Doing five deals in eight months is a lot for any bank to handle, so the $520 million-asset Bradford Bank in Baltimore borrowed a page from much larger rivals and created an in-house conversion team.
Led by a full-time coordinator, eight to 12 employees from divisions throughout the thrift work to try and make acquisition integrations go smoothly.
"We're a small organization, we only have about 80 employees, so it does turn out to be the same group of people on a regular basis," Noel Palmer, the team's coordinator, said last week.
Dallas Arthur, Bradford's president, said, "They are available for whatever we need, whether it's an acquisition of another financial institution or if we're doing something internal as far as adding a new service or a new product."
The conversion team, which was established in 2003, has been particularly busy of late.
Bradford agreed last June to buy the deposits of a branch of the $401 million-asset American Bank in Silver Spring, Md., announced in July that it was buying the $50 million-asset Valley Bank of Maryland in Hunt Valley, and bought Best Title and Processing Co. of Towson, Md., on Dec. 1. Last month it cut two deals set to close next quarter: for the $29 million-asset Golden Prague Federal Savings and Loan Association in Baltimore and the $19 million-asset Senator Bank in Cockeysville, Md.
"They're basically just … rolling up a series of small acquisitions and increasing their size," said David G. Danielson, the president of Danielson Capital LLC, an investment banking and consulting firm in Rockville, Md.
After the deals are announced, the conversion team works to make sure that customers experience a "seamless transition" to Bradford.
"That's why we bring in people on an as-needed basis from all the different departments in the bank," Ms. Palmer said.
For example, after Bradford announced it was acquiring deposits from American Bank, Ms. Palmer assembled employees from its branch management, deposit services, and information technology units. Together, they examined the deposit products that American Bank offered to ensure that Bradford had identical or comparable ones.
"If you don't have a comparable product, you create new products and you work with our processor to do that," Ms. Palmer said.
