- Forward look: The combined company will start with more than $28 billion of deposits, including $1.8 billion in Northern New Jersey.
- Supporting data: Blue Foundry Bancorp has reported more than $20 million of losses since its conversion to a stock-traded company in 2021.
- Expert quote: “Blue Foundry was horrible. They couldn’t make any money,” said activist investor Larry Seidman, who had pushed for a sale of the bank.
Fulton Financial in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, announced plans Monday to pay $243 million in stock to acquire a struggling New Jersey community bank.
For the $32 billion-asset Fulton, the acquisition of Blue Foundry Bancorp would raise its profile in a densely populated, deposit-rich Northern New Jersey marketplace where it has comparatively little presence today. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.
“The expansion in northern New Jersey aligns with our strategy of growing in our local markets and positions us well to drive organic growth across our commercial, consumer, wealth advisory and mortgage businesses,” Curtis Myers, Fulton’s chairman and CEO, said in a press release.
For the $2.15 billion-asset Blue Foundry, which operated as a depositor-owned mutual thrift for most of its history, the merger would end about four years of operation as a publicly traded bank.
Rutherford, New Jersey-based Blue Foundry reported more than $20 million of losses during that time. Its bottom-line woes prompted bank investor Larry Seidman to push, via a
Seidman said Monday that he is happy a deal got done. There is “no question whatsoever” that Fulton will be able to produce better results from the Blue Foundry assets, Seidman told American Banker.
“It’s a good bank with good management,” Seidman said of Fulton. “Blue Foundry was horrible. They couldn’t make any money.”
In a conference call with analysts in January, Blue Foundry CEO Jim Nesci
At Blue Foundry’s annual meeting in May, shareholders voted down Seidman’s advisory proposal calling for the company’s sale. They appeared to embrace the real thing Monday, however. Blue Foundry shares were trading up a whopping 40% at $11.05 on Monday afternoon.
The deal’s $243 million price tag amounts to 77% of Blue Foundry’s tangible book value. The combination is expected to have an immediate, positive effect on Fulton’s results, boosting tangible-book-value-per-share by 26 cents in 2026 and 44 cents in 2027, the first full year of operations for the merged company, according to Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Christopher Marinac.
“Our projections factor $50 million in additional earnings in 2027,” Marinac wrote in a research note.
Blue Foundry was founded in 1939 as the Boiling Springs Savings & Loan Association, following the merger of two smaller thrifts. It became a public company in July 2021 after raising $278 million in a stock offering.
Federal regulators require converted mutual banks to operate at least three years before they can be acquired.
Despite struggling to turn a profit, Blue Foundry does possess an attractive footprint in Northern New Jersey, including Bergen, Union and Essex counties, where the combined deposit market exceeds $124 billion, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
The merged institution is expected to start with more than 220 branches, $34 billion of assets and $28 billion of deposits — including $1.8 billion inside the Bergen-Essex-Morris marketplace.
“This partnership allows us to preserve the local relationships and personalized service our customers value, while gaining access to greater resources and providing more solutions and convenience to customers,” Blue Foundry’s Nesci said in Monday’s press release.
The most recent acquisition for Fulton, holding company for the 143-year-old Fulton Bank, involved the takeover of Republic First Bancorp after the Philadelphia bank was