Mercantile Bank Corp. in Grand Rapids, Mich., announced Tuesday that Michael Price plans to retire as president and chief executive at the end of the year after a decade at the helm of the company.
Robert B. Kaminski Jr., the chief operating officer, will succeed Price as president and CEO of the $3 billion-asset Mercantile, the holding company for Mercantile Bank of Michigan.
Price, 58, succeeded Gerald R. Johnson as chairman and CEO in July 2007. He will remain chairman until May 2018.
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New rules have made it more challenging to originate mortgages without drawing attention from regulators. Mercantile Bank in Michigan, however, believes that positive trends in its biggest markets are incentive enough to hire lenders and improve its systems.
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Mercantile Bank in Grand Rapids, Mich., plans to close five branches to cut costs. The $2.9 billion-asset company said in a press release Wednesday that it plans to close the branches in the first quarter.
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The company began to seriously consider its options when Bank of America agreed to sell nearly two dozen Michigan branches in early 2013. Chemical Financial eventually agreed to buy Lake Michigan for $184 million.
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Kaminski, who is 53 and has been COO since 2000, was
"This decision reflects the ongoing management succession process that our Board has developed over many years," Price said in a press release. "I have worked closely with Bob for over 32 years, since before we were both founding executives of our Company. I have absolute confidence that Bob will be an excellent CEO going forward."
John Donnelly, managing director of Donnelly Penman & Partners, a Grosse Pointe, Mich., investment banking firm, called Price "as talented an individual as I've ever seen" but said Mercantile "is being left in very good hands" with Kaminski.
"They all came out of that First Michigan system that sold to Huntington so many years ago," Donnelly said.
Mercantile also announced its second-quarter results Tuesday. It said that its net income rose 12% from a year earlier to $7.4 million and that robust revenue growth was driven in part by the movement of assets from securities into higher-yielding loans. That shift helped Mercantile improve its margin to 4.01%, versus 3.83% a year earlier.
Revenue rose 7.2% from a year earlier, to $31.2 million.
Mercantile also reported continued asset-quality improvement. Nonperforming loans fell 36% from a year earlier to $5.6 million, or 0.22% of total loans.
"We're firing on all cylinders," Price said during a conference call with investment analysts.
