By Stefan Yablonski
Pathfinder Bank has recently announced it has signed paperwork to acquire the East Syracuse branch of Berkshire Bank, located at 6611 Manlius Center Road.
When the deal goes through later this year, as it’s expected, it will be the first branch office Pathfinder acquires; it usually builds its branches from scratch.
Is that a change in strategy on the part of Pathfinder Bank?
It tuns out it was an unanticipated opportunity that came up and Pathfinder Bank cashed in on it.
“We got a phone call from Berkshire’s partners and they asked if we’d be interested in looking at potential branch sales from Berkshire,” explained James Dowd, president and chief executive officer of Pathfinder Bancorp, Inc., and Pathfinder Bank. “And we are very interested in acquiring deposits in the Syracuse market. So we decided to jump into the process.”
Berkshire was selling off 10 of its branches, he said.
Pathfinder is buying just the East Syracuse branch of Berkshire Bank.
Dowd said he wasn’t looking to add another branch — but Berkshire’s offer was too good to pass up.
About a year and a half ago, Pathfinder renovated a 4,748 square foot, single family home at 506 W. Onondaga St., Syracuse, into a branch office and community meeting rooms.
“Typically, if that opportunity [Berkshire] had not come up, we would have given the West Onondaga branch a little bit of time to get to a profitability section before we moved on to try to build another one,” Dowd said.
The West Onondaga location was an underserved area of Syracuse.
“We intentionally entered that underserved area to make sure that we were providing our banking services to the full population of the Syracuse market,” Dowd explained. “It’s been successful for us. We’ve had a lot of support from a number of different organizations who were appreciative of our efforts. So — so far, so good.
“We wanted to come in there with a full-service organization; do the best we could to provide that market with the opportunities and capital that they need.”
Pathfinder expects to close on the Berkshire purchase and sale by the end of the third quarter of this year.
This would be their fifth site in Onondaga County.
“We have Clay and Cicero, one downtown and we just opened 506 W. Onondaga about a year and a half ago,” Dowd said.
At this point in time, Pathfinder is going to continue to look for opportunities to expand in Onondaga, “absolutely,” he said.
“Right now the focus is on Onondaga — especially with the Micron announcement as well as the watershed of activities that are coming after that,” he added.
Pathfinder Bank traces its local roots back to 1859 and currently employs more than 175 with 11 locations in Oswego and Onondaga counties, including two along Route 31 in Cicero and Clay, two in the city of Syracuse and an additional loan production office in Utica.
