West Bend-based Westbury Bancorp Inc. expects its decision to delist its stock from the Nasdaq and deregister it with the SEC to benefit shareholders.
The cost of listing the Westbury Bank parent company’s stock on the Nasdaq, keeping it registered with the SEC and meeting those organizations’ requirements was easily in the six figures, said Kirk Emerich, chief financial officer and executive vice president of investor relations at Westbury.
“The SEC regulation requires more rigorous reviews of our quarterly numbers by our accountants and some other people, and all that will go away,” Emerich said. “We’re going to get (shareholders) the same info with a little less expense.”
As a community bank with an $80 million market capitalization, Westbury was on the small end of companies traded on the Nasdaq, and the OTCQX market is a better fit, Emerich said.
“We don’t expect that our liquidity as far as people being able to buy and sell the stock will change significantly,” he said. “We don’t trade a real high volume of shares on a daily basis right now and we don’t think that’s going to be impacted significantly.”
Westbury has had a couple of down quarters because it is absorbing the costs of expanding into the Madison market, but that did not influence this decision, he said.
“At this point in time, we thought that the cost savings, without significantly impacting the trading ability of our shares, was an overall positive for our shareholders,” Emerich said.
Moving forward, Westbury will continue to focus on growing its business organically in Waukesha, Washington and Dane counties, he said.
“We plan to be a locally-owned, locally-involved community bank for a long time,” Emerich said.
