Bar Harbor Bankshares

Bar Harbor Bankshares

Bar Harbor Bankshares was founded in 1887 as a community bank serving Mount Desert Island, positioning itself as the primary depository for the summer residents who built the 'cottages' that define Bar Harbor's Gilded Age history. Curtis C. Simard, President and CEO, now runs a publicly traded holding company with roughly $4 billion in assets, using the franchise's deposit-rich base to extend commercial real estate and business loans across Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The bank operates through its subsidiary Bar Harbor Bank & Trust, which provides a conventional community-bank loan mix: commercial real estate, residential mortgages, and commercial and industrial lending. Its geographic footprint spans coastal Maine enclaves like Bar Harbor and Ellsworth, interior markets like Bangor, and acquired territories in Burlington, Vermont, and Hanover, New Hampshire. The portfolio is shaped by the seasonal economy — hospitality, construction, and service businesses tied to summer tourism, alongside year-round lending to local professionals and trades. Simard drove expansion through acquisitions, including the purchases of Lake Sunapee Bank Group in 2016 and People's United Bank's northern New England branches in 2021. These deals extended the franchise into new states and added scale, with the bank now operating more than 50 branches. The trust and wealth management division, Bar Harbor Wealth, provides a coordination point for the high-net-worth seasonal community, though its primary investment posture remains balance-sheet lending rather than fee-based asset management. Bar Harbor Bankshares sits at the intersection of a commercial bank and a regional asset manager, differentiated by its deposit franchise in one of America's wealthiest non-urban enclaves. The bank is not a family office, but it functions as a capital allocator in a region where family wealth is tightly woven into the local economy. Its governance is public, its lending is geographically concentrated, and its long-term relevance hinges on maintaining the deposit relationships that fund its loan growth.