Westchester and Valley complete banking merger

The merger of Valley National Bankcorp and The Westchester Bank Holding Corp. has been completed. Westchester”™s wholly owned subsidiary The Westchester Bank has become part of Valley and has been rebranded under the name Valley Bank.

The Westchester Bank was billed as the largest independent commercially focused bank headquartered in the county, operating seven branches and having total assets of $1.3 billion. The combination of The Westchester Bank and Valley National results on a pro-forma basis as of March 31, 2021, in a banking operation with $43 billion in assets, $34 billion in loans and deposits, and 233 branches that include 45 in New York, 131 in New Jersey, 41 in Florida and 16 in Alabama.

“Many times in the industry banks try to combine and cut expenses and cut people to prosper, but that was not at all part of the rationale behind merging Westchester Bank into Valley,” John Tolomer, who had been president and CEO of The Westchester Bank told the Business Journal. Tolomer has assumed the role of president of the Westchester market for Valley National.

“In fact, what Valley is helping us do as the legacy Westchester bank is continue to do what we have been doing, which is to be very involved in the community, very involved with not-for-profits, very involved with small to medium-sized businesses and consumers,” Tolomer said.

Tolomer expressed pride in the way The Westchester Bank coped with the Covid pandemic, noting that the bank made more than $90 million in PPP loans.

“We were able to mobilize quickly,” Tolomer said. “We were able to have people work remotely and we kept our employees safe. We didn”™t have any Covid cases. We were able to serve our customers and do more electronically. We called our customers on an on-going basis, ”˜Is there anything you need, is there anything we can do to help you.”™”

Tolomer expressed the view that Valley National is the right partner for The Westchester Bank and said he has known Valley National”™s CEO Ira Robbins and President Tom Iadanza for a number of years.

“We have always run our banks in a very similar fashion, very customer oriented, very employee oriented and very community oriented,” Tolomer said. “The Westchester market will get the full thrust of what Valley offers. The idea is not to cut our people or expenses but to invest in the Westchester market.”

Tolomer said that one of the factors evaluated about the merger was whether the increase in institutional size would interfere with the close relationships in the community that Tolomer and The Westchester Bank had developed over the years.

“Essentially, the people that the Westchester clients have dealt with will remain the same: it”™s the same lenders, it”™s the same retail network, it”™s the same cash management people,” Tolomer said. “A bank is made up of people. As a community bank, banking made personal is going to continue to be the guiding principle for the Westchester market and certainly it is also on a larger scale for Valley Bank in totality. So, it”™s a very consistent message to get close to your customers, make sure we can figure out how to help them.”

Tolomer said that they would be looking at possible expansion in the number of branches serving the Westchester market.

“You have to do things in stages and certainly the conversion ”¦ was an overwhelming success and we”™ll be looking at how we will expand,” Tolomer said. “The overwhelming trend, especially in the last two years, our customers are using more electronic ways to touch the bank.”

Tolomer said that banking industry trends are tending to move toward some consolidation.

“At the core one has to look at the organizations and why they would be going about a merger. In our particular case, The Westchester Bank, our success outpaced all of our most aggressive business plans and you get to a point where you have to look and say,  ”˜Gee, we”™re going to have to maybe take a slight step back and reinvest in our business.”™”

Tolomer said that the merger instantly gives existing clients access to a host of new products.

“We made a fundamental decision that it would be more timely for us to merge with a Valley and be able to offer those products and services immediately as opposed to building those disciplines,” Tolomer said. “Valley did due diligence on The Westchester Bank but Westchester did due diligence on Valley. We had a clear understanding that our perspectives and the way we attack business are the same. We had similar if not identical business models, but at different levels given the asset size.”

Tolomer said there were no surprises during the actual day-to-day process of bringing the banks together.

“It went extremely well and part of it was the way we went about being clear of how we operate and how we”™d operate going forward,” Tolomer said.