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Activist Wants Eastern Bankshares To Go On Sale, Stop Acquisitions – Report
The report noted that Eastern Bankshares has cited its purchases as strengths, helping it in areas including wealth management. The activist hedge fund, HoldCo AM, disputes this, and wants the financial firm to put itself on the market.
Activist investor HoldCo Asset Management, which has a position in Boston-based Eastern Bankshares, wants the financial firm to put itself up for sale rather than spend money buying other banks, Reuters reported October 17.
The report cited documents it has seen and unnamed sources.
While Eastern Bankshares – the listed holding company for Eastern Bank – cites its acquisitions as strengths that helped assets swell to $30 billion next month from $12 billion in 2019 and strengthen its foothold in wealth management, HoldCo disagrees with that view.
HoldCo says recent purchases of Century Bancorp, Cambridge Bancorp and HarborOne Bank, which will be finalized next month, have hurt shareholders and that they would have been better off if management had done nothing, the report said.
Since the start of January, shares in Eastern have risen from $16.95 per share to $18.7 per share.
HoldCo has a 30 per cent stake in Eastern.
The report highlights that a drive towards industry consolidation – often portrayed as an inevitable and necessary step as regulations and other costs drive a need for economies of scale – can clash with claims that some deals hurt shareholder returns.
The hedge fund also wants Eastern's management to stop its "poor allocation of capital," which includes three acquisitions made in five years and multiple securities restructurings, the report continued.
Eastern transformed from a mutual bank, founded in 1818, to a publicly traded company in 2020 via an IPO.
The report said a representative for Eastern did not respond to requests for comment.
The hedge fund, with $2.6 billion in assets, is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
On September 26, Eastern Bankshares, the holding company for Eastern Bank, and HarborOne Bancorp, the holding company for HarborOne Bank, said they received regulatory approvals to complete their proposed merger, which was previously announced on April 24, 2025. They said they expected to wrap up the deal on about November 1.