B y A n a s t a s i a S t a n m e y e r // P h o t o s C o u r t e s y o f B e a c o n B a n k
regional institutions that sit comfortably between local community lenders and multitrillion-dollar national mega-banks.
At Chittenden Corporation in Vermont, Perrault helped build a high performing regional bank that stayed firmly rooted in local markets. At Brookline Bank, he ran a lean, commercial heavy lender with a strong presence in Boston and Rhode Island. Berkshire Bank brought strong, lowcost core deposits, specialty businesses like a national Small Business Administration( SBA) lending division and asset-based lending, and tax-credit investing, as well as a network of community markets from the Berkshires to rural Connecticut and upstate New York. Beacon is the logical next version of that model.
The Past and the Future
As a matter of background, Berkshire County Savings Bank was founded in 1846 and became deeply tied to its home region. The institution officially changed its name to Berkshire Bank in 1997 after acquiring Great Barrington Savings Bank. As late as 2001, the bank operated 11 full-service branches, entirely concentrated within Berkshire County to serve local residents and municipal needs. In the early 2000s, the bank expanded across Western Massachusetts, most notably absorbing Legacy Banks. It grew its footprint eastward down the Route 9 corridor into the Pioneer Valley and Springfield markets, eventually ballooning into a multi-state network stretching into Connecticut, New York, and Vermont.
Post-pandemic, Berkshire Bank experienced a sharp increase in online and mobile banking, leading to the closure of 44 branch locations, including three in Berkshire County( Dalton, Otis, and Williams Street in Pittsfield). At the time of the merger, Berkshire Bank operated a total of 83 branches, including 12 in the Berkshires( three in Pittsfield, two each in Lenox and Great Barrington, and one each in Stockbridge, West Stockbridge, Lee, North Adams, and Sheffield).
One of Perrault’ s first moves after the merger was to undo a structural choice that, to him, never made sense for a bank that claimed to be local. Under its previous leadership, Berkshire had migrated toward a vertical model: specialized lines of business— commercial real estate, middle market, small business— reported up their own chains into Boston. Local bankers could advocate, but the ultimate power to say“ yes” or“ no” often sat two hours away. He replaced that with something simpler: a bank of regions. In other words, regions own their profit‐and‐loss. And local leadership is responsible for strategy, performance, and most credit decisions.
“ We want our people to be very empathetic, and we want things simplified,” says Perrault.“ We try to minimize bureaucracy in the system, and we work on that every day. We still have a little ways to go.… We’ re a highly regulated industry, so there’ s always a lot of rules that come in and rules change ….[ We try not ] to affect the customer too much.” The leadership of the new parent company incorporates people from both entities. Along with Brookline’ s Perrault becoming president / CEO of Beacon, Berkshire’ s David Brunelle, managing director and co-founder of North Pointe Wealth Management in Worcester, took over as chair. The combined Beacon Bank map was divided into six distinct regions, with three regional presidents selected from Berkshire Bank, and three pulled from Brookline Bancorp’ s legacy institutions. I spoke not only with Perrault for this article, but also Jim Morris, regional president for Berkshire County, Upstate New York, and Vermont; Matthew Emprimo, commercial leader for Berkshire County and Vermont; and Lori Kiely, director of foundation and charitable giving, as well as the Berkshire County regional leader.
The dust has almost settled with the merger that was finalized in late 2025 and rebranded into Beacon Bank this past February, although Perrault has a punchlist of things that still need to be done.“ We haven’ t completely eliminated duplicate networks,” he says,“ and people are still in the middle of getting some of their Beacon Bank emails changed from Berkshire Bank emails.” And bank cards are gradually being replaced as they expire, rather than executing a massive, immediate reissue.
All Berkshire-based branches remain open after the merger. That’ s largely because Brookline Bank and Berkshire Bank had very limited branch overlap. In addition, Beacon Bank has maintained the number of employees in Berkshire County, which is more than 200. Perrault visits the Berkshire region often and keeps in close touch with Morris, the region’ s leader, as well as other members of the team. He has met with Pittsfield Mayor Pete Marchetti and local business leaders in order to better understand the Berkshire market.
Perrault, whose primary home is in Newport, Rhode Island, describes himself as a“ real fuss bucket about the branches” and has spent millions upgrading physical branches, especially in Western Massachusetts. He regularly visits branches unannounced, talks directly with staff, and looks for operational issues to fix.( Staff jokingly refer to these as“ Paul sightings.”)
Most importantly to note for people living in the Berkshires is that the region is treated as its own franchise: distinct, accountable, and expected to behave like a full‐service bank, not a satellite.“ We are run nearly autonomously as a small bank with full P & L responsibility on the ground,” says Morris. He oversees local branch banking, private banking, commercial real estate, lending operations, and ensures that regional lending decisions are made locally.“ We have loan authority in Pittsfield, which means the people making the decisions are in the market and know the market better than anybody would in Boston,” Morris says.
“ In the past, various lines of business reported up to people in other markets, and now they all report up to Jim in this market,” adds Kiely.“ We feel more like a team. We’ re supporting one another …. We’ re focusing on Berkshire County: What the needs are here, what the priorities are, what the organizations are that we want to support, the events we want to go to. It’ s kind of a small community bank within a larger bank.”
Bigger Limits, Shorter Distance Scale, for Perrault, shows up in two concrete ways: how much the bank can lend,
Fall 2026 BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE // 65