Hartland-based Town Bank plans to open a branch at 4720 W. Lisbon Ave. on Milwaukee’s northwest side.
The 3,000-square-foot branch has received approval from the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions and federal regulators.
But it still has to work out a few other details before opening.
“We’re working through a couple contingencies with the building owner, because we plan to purchase the building,” said Jay Mack, chief executive officer of Town Bank.
The bank this week filed a request with the Milwaukee Board of Zoning Appeals to occupy a portion of the premises as a drive-through facility that does not meet the minimum required queue length.
If all goes well, Town Bank would complete its building purchase in mid-November and then renovate the building’s interior and exterior, which will have an ATM and a two-lane drive-thru. Mack hopes to open the branch late in the first quarter of 2017 with a six-employee staff.
The branch will be Town Bank’s second in the city of Milwaukee—the other is at 140 S. First St. in Walker’s Point—and its first on the northwest side. Lisbon Avenue is a busy traffic corridor and is surrounded by a number of small businesses that Town Bank wants to target, Mack said.
“We really have no brick-and-mortar north of (I-)94,” he said. “We like this particular site because it’s located on the north side of Milwaukee, where we don’t have any traffic at this point. We’ll be in closer proximity to some neighborhoods where we’d like to attract banking clients.”
“This area has an abundance of small businesses. To the east you have the 30th Street corridor, which is an area that has a fair amount of industrial and other types of small businesses. To the west is the Washington Heights area and Wauwatosa.”
Town Bank also recently gained approval to open a loan production office at 76th and Bradley. It will occupy a 2,000-square-foot portion of an existing office opened earlier this year by Wintrust Mortgage Co., another entity that is part of Town Bank’s parent company, Wintrust Financial Corp.
The bank, which currently has 19 branches in the Milwaukee and Madison areas, plans to add more new branches in the near future, though there are no firm details to share yet, Mack said.
“We do have two to three additional branch expansion initiatives on the drawing board,” he said. “It would be late 2017, in all likelihood.”
