A longtime resident of Stony Brook, Elizabeth Custodio was born and raised in the Bronx.
After attending CUNY at Herbert H. Lehman College, she embarked on a banking career with, then, Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., and has not looked back since.
During those formative years, she was first introduced to the vital importance of true customer service. Today, Elizabeth is still driven by that defining principle, with skills now honed by over forty years of dedicated banking experience — most recently at M&T Bank, as vice president and regional CRA officer.
Her responsibilities include economic development and community engagement while ensuring the bank continues to comply with all local, state, and federal regulatory requirements of the Community Reinvestment Act.
Elizabeth held similar CRA roles at People’s United Bank, Suffolk County National Bank, and Astoria Bank — all of which came on the heels of an extensive and fruitful tenure at HSBC. Clearly, customer and community continue to form her banking DNA.
Elizabeth possesses a unique sensitivity to, and profound awareness of, the needs and concerns of economically underserved and socially challenged communities — but also the transformative power that comes from access to opportunity.
She excels in exploring, creating, and developing synergies between business, industry, academia, government and key community-based organizations throughout the region — a skillset leveraged like never before during the pandemic, where she helped companies and organizations support their communities and secure life-changing financial guidance and assistance.
She is repeatedly recognized and lauded as a skilled and cogent leader, the essential connective tissue between bank and community, whose value is repeatedly proven by the milestones she continues to reach — all while raising three exceptional children, Eliud II, Christie, and Mark, all professionals today, along with her husband, Eliud Custodio.
Fluent in Spanish and raised in the inner city, Elizabeth is informed, imbued, and inspired by a broad and inclusive perspective of ‘community,’ with an innate sensitivity to diversity, equity, and inclusion, multiculturalism, and evolving socio-economic dynamics — materia prima for building an extensive, indispensable, and influential network.
Elizabeth holds seats on the boards of multiple organizations, including the LI Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the Long Island Regional Planning Council, the Community Development Corp. of Long Island Advisory, Vision Long Island, as well as serving on the SUNY at Old Westbury Foundation Board of Trustees and holding numerous additional leadership roles and affiliations.
Her work and tireless advocacy continue to garner awards and well-deserved honors from the public and her peers, including The New York Jets NFL Hispanic Heritage Leadership Award, LIBN Top 50 Women in Business, and both the Schnepps Power Women and Latin Impact Awards, just to name a few.
Elizabeth Custodio has seen firsthand how the strategic alliances she has helped forge continue to stimulate and sustain economic development as a form of personal empowerment and professional advancement — not just for the individuals, organizations, and communities she serves, but for the financial institutions who serve them.
