it comes to marketing, compliance, and digital transformation. She takes a practical approach, helping community banks lean into their strengths as values-driven, community organizations with deep ties to their communities. A skilled marketer in her own right, Jordyn’s channel of choice is social–where she’s guilty of falling down the occasional TikTok rabbit hole and posting photos of her adorable small humans, Ryker and Zoey. Jordyn is based in Lincoln, Nebraska, where she enjoys lake days with the family and watching Nebraska volleyball.
10:30 am - 11:20 am
Using Brand to Blur the Lines of the Traditional Marketing Funnel
SPEAKER: Michael Panagako
Community banks continue to lose market share to larger banks. Year after year, NEFMA conference after NEFMA conference, we find ourselves having many of the same conversations – how do we stand out in a sea of sameness, how do we get more value out of our marketing budgets, and how do we get the next generation of customers to care about local banks the way their parents and grandparents did?
Your brand can’t do it all. So we’ll discuss tactics to deploy your brand in ways that transcend traditional ‘glossy awareness advertising’. These tactics shorten the distance between consideration and intent and use your brand in unexpected late-funnel ways.
Blurring the lines between awareness media and consideration media isn’t a new topic, but we take the idea and turn it into a holistic removal of all barriers and lines that makeup the traditional sales funnel.
We’ll discuss how to use technology to flatten the funnel and then use your people to stretch the funnel wider.
We’ll discuss ‘chicken-or-the-egg’ scenarios: how can you sell a financial product to a customer that doesn’t know you exist? But also flip it: how can you make people aware of your bank, without squandering money with the flimsy goal of ‘increasing awareness’?
The conventional wisdom says to use brand awareness tactics to help shorten the distance between ‘awareness’ and ‘consideration’ – but what if we could use ‘brand’ to shorten the distance between ‘consideration’ and ‘intent’ as well? Or better: tactics that turn the sales funnel on its head, leading with end-cycle intent. It’s the method that large banks can afford to do, but local banks unnecessarily fear.
We’ll present case studies that show real world examples of media tactics, brand tactics, and marketing tactics that dismantle the traditional sales funnel and lead to sustaining growth.
We’ll also juxtapose these case studies with national banks, showing how their built-in awareness seemingly frees them to take risks that local banks too often shy away from.
While these are broad-brush topics, there are also very specific topics that we’ll cover, including:
- Rich media “Branded acquisition” tactics – the dos and don’ts
- The paid search ecosystem – how to lead your marketing mix with intent
- How to avoid the murky community bank “brand slop” permeating the industry
- How regression analysis can uncover insights that aren’t always obvious
- How to turn local "community newspapers" and similar properties into performance drivers instead of community obligations.
- How your people – at every level – can utilize your brand to shorten the sales cycle
The takeaway will be how to deploy your brand in powerful but unexpected ways that move the needle in sales and growth. The session will be one part right-side of the brain: what do we do to make our brand more powerful and aspirational? And one part left-side of the brain: how can we grow faster and move the needle in sales? The takeaway will be how to marry both objectives using new technologies, methods and media to make your brand work harder in a crowded and competitive market.
Mike Panagako
Ten Feet Tall
Mike is a 25-year veteran working in the power of brand. His expertise covers a wide variety of professional services industries with primary focuses on banking, finance, real estate, destinations and hospitality.
He is both an 'agency person' and a 'client-sider', having split his time between the agency world and the client-side, working in commercial finance, real estate construction and development.
As the Managing Partner/Growth & Strategy for Ten Feet Tall, Mike sees ways to utilize the power of your brand to move the needle in both expected and unexpected ways. Working across many industries, Mike has made it a mission to bring best practices from beyond the world of banking to his bank partners.
Beyond his client partnerships, he oversees the agency’s growth and development.
Outside of Ten Feet Tall, he is a team leader and fund-raiser for the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and a co-founding member of B/GREG, the Boston Gay Real Estate Group.
11:20 aM - 12:10 PM
Reaching Gen Z (and Looking Ahead to Gen Alpha): Channels, Behaviors, and Practical Playbooks for Engaging the Next Generation
SPEAKER: Tom Stirling
For years, marketers have been told they need to “reach Gen Z.” But most guidance stops at stereotypes, surface-level channel lists, or trend-chasing tactics that don’t translate into real engagement or trust. The reality is more complex—and more urgent. Gen Z has fundamentally different expectations around communication, privacy, authenticity, and brand behavior. And Gen Alpha, now entering their teen years, is being shaped by an even more fragmented, creator-driven, and algorithmic world. Traditional outreach models—especially email-first, SMS-heavy, or interruption-based approaches—are increasingly ineffective, and in some cases actively rejected. In this session, Tom Stirling explores how Gen Z actually behaves, how they interpret brand outreach, and what CMOs need to rethink now to stay relevant—not just for today’s younger audiences, but for the next decade of growth. Rather than focusing on novelty platforms or short-lived trends, this session breaks down the structural shifts happening in how younger audiences communicate, evaluate brands, and decide when (and if) to engage. Topics include why SMS norms are changing, how private and semi-private channels are replacing public feeds, why “always-on” brand presence can backfire, and how younger audiences distinguish between brands that understand context versus those that simply show up. Attendees will learn how Gen Z’s preference for opt-in, contextual, and asynchronous communication impacts channel strategy—across social, community platforms, messaging, and owned media. The session will also explore how creator ecosystems, peer validation, and cultural fluency influence credibility far more than polished brand messaging. Importantly, this is not a session about abandoning fundamentals. It’s about recalibrating them. Tom will share practical frameworks for adapting existing brand, content, and CRM strategies to better align with younger audiences—without chasing every new platform or diluting brand integrity.
Looking ahead, the session will also touch on Gen Alpha: what early signals marketers should pay attention to, what’s likely to carry forward from Gen Z, and where assumptions may break down entirely. The goal is to help marketing leaders future-proof their approach—not by predicting trends, but by understanding behaviors. This session is designed for CMOs and senior marketers who want clear, actionable guidance on how to engage younger audiences thoughtfully, responsibly, and effectively—without gimmicks, jargon, or generational clichés.
Tom Stirling
Stirling Brandworks
Tom Stirling is a seasoned brand strategist helping banks, credit unions, and growth-focused organizations across the country build insight-driven marketing that earns attention and trust. He is the host of two podcasts–No Assigned Seats & Brand2Brand–exploring brand strategy leadership, and growth inside complex organizations.
As CEO of Stirling Brandworks, Tom leads a strategy-first team partnering with regulated and mission-driven brands to move beyond category clichés and build work rooted in real customer behavior, cultural context, and business reality. His approach balances bold creative thinking with operational discipline — ensuring marketing doesn’t just look good, but performs.
12:10 pm - 12:25 PM
CLOSING REMARKS
SPEAKER: Kerri Madnick, President, NEFMA