A New Chapter for Local Banking

How Beacon Bank is strengthening—and scaling up—what a community bank can do for the Berkshires

When Berkshire Bank's green signs quietly changed to Beacon Bank, the Berkshires braced for a familiar story: a homegrown institution swallowed by something bigger and even more removed. In fact, going bigger is bringing the bank closerto its roots. The merger, driven by CEO Paul Perrault, has strengthened the bank’s local focus, creating a regional institution that maintains a hometown, neighborhood feel.

“We’re building a bank that’s just big enough to matter, and still small enough to know its towns,” Perrault says.

On paper, the numbers look every bitthe classic consolidation story. Boston-based Brookline Bancorp (the parent company of Brookline Bank, BankRI, and PCSB Bank) merged with Pittsfield-born Berkshire Hills Bancorp (the parent company of Berkshire Bank). Before combining, both legacy parent companies held nearly equal size, with Berkshire Bank at roughly $12 billion in assets and Brookline Bancorp at $11.6 billion, totaling around $24 billion for the newly formed entity and 145 branches and commercial financial centers across five states.

For Perrault, those headline figures are almost secondary because the regulatory threshold held fast. “The big regulatory threshold is $10 billion,” he notes during a one-on-one conversation. Both banks were already over that line, and already living under federal supervision. “Going to $24 billion didn’t change that math.”

What did change was that the bank can be more effective in places like the Berkshires, and Perrault was just the person who could make that happen. He built a career spanning nearly four decades as a banking executive across New England and the Northeast, leading mid-sized regional institutions that sit comfortably between local community lenders and multi- trillion-dollar national mega-banks.

At Chittenden Corporation in Vermont, Perrault helped build a high-performing regional bank that stayed firmly rootedin local markets. At Brookline Bank, he ran a lean, commercial-heavy lender with a strong presence in Boston and Rhode Island. Beacon is the logical next version of that model. Brookline brought loan-growth engines and specialty businesses: national Small Business Administration (SBA) lending, asset-based lending, and tax-credit investing. Berkshire brought a network of community markets and low-cost deposits from the Berkshires to rural Connecticut and upstate New York.

The Past and the Future

As a matter of background, Berkshire County Savings Bank was founded in1846 and became deeply tied to its home region. The institution officially changed its name to Berkshire Bank in 1997 after acquiring Great Barrington Savings Bank. As late as 2001, the bank operated 11 full-service branches, entirely concentrated within Berkshire County to serve local residents and municipal needs. In the early 2000s, the bank expanded across Western Massachusetts, most notably absorbing Legacy Banks. It grew its footprint eastward down the Route 9 corridor into the Pioneer Valley and Springfield markets, eventually ballooning into a multi-state network stretching into Connecticut, New York, and Vermont.

Post-pandemic, Berkshire Bank experienced a sharp increase in online and mobile banking, leading to the closureof 44 branch locations, including threein Berkshire County (Dalton, Otis, and Williams Street in Pittsfield). At the time of the merger, Berkshire Bank operated a total of 83 branches, including 12 in the Berkshires (three in Pittsfield, two each in Lenox and Great Barrington, and one each in Stockbridge, West Stockbridge, Lee, North Adams, and Sheffield).

One of Perrault’s first moves after the merger was to undo a structural choice that, to him, never made sense for a bank that claimed to be local. Under its previous leadership, Berkshire had migrated towarda vertical model: specialized lines of business—commercial real estate, middle market, small business—reported up their own chains into Boston. Local bankers could advocate, but the ultimate powerto say “yes” or “no” often sat two hours away. He replaced that with something simpler: a bank of regions. In other words, regions own their profit-and-loss. And local leadership is responsible for strategy, performance, and most credit decisions.

“We want our people to be very empathetic, and we want things simplified,” says Perrault. “We try to minimize bureaucracy in the system, and we work on that every day. We still have a little ways to go....We’re a highly regulated industry, so there’s always a lot of rules that come in and rules change....[We try not] to affect the customer too much.”

The leadership of the new parent company incorporates people from both entities. Along with Brookline’s Perrault becoming president/CEO of Beacon, Berkshire’s David Brunelle, managing director and co-founder of North Pointe Wealth Management in Worcester, took over as chair. The combined Beacon Bank map was divided into six distinct regions, with three regional presidents selected from Berkshire Bank, and three pulled from Brookline Bancorp’s legacy institutions.

I spoke not only with Perrault forthis article, but also Jim Morris, regional president for Berkshire County, Upstate New York, and Vermont; Matthew Emprimo, commercial leader for Berkshire County and Vermont; and Lori Kiely, director of foundation and charitable giving, as well as the Berkshire County regional leader.

The dust has almost settled with the merger that was finalized in late 2025 and rebranded into Beacon Bank this past February, although Perrault has a punchlist of things that still need to be done. “We haven’t completely eliminated duplicate networks,” he says, “and people are still in the middle of getting some of their Beacon Bank emails changed from Berkshire Bank emails.” And bank cards are gradually being replaced as they expire, rather than executing a massive, immediate reissue.

All Berkshire-based branches remain open after the merger. That’s largely because Brookline Bank and Berkshire Bank had very limited branch overlap. In addition, Beacon Bank has maintained the numberof employees in Berkshire County, whichis more than 200. Perrault visits the Berkshire region often and keeps in close touch with Morris, the region’s leader, as well as other members of the team. He has met with Pittsfield Mayor Pete Marchetti and local business leaders in order to better understand the Berkshire market.

Perrault, whose primary home isin Newport, Rhode Island, describes himself as a “real fuss bucket about the branches” and has spent millions upgrading physical branches, especially in Western Massachusetts. He regularly visits branches unannounced, talks directly with staff, and looks for operational issues to fix. (Staff jokingly refer to these as “Paul sightings.”)

Most importantly to note for people living in the Berkshires is that the regionis treated as its own franchise: distinct, accountable, and expected to behave like a full-service bank, not a satellite. “We are run nearly autonomously as a small bank with full P&L responsibility on the ground,” says Morris. He oversees local branch banking, private banking, commercial real estate, lending operations, and ensures that regional lending decisions are made locally. “We have loan authority in Pittsfield, which means the people making the decisions are in the market and know the market better than anybody would in Boston,” Morris says.

“In the past, various lines of business reported up to people in other markets, and now they all report up to Jim in this market,” adds Kiely. “We feel more like a team. We’re supporting one another....We’re focusing on Berkshire County: What the needsare here, what the priorities are, what the organizations are that we want to support, the events we want to go to. It’s kind of a small community bank within a larger bank.”

Bigger Limits, Shorter Distance

Scale, for Perrault, shows up in two concrete ways: how much the bank can lend, and how far from the customer the decision is made. Beacon can now comfortably put up to roughly $100 million into a single client relationship—far beyond what most projects in the Berkshires will ever require, but critical if the bank wants to keep serious developers and mid-sized companies in its orbit.

At the same time, he has pushed to shorten the distance between a Berkshire County borrower and the people with the power to approve or decline. Morris says commercial term sheets that once took weeks now go out in days.

“We’ve delivered term sheets as fast as a day to a week, which is really fast in the commercial world,” Morris says.

Emprimo was a longtime commercial banking leader with Berkshire Bank prior to its rebranding and merger. Previously, he typically generated about $20 milliona year in new commercial business. This year, he expects to double or even triple that, with a pipeline he estimates at $60–65 million, all in Berkshire County and southern Vermont. He points to a more pro-business credit policy and the fact that loan committees increasingly sit in Pittsfield, with colleagues who know the properties and the people by name.

That’s exactly the behavior Perrault wants from Beacon’s structure. “In Pittsfield, we’re going to look for and make every good loan that we possibly can,” he says, “and we’ve got people dedicated to doing that.” The Berkshires is not being stripped of capital to feed the city; it is the crucial funding engine for a network of carefully chosen growth markets.

“I actually feel like even though the bank doubled in size, our world actually shrunk,” says Emprimo.

Under Beacon, Perrault has pulled three specialized tools into the Berkshire’s orbit.

First, there is a national SBA lending arm (44 Business Capital, a Division of Beacon Bank & Trust), based in Pennsylvania, that can support small and startup businesses in regions such as western Massachusetts that might not clear traditional underwriting.

Second, there are specialized teams handling asset-based lending across Massachusetts that fund growing or stressed operations using working capital assets rather than hard real estate. Asset-based lending provides businesses with cash loans based

on the value of their short-term assets, such as unpaid customer invoices and current inventory. Instead of requiring physical buildings or real estate as collateral, the bank uses these moving parts of the business to secure the financing. This gives fast-growing or financially stressed companies quick access to working capital when traditional business loans are unavailable.

Lastly, Beacon has a tax-credit investing unit that structures historic and low-income housing deals, often stepping in as an equity partner. Downtown Pittsfield isone of Perrault’s proving grounds. Beacon Bank is financing—and in some cases co-investing in—a cluster of historic rehabs that are transforming older buildings into apartments and mixed-use spaces. Working alongside developers like Allegrone Companies, the bank doesn’t just provide loans; it buys tax credits, effectively becoming a limited partner for about five years, according to Morris.

The bank pays less than a dollar today for each future dollar of tax credit, then realizes the full value over time. That spread covers Beacon’s cost of capital and generates a modest profit. For the developer, the equity makes borderline projects viable. For the city, it means fewer boarded-up windows and more lights on at night, says Morris.

One not-yet-announced project will convert a vacant downtown building into housing and a childcare center, with around 20 percent of the units designated as “affordable.”

Perrault also understands symbolism. When Berkshire Bank shifted its headquarters to Boston, it left 99 North Street in Pittsfield looking more like a relic than a headquarters. In late 2017, senior leadership migrated to Boston’s financial district. While operations and back-office staff originally remained in Pittsfield, the physical presence of the bank downtown began to shrink over the following years, culminating in August 2022, when Berkshire Bank permanently closed and consolidated its branch office at 99 North Street, merging its services into the nearby 66 West Street branch. The closure left the central property largely underutilized.

That’s all being reversed.

Revitalizing 99 North

Beacon is now renovating its building at 99 North Street—what Morris describes as a “frame-up” rebuild, down to the studs. The existing downtown branchat 66 West Street will move into a new flagship branch on the ground floor. The bank is consolidating scattered staff into the building. Commercial lending and customer-facing folks will be on the first floor. Operations will be on the second, third, and fourth floors, and then the fifth floor will be wealth management.

“We’re all going to be one team in one building,” says Emprimo.

“It is our flagship branch for the Berkshires, and we anticipate a wonderful ribbon cutting toward the end of the year,” says Morris. “We’re bringing so many people into that one location now that I think ifI owned a deli on North Street, I’d be very happy with the future.”

For Perrault, the project is partlyabout function—getting people under one roof—and partly about sending a message: Pittsfield is still a headquarters for Beacon Bank. Another obvious benefit is providing a much-needed boost to downtown Pittsfield.

The merger also gave Perrault a chance to ask another question: What does Beacon Bank do with Berkshire’s longstanding community foundation when joining it with a bank that had none? The answer was simple: He left Kiely’s Berkshire-based foundation budget intact and broadened her role, asking her to coordinate charitable

efforts in markets that had never before had a formal foundation.

According to Kiely, maintaining long-term commitments in the Berkshires includes food security, from Western Mass Food Bank’s mobile units to Berkshire Agricultural Ventures’ SNAP-matching at farmers markets; housing and neighborhood work with Central Berkshire Habitatfor Humanity and similar groups; and workforce pipelines through such entities as Berkshire Community College and the Berkshire Innovation Center.

Kiely speaks candidly about the scale of need in the Berkshires—housing, childcare, transportation, hunger—and the impossibility of any single institution fixing them. Perrault’s expectation is not that Beacon will be the hero, but that it will be in the room supplying money, staff time, and financial education as one of the core pieces of local infrastructure.

Why choose the name “Beacon Bank”? According to Perrault, “Beacon means stable, strong.” He also points out that with a merger of equals (Brookline and Berkshire banks), you really can’t use either name.

Perrault is definitely watching closely what’s going on in the Berkshires, both through his own eyes and definitely through Beacon’s leaders in this region. The impact will become apparent in ways that are most meaningful for the people Beacon serves and the local stories that are told: in how long it takes a shop owner in Great Barrington to get a loan answer; in whether scaffolding goes up on a long-vacant block in Pittsfield; and in 99 North becoming the bank’s regional hub once again.

Both Berkshire and Brookline have benefited from becoming Beacon Bank, says Morris. “Each side is expanding because of the additional tools we now have in our tool belt,” he says, “but I’d give all the credit to the regionality of the model, which we identified quickly as the number one reason to be excited. Looking out a few years from now, I want people to think of Beacon as the big bank in town that takes care of their needs, anticipates their needs before they do, and knows we’re there for them.”