Mr. Byrnes: Tompkins Trustco is a holding company that owns three community banks plus an insurance agency. The lead bank is Tompkins Trust Company, which is headquartered in Ithaca and has been in business since 1836. In December 1999, we acquired Letchworth Independent Bancshares, and thereby added the Bank of Castile and Mahopac National Bank to our company. We also have acquired some well known insurance agencies in western New York and have combined those into Tompkins Insurance Agencies. Our focus is on distinguishing ourselves as a community banking company. We operate each of our three banks under a separate Board of Directors and separate management, and, although we combine a lot of the support and service activities, we keep the customer decisions local and also manage the involvement in each of our communities the same way.
TWST: Looking at those geographies, how have they been doing under the
current economic conditions?
Mr. Byrnes: Each of our subsidiaries has improved its performance since
coming into the Tompkins organization, and each of them has continued to
grow both in terms of assets and profits. We have three distinct market
areas. Western New York is probably the economy that's experiencing the
least growth of the three; however, our operations are located in
smaller to medium-sized communities that are not quite as cyclical as
the major metropolitan areas. We operate in more rural areas and in some
of the suburbs of Rochester. The economy is not great there, but we have
continued to see growth in our operations, mainly through market share
growth. In central New York, we operate in Ithaca, which is home to
Cornell and to Ithaca College. The college town environment tends to be
somewhat less cyclical. Cornell is a major research university with 400
million plus in research spending, so we tend to have a reasonably good
economic picture in our central New York area. Downstate, where Mahopac
National Bank operates, the economy and the demographics are the most
attractive of the three. We operate in Putnam and Duchess County
principally, and those counties have been experiencing growth, being in
the outer ring of the New York metropolitan area. So we have good
demographics in terms of income levels, but also good population growth
in that area.
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