The First National Bank of Brookfield is getting a big sister.
The bank’s holding company, Brookfield Bancshares, is set to acquire North Shore Trust and Savings, a local bank based in Waukegan, and its own holding company, NSTS Bancorp. North Shore announced the agreement, valued at about $73.7 million, in a press release on May 12.
“We love Brookfield. We’ve been in Brookfield since 1962. [We’re a] good, old-fashioned community bank, but we are finding ourselves competing throughout Chicagoland against a lot of the big banks. In banking, it helps to have a little bit more size and scale to give your customers the best products and the services they deserve,” Phil Richard, the president and CEO of the First National Bank of Brookfield, told the Landmark.
“North Shore is a very similar bank. They happen to be about an hour away in the Waukegan area, but a community savings institution,” he said. “Their management team is getting a little bit older, but they still wanted to keep a community bank in the Waukegan area, so we thought it was a really good fit.”
Richard said Brookfield Bancshares, while run by the same staff as the First National Bank of Brookfield, will officially operate the two “sister banks.”
North Shore, which opened in 1921, will retain its own branding and operations, Richard said. According to the press release, stockholders of NSTS Bancorp will receive $14.28 per share they own, and its shares will no longer trade on Nasdaq.
Richard said the deal has been in the works for “a little over a year.”
“Much like real estate, there are investment advisors that alert banks when other banks are for sale. It was brought to our attention that way, and we started to look into it and took our time. [We wanted] to make sure this is the right thing for us. This is our first acquisition, so [it was] something we really thought long and hard about,” he said. “Finally, with a lot of work, we made it happen; at least, we have signed a definitive agreement to make it happen, and now we go through a few more months of procedures to make it final.”
Those procedures require Brookfield Bancshares to submit an application to acquire NSTS Bancorp and North Shore to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an independent regulatory body within the United States Department of the Treasury.
“We have to fill out an application and produce some projections and plans and things like that of what we’re going to do moving forward, and the regulators look at it,” Richard said. “[North Shore is] also a public company, so they have a variety of things they need to do as a public company being sold. They need to go through some steps to get shareholder approval and all those good things.”
Richard said he expects the deal to close by the end of the year.
“You never know how long things are going to take, but that’s what we’re thinking: definitely before year end,” he said.
He said the deal should only bring positive effects to the services that local customers receive from the First National Bank of Brookfield.
“We recently launched a new website. We’ve gotten all the mobility products out there. There’s a lot happening with AI and things like that,” Richard said. “Banking is rapidly becoming much more driven by phones, tablets and computers than it is folks coming into the physical location, but we still think it’s important to have a viable physical location in these communities … The combination is very important to us, and this helps us do those things better.”
