Page 22 - BusinessWest April 18, 2022
P. 22

 Branching Out — Again
bankESB Parent Continues to Expand Through Acquisition
A“survival tactic.”
That’s one of the phrases Matt Sosik, CEO of Hometown Financial Group Inc., the parent of bankESB, used to describe Home- town’s announced plans to acquire Randolph Bancorp Inc., the latest in a series of moves by Hometown to expand through acquisition.
Elaborating, Sosik said this acquisition will certainly give Hometown, the multi-bank hold- ing company for Abington Bank as well as bank- ESB, a larger, stronger footprint on the state’s South Shore. Indeed, Randolph Bancorp is the holding company for Envision Bank, which will merge with and into Abington Bank to create a $1.4 billion institution with 11 full-service retail locations across the South Shore, including the towns of Abington, Avon, Braintree, Cohassett, Holbrook, Marion, Randolph, and Stoughton.
But the primary reason for this acquisition, as well as the other five undertaken in just the past seven years, he told BusinessWest, is to achieve something that is becoming ever-more critical in today’s banking climate: scale.
“Banking has become such a low-margin business that scale is absolutely critical,” Sosik explained. “We aren’t running our company to survive three years or five years; we’re running to survive 20 and 30 years. We want to be a relevant player in all our markets, and we want to ensure our long-term survival, and to do that, scale is
the name of the game. “We’re not seeking this
growth because it makes us feel better or because it allows us to pump our chest out,” he went on. “This is a survival tactic in this business.”
With this latest acquisi- tion, which is expected to be finalized by the fourth quarter of this year, Home- town will have consolidat- ed assets of approximately $4.4 billion and a branch network of 38 full-service offices across Massachu- setts and the northeastern part of Connecticut. The move will make Hometown the 10th-largest mutual banking company in the country.
“That’s scale — that’s
about us being one of the
survivors when the dust eventually settles,” said Sosik, reiterating, again, the need for size in a changing, still consolidating banking and finan- cial-services sector, where competition is grow- ing — and evolving.
Matt Sosik says Hometown Financial Group’s latest acquisition, like those that came before it, is all about creating scale at a time when that quality is critical to growth and even survival.
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  22 APRIL 18, 2022
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