Following trend, Maine's banking trade groups merge
Photo/David A. Rodgers
Chris Pinkham, president of the Maine Association of Community Banks, says purpose and not politics was behind the merger of Maine's two banking trade groups
After more than 100 years as separate organizations, the Maine Association of Community Banks and Maine Bankers Association have merged.
Despite the timing of the announcement, Chris Pinkham, president of the Maine Association of Community Banks and head of the freshly merged organization, says the decision to join forces was not instigated by the economic downturn. Talks between the two organizations — which merged under the MACB moniker — started about a year ago. When the economy began to sour last fall, Pinkham says enough time and due diligence had been invested in the idea that the organizations were able to move rapidly to finalize the merger plans. Joseph Pietroski, the executive director of the MBA, stepped down at the end of 2008.
“There’s a whole series of reasons [to merge], but the single most important reason is that the time had finally arrived to have a single voice,” Pinkham says.
That’s not to imply the two groups had disparate voices before. Pinkham says the groups rarely if ever found themselves on opposite sides of an issue.
Historically, the MACB, founded in 1883, represented mutual savings banks, while the MBA, also more than 100 years old, represented stock banks. Pre-merger, the MACB had 21 members, from Machias Savings Bank to TD Banknorth and the MBA had only nine members, including national banks like Bank of America and KeyBank.
Today, there are 33 banks in Maine — three didn’t belong to either organization — a far cry from what Maine’s banking industry looked like when Pinkham joined the MACB 30 years ago. In 1980, when Pinkham became president of the MACB, there were close to 70 banks in the state, he says. But years of consolidation and mergers have thinned the herd, likewise thinning the argument for supporting different trade associations.
While the perspectives of the two organizations’ members may have been different 25 years ago, Pinkham says the industry has changed. All banks, whether mutual savings banks or stock banks, big banks or small, share the same interests. “Safety and soundness is number one, and making sure customers are happy,” Pinkham says. “We’re all concerned about regulation, all concerned about the public perception of this foreclosure mess.”
Pinkham says the merger wasn’t an effort by some of the bigger banks to slip under the scandal-free comfort of the community-banks banner. He says the public doesn’t differentiate. “A bank is a bank is a bank.”
When it became clear a merger was in the best interest of the associations, Pinkham says the right people got it done, referencing Joseph Murphy, president of Bar Harbor Bankshares and chair of the MBA, and Glenn Hutchinson, president of Bath Savings Institution and chair of the MACB.
Mergers among banking trade associations have been going on all over the country. In January, the New Jersey League of Community Bankers merged with the New Jersey Bankers Association. The Texas Bankers Association and the Texas Savings and Community Bankers Association merged in the summer of 2006. In fact, Pinkham says Maine was the only state in New England that still had two trade groups representing the same industry.
But Pinkham says it was the June 2007 merger of the American Bankers Association and America’s Community Bankers that most likely restarted the merger conversation in Maine. “But only because people were thinking about it,” Pinkham says. “I’d love to tell you our members wake up and the first thing they think of is their trade association,” he says with a laugh, “but it’s not. It’s way down the list, some time after breakfast.”
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