Daryl Forsythe, President and Chief Executive Officer Michael Chewens, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer NBT Bancorp, Inc.
	NBT Bancorp, Inc., is a financial holding company headquartered in Norwich, NY, with combined assets of $2.7 billion in 2000. Its subsidiaries include NBT Bank and Pennstar Bank, both full-service community banks that together serve more than 100,000 customers from 78 locations throughout New York State and Pennsylvania. In May of last year, NBT Bancorp was faced with a formidable challenge. It needed to execute the conversion of four acquisitions that, when completed, would quadruple the size of NBT Bank. In need of a partner to manage this large undertaking, NBT officials consulted informally with other bank executives and received a favorable report on ADS from Hudson United Bank, which had recently engaged ADS to handle a particularly challenging multi-bank migration project. The NBT acquisition plan called for Pennsylvania's Lake Ariel Bank and Pioneer American Bank to be merged—along with six branches from Sovereign Bank—to form Pennstar Bank. Around the same time, NBT had announced a merger of equals between NBT Bank and another community bank in upstate New York. After ADS was awarded the project, NBT and ADS agreed on a plan and resource teams to handle the conversion and consolidation efforts. The scope of the ADS engagement was comprehensive, including: a management assessment to support the structuring of the new organization; a project plan; the development and building of a blended project team composed of representatives from all four institutions and ADS consultants; and the establishment and staffing of a Program Office to manage and drive the project. The team was assembled and conversion efforts were well underway when due diligence findings led to the cancellation of the merger between the two New York banks—approximately six weeks before the Lake Ariel Bank was to be converted. The cancellation was a major blow to the project team, which lost several members—thereby leaving key positions vacant in mid-project. To keep the project moving forward, ADS personnel shifted their roles— in a single day—from consultants and project managers to active project team members. Additional ADS experts were brought in to fill vacancies. At the same time, ADS project managers worked with NBT to review and renegotiate vendor agreements, since they were initially based upon the greater processing volumes anticipated by the New York bank merger. This brought added pressure to an already tightly constrained schedule. Because ADS had the depth of resources and skills to supplement the conversion effort on a moment's notice, the NBT/ADS project team was able to successfully convert the Lake Ariel Bank, Sovereign branches, and Pioneer American Bank on schedule. The team established centralized and consolidated Loan and Deposit Operations at NBT Bancorp in Norwich, with account processing outsourced to FiServ CBS in Arlington Heights, and item processing outsourced to NCR's Utica, NY location. By the summer of 2001, the NBT Bank and Pennstar account databases will be merged within the FiServ system to complete the merger process.