Eastern Bank
large bank in New England, Massachusetts

Eastern Bank is a bank based in Boston, Massachusetts. Before de-mutualizing in 2020, it was the oldest and largest mutual bank in the United States and the largest community bank in Massachusetts.
With 95 branches, Eastern had a 3.2% market share in Massachusetts in 2016. It was founded in 1818 in Salem, and then moved to Lynn, Massachusetts.
The company began an aggressive expansion campaign near the end of the 1990s and moved its headquarters to Boston's Financial District. In 2020, Eastern Bank announced plans to de-mutualize and become a publicly traded corporation.
History
Eastern Bank was established on April 15, 1818, by a Canadian dentist, as Salem Savings Bank and became insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on October 1, 1983. On October 19, 1989, Eastern Savings Bank's parent company Lynn, Massachusetts-based Eastern Bank Corporation, renamed it Eastern Bank, and reorganized it into a mutual holding company, making it the first of its kind in Massachusetts.
In the years following its reorganization, it made several acquisitions of local banks. They included Shore Bank And Trust Company (Lynn, April 1992), Malden Trust Company (Malden, May 1992), First Colonial Bank For Savings (Lynn, October 1993), and Saugus Bank And Trust Company (Saugus, November 1994).
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This entry incorporates text from “Eastern Bank” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.