Officials with Jacksonville Savings Bank are discussing their merger and acquisition by CNB Bank & Trust.
CNB is announcing that the Directors of Jacksonville Savings Bank has approved the sale of Jacksonville Savings Bank to Carlinville National Bank Shares Inc. CNB Bank Shares, Inc. and Jacksonville Bancorp, Inc. have jointly entered into a definitive merger agreement in which Jacksonville Bancorp will merge with and into CNB Shares.
This merger also means that Jacksonville Savings Bank, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Jacksonville Bancorp, will merge with and into CNB Bank & Trust, the wholly-owned subsidiary of CNB Shares.
Jacksonville Bancorp board chairman for Andy Applebee says talks of a merger have been ongoing for several months.
“The process began last summer. We were approached by the chairman of the board and President of CNB. They came to us with the idea that a merger of our two banks might result in a bank that’s even better than the two individual banks. There’s been a lot of discussion, due diligence and negotiation for the last six months,” says Applebee.
Applebee explains why this merger was appealing for Jacksonville Bancorp and Jacksonville Savings Bank.
“CNB is about three times our size, they have operations in both Chicago and the St. Louis metropolitan areas, they have thirteen locations throughout central Illinois. If you look at our locations, Litchfield, Virden, Jacksonville and Chapin, and overlay those on to their footprint, it fits very nicely. And first and foremost, they are a community bank, so they have the same values as we do, so that was very important,” Applebee says.
He also explains what will happen to the name of Jacksonville Savings Bank as well as the bank’s employees.
“I think that CNB’s expectation is that most of our employees will stay right here. There may be an opportunity for some of them to move to other locations, but particularly our customer service reps, our loan officers and the people that our customers deal with, they’ll see the same people here. We’ll remain Jacksonville Savings Bank until the closing, which we expect that to probably be June, maybe May. Then after the closing, a computer conversion will probably take another six months, so my expectation is that the Jacksonville Savings Bank and logo will be around until 2019, which will give us a nice transition period, but at some point, the CNB brand will go up,” Applebee explains.
All shareholders of Jacksonville Bancorp will receive 33 dollars and 70 cents in cash for each share they hold of common stock. The transaction has been valued at about 61.6 million dollars.