Downtown Albany, where Pioneer Bancorp is based, seen along the Hudson River. Photo: Quintin Soloviev, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Pioneer Bancorp, the Albany parent of Pioneer Bank, reported third-quarter net income of $85,000, or about $0.00 a share, down from $4.3 million, or $0.18 a share, a year earlier. The Oct. 30 release said the quarter included $6.2 million in litigation-related expense tied to agreements in principle to resolve long-running lawsuits.
Those agreements, reached in October with Southwestern Payroll Services, Granite Solutions Groupe and National Payment Corp., known as NatPay, would resolve claims pending in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York. Pioneer said the resolutions remain subject to definitive settlement agreements and to stipulations dismissing the cases in their entirety with prejudice. The matters date to 2019.
Underneath the legal charge, the bank reported a stronger operating core. Net interest income was $23.6 million, up $3.4 million, or 16.9 percent, from the third quarter of 2025. The net interest margin was 4.26 percent, up 10 basis points. Net loans receivable were $1.94 billion at Sept. 30, up $290.3 million, or 17.6 percent, from the end of 2025. Deposits were $2.13 billion, up $391.7 million, or 22.5 percent. Non-interest income was $5.5 million, about 14 percent of revenue, the company said. The figures are preliminary.
For the first nine months of 2026, Pioneer reported net income of $8.9 million, or $0.37 a basic share and $0.36 diluted, compared with $16.5 million, or $0.67 a share, in the same period of 2025. Total assets were $2.60 billion at Sept. 30, and shareholders’ equity was $323.3 million. The deposit base, the release said, was about 52.9 percent retail, 16.4 percent commercial and 30.7 percent municipal. Estimated uninsured deposits, net of affiliate and collateralized deposits, were 10.6 percent of total deposits.
President and CEO Thomas Amell said the quarter “reflected the strength of Pioneer’s relationship-based business model” and that growth in net interest income and the margin “more than offset the costs of resolving the legal matters, which we recognized this quarter.” On the settlements, he said the company was “extremely pleased to have reached agreements to resolve the Southwestern Payroll, Granite Solutions and NatPay matters, and we look forward to finalizing them.”
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