Middlesex Savings Bank

Given its origins as a credit union specifically for employees of technology pioneer Digital Equipment Corp., it's no surprise that Digital Federal Credit Union serves a lot of people who like fancy gadgets. So when new technology comes along, DCU tends to jump on board.

Bankers in Central Massachusetts are keeping one eye on the local economy for signs of recovery and...

In the last year, data from 96 million credit cards were exposed during breaches at Home Depot...

Several banks and a credit union with operations in to Central Massachusetts have been honored by the state's office of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) for lending to businesses during the 2014 federal fiscal year, the federal agency announced.

Lenders are finding themselves walking a tightrope between providing lower-income Americans with quality housing and keeping their...

Virtually all banks with more than $4 billion in assets depend on income from selling stock to fuel their growth. Middlesex Savings Bank is the exception.

It happened more than 1,500 times in 2013. Someone in a firm's IT department found an odd piece of malware on a server, or a bank got a call from a major retailer warning that some debit card records had been compromised, or a laptop computer containing a list of social security numbers went missing.

When it comes to bank consolidation, Central Massachusetts has always bucked the trend. Twenty years ago, 37 of the nation's largest banks had morphed into just four institutions by 2010, according to the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, Central Massachusetts was home to 39 banks, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) Nearly two decades later, it's still home to 27.

Commercial lending boundaries are beginning to crumble for several Central Massachusetts banks that are launching a virtual free-for-all to generate business that can cover a drop in residential real estate lending.

In an era of competition from national and international institutions, pricey technology and uncertainty about coming regulations, what's a small local bank to do? The obvious answer, chosen by large numbers of banks across the country over the past couple of decades, is to merge with, buy, or be bought by, a rival. In Massachusetts, though, the situation is a bit different. Bruce Spitzer, spokesman for the Massachusetts Bankers Association, said 75 percent of the organization's members are mutually chartered banks. That means they can't be acquired by stock banks — which include big players like Bank of America — without going through a complex and lengthy conversion process.