Former Boston Fed chief joins Berkshire Hills board

Eric Rosengren, a former longtime president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, is the newest addition to the board of directors that oversees Berkshire Hills Bancorp in Boston.

Rosengren, who retired from the Boston Fed in the fall of 2021, joined the board as an independent director on April 5, Berkshire Hills announced Monday in a press release. He was appointed to the board's risk management, capital and compliance and audit committees.

Rosengren is the 14th member of the board. Directors serve one-year terms and are up for election annually, a company spokesperson said in an email.

Berkshire Hills CEO Nitin Mhatre said in the press release that Rosengren will "help bolster Berkshire Bank further" as the $11.7 billion-asset company "continue[s] to advance along [its] path of becoming a high-performing, leading socially responsible community bank."

Chairman David Brunelle said in the press release that Rosengren's experience leading the Boston Fed, which began in 2007, as well as his "vast subject matter expertise" will give "invaluable perspectives to the strategic and risk oversight functions" to the Berkshire board.

The election of Rosengren, 65, is the latest in a string of top leadership changes at Berkshire Hills since Mhatre was hired as CEO in January 2021. 

In February, the company appointed former Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito to the board of directors. The prior month, it announced that David Rosato had been hired to fill the chief financial officer role, which was vacated in October by Subhadeep Basu. Rosato was CFO of People's United Financial, which was acquired by M&T Bank last year.

Also around the start of the year, Berkshire Hills hired two executives to lead its commercial banking and credit divisions. James Brown, formerly of Boston Private Bank & Trust Co., joined Berkshire Hills as its head of commercial banking, while Philip Jurgeleit, the former credit risk leader at Santander Bank, was hired as Berkshire Hills' chief credit officer.

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Under Mhatre's strategic plan, the company aims to launch more digital channels, enhance business lines such as wealth management, increase profitability and better support the communities it serves, in part by lending and investing $5 billion in community development initiatives over three years.

Rosengren, who joined the Boston Fed in 1985 and spent 14 years as president, announced his retirement in September 2021, nine months earlier than planned, citing a worsening kidney condition. 

The announcement coincided with heightened scrutiny of the personal financial transactions of Rosengren and former Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan. Following a Wall Street Journal report that said the pair engaged in certain trades while privy to the Fed's internal discussions about its response to the pandemic, both said they would sell all individual stock holdings.

Rosengren is currently the CEO of Rosengren Consulting and a visiting scholar at the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy, Berkshire Hills said in the release.