Middletown-based Liberty Bank recently tripled the office space it occupies at 100 Pearl St. in downtown Hartford, growing from a 1,200-square-foot office on the third floor to about 5,000 square feet on the 13th.
“We’ve brought in enough new business to justify a bigger space and better space than we had,” said Stephen Roche, Liberty’s Greater Hartford market president and regional manager of commercial banking.
The move accommodates Liberty’s fast-growing Greater Hartford commercial lending division and comes amid a key strategy shift the mutual lender adopted a few years ago under CEO David Glidden.
The shift included refocusing the bank’s lending portfolio on more local turf up and down the I-91 corridor, with the Hartford region being central to that effort.
The downtown Hartford office is responsible for coverage of about half of Connecticut and business in a portion of Massachusetts. The larger office also reflects employees who have largely eschewed the remote work option.
Liberty, with $7.4 billion in assets, opened its Pearl Street office two years ago with three staff. It now has 13 employees on a new and larger floor, Roche said. He is seeking to hire two more.
Roche said there are five years remaining on Liberty’s lease at 100 Pearl St. The bank is now occupying space previously held by KeyBank, which recently moved to the nearby Goodwin Square office tower. Liberty’s agreement with landlord Shelbourne Global Solutions includes an option for an additional 2,000 square feet, Roche said. That’s an option Roche aims to exercise through continuing robust lending growth.
Roche said a centralized office is the best option for collaboration and mentoring. Traveling to the office also helps clearly divide work time from personal time, a line that has been increasingly blurred by the remote work trend following the pandemic, Roche said.
“I’m a big fan of collaboration,” he said. “It’s hard to collaborate in a Zoom meeting. People find there are more opportunities to grow and learn in an environment where everybody is there.”
Roche said working in the city is simply good for business, offering proximity to professionals, attorneys and accountants who help drive business. He also believes that corporations have an obligation to support the city by their presence.
Roche, who previously worked for United Bank, had seen Hartford’s growing vibrancy squashed by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, Roche said, he sees it rising again.
“We came in right in the middle of COVID, so you would go to Max Downtown for lunch on a Wednesday and there was nobody there but me,” Roche recalled. “Now, all the sudden, that vibe is starting to come back.”
