It's been a little over a year since Hampshire First Bank in Manchester became a division of NBT Bank, providing local bankers with greater lending capacity, an expanded set of financial offerings, and access to a larger network of banking locations.
As the final step in this process, Hampshire First Bank started doing business as NBT Bank on September 16, 2013. “Bringing our New Hampshire locations under the NBT Bank name will allow our customers to more fully access all of our financial service offerings,” said Dallas Lagerquist, vice president and retail market manager. The name change will also help customers to identify with NBT’s banking locations across the five-state area it serves, including Massachusetts, Vermont, New York and Pennsylvania.
Customers will not notice any other changes at the bank. “We made all the operational conversion changes at the time of the acquisition in June 2012,” said Jay Dinkel, senior banking relationship manager. “This is purely a name change, to be consistent with the rest of the organization.”
As one of the new features that NBT Bank brings to NH, businesses interested in financing options to start up or expand their operations can benefit from the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) designation of NBT Bank as an SBA Preferred Lender across its entire five-state footprint. Under this program, the Bank has been granted the authority to approve loans that result in faster service to local small business owners in need of capital.
“Hampshire First Bank knows how vital small businesses are to the economy of New Hampshire,” said Dinkel. “We hope that renaming Hampshire First Bank to NBT Bank will help our customers and the communities we serve to fully understand our lending power and expanded set of banking services that are already available.”
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