Online banking has been growing for years, but local bankers say the coronavirus pandemic has turbocharged the trend. They’ve seen customers rapidly moving to a variety of digital banking applications, including online check depositing, electronic signatures for loan documents and digital wallets, which store credit and...
[caption id="attachment_53248" align="alignleft" width="216"] Boyne City-based snow ski manufacturer Shaggy's joined with 1-800-Stencil, also of Boyne, to manufacture approximately 175,000 disposable face shields for McLaren and other Michigan hospitals.[/caption] Virtually every northern Michigan manufacturing company was touched, in some way, by the devasting coronavirus pandemic. Many were forced...
Healthy Start Child Care has been providing much-needed day care for families in the Traverse City area for a quarter of a century. But the coronavirus epidemic, which prompted Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to order the temporary closure of most day care operations, threatened to shut the...
Munson Healthcare Chief Executive Officer Ed Ness is navigating unchartered waters as he steers the nine-hospital system through the COVID-19 pandemic. “From a health and business prospective, this is something we haven’t experienced before,” he said. “In the short term, the business has dramatically changed.” But Ness...
by Rick Haglund Michigan hospitals – including Munson Healthcare – will likely take a financial hit from a new auto insurance law that will replace the state’s 48-year-old no-fault insurance system. Meanwhile, it’s unclear how much consumers will save under the new law, which takes effect July...
Local business leaders have high hopes that an unconventional, little-known federal tax incentive could pump millions of dollars of new commercial and residential investment into a low-income section of Grand Traverse County. A 6.2 square-mile swath of land including a large area of Garfield Township and...
Much of the recent news coming out of Cherry Capital Airport has been about the expansion of commercial passenger service to new locations, including cities in California, Florida and Texas. But there is a lot of activity happening in the private business travel and personal aircraft...
In the 1990s, Second Chance Body Armor was the darling of the northern Michigan business scene, with legends of its founder actually shooting himself to prove the efficacy of its products. In 2004, a recall put the company in a tailspin, its assets sold off. But now,...
The merger trend among local independent insurance agencies, which shifted into high gear last year, is also hitting the public accounting sector. Traverse City-based Dennis, Gartland & Niergarth (DGN), northern Michigan’s largest, locally owned public accounting firm, last month purchased Hill, Schroderus & Company, a Petoskey-based...
Financial institutions have long competed for deposits using a variety of lures, including promotional interest rates, tote bags and toasters. Frankfort-based State Savings Bank, which entered the Traverse City market last year, even offers a free pie to anyone who switches a checking account from another...
