Gerry Nadeau has been executive vice president at Rockland Trust for four years. The Brockton native has been with the bank for 27 years, his entire career. He comes from a family of bankers and started out in a training program that ensured that he could do every job in the bank. He lives in North Easton. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, and like many of us, he can’t finish one issue of The Economist before the next one arrives. Here, he talks about his career and the future of the banking industry in Massachusetts.

Gerry Nadeau

Title: Executive Vice President, Rockland Trust; Rockland

Age: 57

Experience: 27 years, 4 years at Rockland Trust

Q: How did you get into the banking business 27 years ago?

A: Actually, I’m a second-generation banker. My mother, my brother and my uncle are all in banking, so it’s somewhat of a common profession in my family.

Q.) Are they local?

A.) My brother is. He’s senior lender at Metro Credit Union.

Q.) What was your first position in banking?

A.) When I started here, we had a training program, so I started being a teller for a period of time and worked my way through every single department in the bank. Some of these stays, you might only be there for a few days, others you might be there for six months. But at that time, it was really understood that you had to learn every position in the bank and then you were going to school in the evening and afternoons as well for additional specialized training.

Q.) So, if they asked you to go work the teller line today, you could go do it?

A.) That’s right.

Q.) What do you see as some of the more pressing issues regarding banks Rockland’s size – not small, but not huge either.

A. ) I guess the thing that concerns me first is the lack of people entering the industry. Finding qualified managers and relationship managers is getting increasingly difficult, much because the industry stopped the kind of training I benefited from and many others in the industry benefited from. Those programs really don’t exist anymore. So, the average age of lenders is really extending out. At Rockland Trust, it’s over 50 years old, average age. The youngest, I learned the other day, is 37-and-a-half. And for the youngest person, that’s pretty old today. When I started, all the banks had training programs. Rockland had a training program, the big banks had training programs and they’ve all gone away, so that’s certainly a big concern, qualified candidates to fill the roles of the future.

Q.) Why have the training programs gone away? Are they expensive to maintain?

A.) Yes, cost. And I think what ended up happening is a lot of companies spent a lot of money training people, and they would leave. They were training them and then they were going off to join someone else, so that’s somewhat of a long-term industry issue.

Q.) You were talking about your concerns.

A.) In the near term, I would say the economy is really thwarting loan demand because potential borrowers and existing clients are worried about where the economy is going, where is the political front heading? Where’s taxation heading? And regulations? All those uncertainties cause you to not want to make a decision. So, given a choice, most people will say, ‘Well, I’m just going to wait.’
Last, I think on the concern side for us is regulation… both the complexity of it, as well as the cost of it. It’s getting increasingly expensive as companies like ourselves have to keep adding compliance officers. I think it really hurts the small banks, $1 billion, maybe $1.5 billion in size, they have to keep bringing on compliance officers, and that’s adding hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in cost. That really is some cost without bringing any revenue in.

Q.) Where’s the best place in Brockton to get lunch?

A.) The Italian Kitchen on Main Street.

Q.) What do they serve there?

A.) The meatballs are great. I think that’s what they’re really known for.

Five Things People Don’t Know About Brockton:
1. Reportedly, the catcher’s mitt was invented in Brockton.
2. Many believe the city was home to the first public building to be lighted by 3 wire electricity, and the connection was overseen by Thomas Edison himself.
3. Edgars, the first retail store to feature a Santa Claus, was in Brockton.
4. Brockton was among the first cities in the country to force railroad companies to install bridges for their lines over road traffic so as not to disrupt the flow of traffic to and from shoe factories, which at the time were more politically powerful than railroad owners.
5. Brockton was one of the first cities where barrooms offered pizza, a style still often referred to as "barroom pizza."