Page 39 - BusinessWest December 22, 2021

Some Moves of Interest
PeoplesBank Builds a Presence in Commercial and Industrial Lending
By Joseph Bednar
For a bank that’s been around for 136 years, PeoplesBank came across com- mercial lending fairly recently.
“My predecessor, Doug Bowen, started com- mercial lending at PeoplesBank probably 35 years ago,” Tom Senecal, the bank’s president and CEO, told BusinessWest. “We didn’t do any com- mercial loans until then, and we started out with
“We have a very successful commercial real-estate portfolio. What we didn’t have was the C&I side. So we started talking about how to get into the C&I business.”
just commercial real estate. And we stayed con- servative with real estate, and never went into the C&I side because we didn’t have a lot of exper- tise. Just by virtue of what our comfort zone was, we focused on the real-estate side.”
That’s all changed, as PeoplesBank has made a strong push into the realm of C&I (commercial and industrial) business lending over the past two years.
“A little over two years ago, we started talking
about our strengths and weaknesses and who we are are and what we do as the largest mutual institution in Western Mass.,” Senecal explained. “We have a very successful commercial real- estate portfolio. What we didn’t have was the C&I side. So we started talking about how to get into the C&I business.”
The reason the bank hadn’t done so sooner came down to expertise, which it had in spades on the real-estate side but much less so in C&I, where “you’re financing equipment, you’re financing lines of credit, there’s different types of collateral, it requires more monitoring, more analysis ... we didn’t have that experience,” Sen- ecal said. “It’s a very complex and very different lending skillset than commercial real estate.”
That’s why Senecal started talking with Frank Crinella, who has decades of experience in lend- ing in the region, about bringing over a group of individuals from a large regional bank to spear- head a push into C&I lending.
“We talked for several months about his group of people coming over, and we brought over five people that have an enormous amount of experi- ence on the C&I side,” Senecal said. “Real estate is much more transactional, and we wanted to develop relationships in our home market much better than we ever had in the past, and C&I, to us, was the way to do it.”
Crinella is now the bank’s senior vice presi- dent and senior lender, and will also take the title of senior credit officer when Mike Oleksak, the institution’s longtime senior lender and senior credit officer, retires at the end of the year.
“C&I typically brings over the relationship more than just the real-estate transaction. And now that we have the group of people that we have, I think it’s going to be tremendously suc- cessful, not just for the Western Mass. market, but for our growth strategy going down into Con- necticut as well,” Senecal said. “Frank and the group of people who came over have been here just over a year and have been enormously suc- cessful in that period of time, starting to build relationships here in Western Mass.”
Crinella saw great potential in what Peoples- Bank was trying to do.
“What attracted us to Peoples was really the culture,” he said. “And C&I is all about relation- ship lending, the team approach. We have a very strong credit culture, but we also have a lot of depth on the cash-management side, and our branch network is very strong and plays well to the companies here in Western Mass. and North- ern Connecticut.”
PeoplesBank
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