Q&A with Bank of New Hampshire’s Robert Magan

Robert “Bob” Magan has more than 25 years of experience managing money for individuals, nonprofits, charitable organizations and municipalities throughout New England.

‘As the baby boomers retire and age out, the transfer of wealth that’s going to occur in the next 12 to 15 years is going to be significant,’ says Robert Magan, senior VP and senior wealth management officer at Bank of New Hampshire.

Robert “Bob” Magan has more than 25 years of experience managing money for individuals, nonprofits, charitable organizations and municipalities throughout New England.

Magan earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting from Plymouth State University. Prior to joining Bank of New Hampshire, he was employed as a portfolio manager with TD Wealth. He currently serves as president of Rise Again Outreach, a nonprofit based in Loudon, and is member of the board of the Office of the Public Guardian in Concord, NH.

Magan recently appeared as a guest on NH Business Review’s “Down to Business” podcast with Managing Editor Amanda Andrews and Editor Mike Cote. This article was adapted from that interview. Listen to the podcast at nhbr.com.

Q. Thank you to Bank of New Hampshire for sponsoring our podcast for this quarter. Can you share more about yourself and BNH’s initiatives?

A. One of the great things that I love about working for Bank of New Hampshire is its focus on the community and sponsoring things like the podcast and events around the Lakes Region and all over the state. We give back a lot. One of the benefits of being a local community bank is that, as a mutual savings bank, we don’t have shareholders to worry about, so any earnings we earn help our clients, our community and our colleagues. And I just think it’s a great place to work.

Q. We know you’re a Plymouth alumnus and have been in the area a long time. Are you from New Hampshire originally?

A. I actually grew up in Delaware, and my parents dragged me up here when I was a junior in high school. With six weeks left in my junior year of high school, I moved to New Hampshire.

Q. It sounds horrendous.

A. I always tell people I came kicking and screaming, but I’m never going to leave, much to my wife’s dismay because she would love to be in warmer climes. I started in banking before I even got to college. I worked one summer for a construction company doing roofing, and I couldn’t stand it, so I found a job as a summer teller with a local banking organization and worked there a number of summers and after college.

About a year into my career there, I got a job on the trust’s investment services side of the business and fell in love with investments and have just kind of stayed in that space my entire career. It’s been 35 years in banking and about 30 years or so in the investment side, so it’s been a lot of fun.

Q. What’s changed during that period? You’ve gone through plenty of economic cycles.

A. I think technology alone is different.

When I started in my career with one of those small trust companies, I was the securities trader. I literally picked up the telephone and called in the trades to the broker. Now that’s all done electronically. Now we load them all up in the system and push a button in the afternoon, and they’re executed within seconds.

I think the technology move has helped bring costs down some. The focus is more of a holistic approach to wealth management, not just here’s my return on my investment portfolio, but how am I going to do financial planning to know that I have enough when I want to retire? Estate planning? How am I going to give it away when I’m not here anymore if I want to give it away? Those are conversations we have with clients all the time. What legacy do you want to leave?

I think just one organization looking at all of those things in one was not around 25, 30 years ago. You had your estate planner, you had your financial planner and you had your investment manager. One of the things we’ve done at Bank of New Hampshire is we offer those three services in one. We don’t draft estate plans, but we do a lot of review with our clients to make sure we understand and interpret it the way they think it should be done.

Q. Even though Bank of New Hampshire is based in the Lakes Region, do you work with clients all over the state?

A. Yes, actually not only all over the state, all over New England, and sometimes throughout the country. One of the things we pride ourselves on is getting to know the next generation. As the baby boomers retire and age out, the transfer of wealth that’s going to occur in the next 12 to 15 years is going to be significant. If you don’t know the next generation of your clients, you’re at a potential to lose those assets.

We’ve brought a lot of our financial planning resources to bear in the department to get to know the next generation without talking about mom and dad’s money.

Something about New Englanders is we don’t want to talk about the money that we do have. We try and encourage that, maybe not to specifics, but that there is something that’s going to occur.