Page 34 - BusinessWest December 22, 2021

That’s a positive trend for commercial lend- ing. Glenn Welch, president and CEO of Freedom Credit Union, was on an economic-outlook call with Visa recently, which projected a 7% uptick
in 2022 in business investments in fixed assets, which means more borrowing. “That’s pretty healthy growth,” he told BusinessWest. “People are looking to borrow out there. Corporations’ finan- cial statements are looking pretty strong the last couple of years, and a lot of consumers are sitting in pretty good financial shape; we’ll see whether they want to pull the trigger or not.”
On the consumer side, they have, with 2021 being the second straight year of double-digit growth on the mortgage-lending side at Freedom, along with healthy business in auto and home-
“With commercial business picking up, people were feeling a little more optimistic with what the future has in store for them — where 2020 was all about trying to figure out what the heck was going on.”
equity loans. “And last year, deposits were up over 20%; this year, it was 10%. Our balance sheet, like many institutions, has grown pretty significantly since COVID hit.”
Tony Liberopoulos, Liberty Bank’s senior vice president and regional manager for Commercial
Banking, said the bank’s new commercial-lending push in Western Mass. — it opened a loan-production office in East Longmeadow in June and has added three more employees since then — has gone well.
“We’ve been very happy. We had a very strong year; we’ve been very busy,” he told BusinessWest, noting that much of that success can be attributed to custom- ers craving normalcy — in this case, face-to-face deal-
ings with a stable team. “With the amount of market disruption
between mergers, com-
munity lenders leaving
their jobs for other oppor-
tunities, and, in many
instances, competitors still
working from home, we’ve
had opportunities to meet
prospects and clients to grow our business,” he explained.
“We’re firm believers that, while businesses have been struggling with things like COVID and supply chains, things will bounce back,” he went on. “And we’re seeing a lot of opportuni-
ties just by being in front of the clients. They want to see familiar faces; they don’t want to deal with just Webex and phone calls.”
Liberty’s lending numbers have borne that out, with 2021 figures close to what they were pre-
Tony Liberopoulos says borrowers want access to digital tools, but mainly prefer face-to-face interactions.
COVID, Liberopoulos added. “That’s all we can ask for at this point. We’ve found customers and prospects still want face-to-face meetings; they want a normal relationship with banks.”
With that in mind, “I think the trend is toward
more confidence in 2022 than there was in 2021,”
he went on. “I think companies have seen their business come back since late May, early June,
when a lot of COVID
restrictions were Banks
lifted. We’re seeing Continued on page 36
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34 DECEMBER 22, 2021
BANKING & FINANCE
BusinessWest