To get a foot in the door with customers, smaller players like the New York community bank need larger lenders to slip up, CEO Steve Bush said.

Bigger banks may be racing to serve mass-affluent and younger wealthy customers, but New York City-based Apple Bank is content to stick with its middle-class roots.

That’s according to CEO Steve Bush, who’s led the privately held, $20 billion-asset bank for about a decade. Still, the lender is working to bring in younger customers and has boosted its marketing efforts, trying new paths to enter the collective consciousness “to a greater degree than we typically would have done in the past, because it's a digital world,” Bush said.

“It's a challenge to get the attention of people on the street in a way that it didn't used to be,” he said during a recent interview.

The bank, founded in 1863, has a large base of older, loyal retail bank customers, many of whom are “the middle and working class of New York City – teachers, nurses, administrators, people in hospitals, people in the school system, small-business people, just regular families in the suburbs,” he said.

But the lender’s age is not “guaranteeing anything about the future,” said Bush, who noted “Credit Suisse failed at 166.”

Apple Bank expects to spend about $10 million this year on marketing efforts, which have included fostering connections with Major League Baseball’s New York Mets and a set of teenage sisters who have a financial literacy-focused YouTube channel.

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