Group Looks to Launch State-Chartered Bank in Nashua

A group of bankers is looking to start a new state-chartered bank in New Hampshire, which would be the first bank headquartered in Nashua since 2012.

Millyard Bank has filed applications with the FDIC and the New Hampshire Banking Department. The group will eventually seek to raise $20 million in capital to launch.

The institution would be a boutique bank that will offer traditional loans and deposit services, with an emphasis on assisting the many retail customers and small and medium-sized business owners and professionals in Nashua, the Granite State’s second-largest city.

“We feel as though those folks don’t have the same access to capital that they had a few years ago,” said G. Frank Teas, the planned president and CEO of the bank. “There were many community-oriented banks around the Greater Nashua area, but they have slowly gone away from mergers and acquisitions.”

Efforts to launch the new bank formally began in May when Teas and a group of others launched a seed corporation called the CBTBE Corp., which stands for Community Bank to Be Established.

Going forward, the bank will be known as Millyard Bank and will not have a holding company, according to Teas.

Teas was the founder, president and CEO of Nashua’s last headquartered bank and former de novo, The Nashua Bank, which would eventually merge and become a part of Newport-based Lake Sunapee Bank at the end of 2012. Lake Sunapee would then go on to be purchased by Bar Harbor & Trust in 2016.

The same path is not expected for Millyard, according to CBTBE’s website, which blamed increasing regulations like Dodd-Frank for The Nashua Bank’s merger with Lake Sunapee.

However, Millyard Bank is charting a path similar to The Nashua Bank. The organization has recruited a diverse group of well-respected greater Nashua business professionals, many of whom were involved with The Nashua Bank and Lake Sunapee.

Nashua developer John Stabile will serve as chairman of the board of directors. Laura Mower, who worked for two decades at Lake Sunapee, will be the bank’s CFO.

Teas said the new bank is also looking to target the same type of customers as The Nashua Bank, with an emphasis on loan transactions of $3 million or less.

The experienced de novo founder said the bank organizers are actively exploring a location in Nashua that would serve as the institution’s headquarters and first branch.

Millyard Bank would be New Hampshire’s second de novo since the financial crisis.

The bank could open as soon as next summer, pending regulatory approvals.