Visiting Liberty Bank President and CEO David W. Glidden’s office shortly after his hire two years ago, Stephen Roche saw a map of Connecticut with red pins lining the corridor of Interstate 91 through Connecticut and into Massachusetts.
Roche – who was hired to head Liberty’s commercial banking efforts in the Greater Hartford region — recalls telling Glidden: “This looks like you want to own I-91.”
Glidden responded: “That’s the vision,” Roche recounted Thursday, during a ribbon cutting for Liberty’s recently expanded commercial banking office in Hartford. “We want to be a presence from Springfield down to New Haven, looking at Hartford as the main focus to grow that space and we want to bring back the market, the kind of relationships with commercial customers that hasn’t been around for years.”
That vision is panning out, according to Glidden, Roche and other Liberty staff present for a Thursday ribbon-cutting of the bank’s growing office at 100 Pearl St. in downtown Hartford.
Liberty opened its commercial banking office two years ago with three staff in a 1,200-square-foot space on the third floor, according to Roche.
Now the office hosts 13 staff, and, within the past two weeks, moved to a roughly 5,000-square-foot space on the 13th floor, with an option to lease 2,000 additional square feet, according to Roche. The new office is bright and modern, with a light color scheme and glass-front offices.
“We are really excited that Liberty has made this commitment to Hartford, has built out this beautiful space in this historic building and it’s contributing to the growth and the revitalization we are seeing,” said Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, speaking at Thursday’s celebration. “I’m really proud that we now have this commercial lending office because there is an awful lot of commercial development happening and we see a tremendous amount of opportunity in the years ahead.”
Liberty’s status as a mutual bank allows it to offer personalized service to commercial clients, Glidden said. And the bank’s $7.5 billion in assets allows it to make loans of up to $75 million, he said.
“We can out-local the national banks and out-national the local banks,” Glidden quipped.
Thursday’s ceremony also offered an opportunity to present $5,000 grants to support two Hartford-based nonprofit business groups – the Spanish American Merchants Association and The Minority Construction Council Inc.
