Cohen quits as CEO of bank she started
At 72, business matriarch is moving on
Betsy Zubrow Cohen, matriarch of a Philadelphia financial/energy/real estate family empire, is stepping down from day-to-day management and the board of The Bancorp, her Philadelphia- and Wilmington-based company, at the end of 2014, she told investors in a statement today.
Shares of Bancorp, which have lately declined below $10 from a recent high of $20+ last winter, rose on the news that Cohen, 72, is retiring and Bancorp has appointed her top lieutentant, veteran Bancorp President Frank M. Mastrangelo, as her replacement. Mastrangelo will also remain Chief Operating Officer. Cohen's son Daniel G. Cohen will continue to chair The Bancorp's board and take over his mother's seat as chair of its bank-subsidiary board of directors. Betsy Cohen will remain a consultant to the company.
The bank is laboring under a federal money-laundering-compliance consent order; it has a history of share price volatility alongside the varying prospects of the several business lines it has moved into and out of (local business loans, payment cards, cash management for employee accounts).
Cohen founded the former Jefferson Bank in the 1970s and used it to help finance some of the players in Philadelphia's "restaurant renaissance," among other borrowers, before selling to Hudson United (now part of TD) Bank in 1999. With her husband, Ed, and sons, Daniel and Jonathan, she has been a fixture on the region's corporate scene, though the couple in recent years has spent more time in Sarasota and New York than around their Rittenhouse Square office. More on the Cohens and their enterprises here.