Photo courtesy of Needham Bank
Joseph P. Campanelli
President and CEO, Needham Bank
Industry experience: 40 years
When Amesbury-based BankProv came up for sale, Needham Bank faced plenty of competition for what ultimately became a $211 million acquisition, CEO Joseph Campanelli said. The reason? The region’s two biggest serial acquirers were both busy with other deals. With BankProv branches now sporting Needham Bank logos – the rebranding was accomplished over a single weekend last month, right after the deal closed – Needham Bank hopes to follow some of its commercial customers north into southern New Hampshire while leveraging BankProv’s technology practices and staff.
Q: As you evaluated a potential merger with BankProv, what stood out about that organization and why did it feel like it would be a good fit?
A: We see more and more customers of ours on a commercial side going up on the North Shore and Southern New Hampshire. As those customers moved up there, we looked at more and more opportunities to grow de novo and then when BankProv came along, there were not a lot of potential bidders, just given the fact that the normal consolidators like Rockland [Trust] and Eastern [Bank] were tied up doing other transactions with HarborOne and Enterprise Bank.
We felt that if it was an opportunity to buy it at the right price and negotiate the right terms, that we could really leverage that franchise and move forward, and we were able to come to a deal on pricing. Then we got to know each other better and better and we realized there are a lot more synergies there than we had anticipated. We love the markets they’re in. They’re all in growing, expanding communities that we can have a nice foothold in and accelerate our growth curve there.
[BankProv is also] a great team of people: They’re innovative, they have great technology. We really said, “Let’s go and look at this as an opportunity make sure we get the right people in the right seats.” We had a handful of people at Needham Bank that were getting ready to retire and they did a little bit of an accelerated retirement.
Friday night, we closed the doors as BankProv, Monday morning, the signs, the paint, the letterhead, the deposit tickets – you name it – was “Needham Bank.” Even the pens in the jars and all that swag on our employees. We did this as a team. We didn’t hire outside consultants. In this case, we said, “No, we’re going to be all on one team. We’re going to do it in 2025 so we hit the ground running for the fourth quarter and going into 2026” and everybody came together to make it happen.
Q: When you think of these deals, a lot goes into being able to add technology, being able to add people. On the technology side, where do you feel you most benefit?
A: You don’t want to substitute technology for access to people, from a cultural standpoint, but we’re both operating the same core platform, and we had made investments over the years on certain elements, enhancing our products, especially on the cash-management side. Bank Prov focuses a lot on building APIs. They had, I think, over 900 APIs tied in with their clients and whatnot, almost like a customized link into the company and we’ll take over probably 600 or 700 of those APIs immediately, and cross-sell and influence them into our customer base, so they’re going to see better feature and functionality.
Q: You touched on wanting to increase market share in Southern New Hampshire. Where else in New England are you looking to grow?
A: If we look at the economic opportunity from Southern New Hampshire down on [Interstate] 495, into Providence, that’s a great market. A big percentage of New England economic activity is housed in that footprint, and I really believe it’s a matter of just continuing to harvest our presence in those locations. BankProv has a very tight relationship with the business community, but didn’t do as much on the residential side of the equation, where they weren’t able to provide residential mortgages and home equity loans or credit cards. Today you can walk to a Needham Bank branch in that marketplace and apply for a credit card or home equity loan or a residential loan. So that’s a day-one lift that they didn’t have.
There’s other things that they bring to the table for us too. It is one of those deals that you talk about the synergies of both companies. We’ve acquired a great team of people: like-minded, very similar cultures, team-oriented and really focused on, “How can we do a better job servicing a customer?” We weren’t out looking for an acquisition. It was a case where things just align nicely because we like the market, we like the people. It all came together.
Q: What is the value in having branding synced up with the announcement of a completion of a merger?
A: I think it’s really important. You hear us always say, “Our money’s the same color as everyone else’s,” and we did not want our team coming over from BankProv to have a delayed conversion. Over the weekend, we had a bunch of Zoom calls and check-ins, and I’m watching about 20 people on the screen trying to figure out who was talking from BankProv or Needham Bank. It was one company rowing in the same direction, really focused on the same objectives. We’re not Bank of America and others. We’ve got to be more nimble; we’ve got to be focused and really get it right. I think that’s the big part of doing this in a timely fashion, but not having a period of time sort of stuck in limbo, where you’re under an umbrella of one company, but you’re really not part of it. We did not want that to happen and we worked hard to make sure we had a timely process in place, and everybody, I think, felt engaged by it. If the brand doesn’t match the experience, then you waste a lot of money.
Campanelli’s Five Favorite Places to Eat
- Mamma Maria’s, Boston
- Grill 23, Boston
- Comfort Kitchen, Boston
- The ‘Quin House, Boston
- “Any place with homemade Italian!”
