Photo Provided Mark Whitmer, executive chair, left, and Nick Sparachane, board member pose in front of the Main Street Bank inflatable pig — a new addition at this year’s shareholders’ meeting.

WHEELING — Bank leaders and shareholders gathered to discuss updates and successes for Main Street Bank on Thursday afternoon at the first annual shareholder meeting since the bank merged with Wayne Savings Bancshares, combining $1.4 billion in assets last May.

Main Street President and CEO James VanSickle described the “whirlwind, but also very consequential last five quarters” for the successful bank.

The combined banks went from having $225 million in wholesale funding borrowing at the beginning of 2024 down to $70 million in the first quarter of 2025.

“What that represents is our outreach to our local communities and our ability to gather deposits within our 19 branches and that has been great for us and it has also been great for our communities,” VanSickle said. “One of the great things about this merger is our ability to grow local deposits and keep that money working in our communities but also paying interest to those depositors within our communities.”

Main Street also saw a 19.7% growth in deposits in Q4 of 2024, and $29 million in deposit growth since March 31. Since the start of 2025, or Q1, the bank’s net income has totaled $3.6 million.

The current cash dividend on Main Street stocks is $0.14 per share, $0.56 per year, which VanSickle said “bodes well for the future.”

Main Street Bank leadership also looked back fondly on the around 250 community events they participated in in the past year from local county fairs to the Fantasy In Lights Parade in Wheeling.

The community-first approach was an area of alignment between Main Street and Wayne, said Board Member Michael Baker.

“When we started Main Street Bank twenty-some years ago we were striving to keep the community presence and that was our number one issue so when we merged with Wayne they had the same general thought process and we’ve continued it on and I like that number 250, it’s been great,” Baker said.

Baker said he is also looking forward to further expansion for the bank chain. The bank now boasts 19 locations across Ohio and West Virginia, with the newest St. Clairsville location soon to come. St. Clairsville has always been on the radar of bank leadership, Baker said.

“We’ve always thought that there’s a lot of synergy between the Wheeling and St. Clairsville markets and there were a lot of customers already over there so we were excited if we could get a physical location there it would help them for convenience and I just think it’s a growing market over there with things that they’ve got going and we want to be part of it,” he said.

As a result of the merger, the bank was also recently able to come out with a special mobile app for the mortgage lending department.

Main Street is constantly striving to stay on pace with technological updates in the industry, Baker emphasized.

“With our technology department I’m really happy they’re always looking for ways to improve and try to blend our services in with the trends and mobile banking,” he said. “I look forward to anything they can come up with.”

A focus for the next year will be continuing community events while growing the company, Baker said.

“Our goal is to continue growth. We’re striving to get our stock prices up. We think that there could be possible other locations we might want to fill into but [we want to] continue the community involvement, [maintain] good shareholder value, continue to be profitable and expand our services to whatever we find is best,” he said.