CB Financial makes announcement.

JACKSON, Mich.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 4, 1997--Steven W. Seely, President and Chief Operating Officer of CB Financial Corporation, announced the continued implementation of a comprehensive retail delivery system strategic plan.

The strategy includes the consolidation, effective July 3, 1997, of the City Bank and Trust Company Financial Centers located at 936 N. West Avenue, 1217 Ferguson Road in the Summit Oaks Shopping Center and 1911 E. High Street in the Micor Industrial Park, in Jackson; and the City Bank Auto Bank drive-through only facility in St. Johns. Each of these banking offices is being consolidated due to increased costs of providing banking services and the close proximity to other CB Financial Centers.

"It is our intent to execute the optimization strategy with the least possible amount of disruption to our customers," continued Seely. "Customers will be notified by personal letter with information regarding the financial centers that will be serving them in the future. Additionally, CB Financial provides several alternative methods of performing banking transactions that may be more convenient for our customers, including CB Telebanc (telephone banking), CB PCbanc, CB InfoCenter (product and service information by phone), ATMs, just to name a few."

Branch optimization is a common theme within the banking industry. External influences such as evolving customer needs, competitive pressures, cost concerns, and rapidly developing new technologies, are forcing banks to re-examine their market focus, resources, structure, and the processes to strive for unprecedented change. The consolidation of branches within bank networks has been a common theme throughout the 1990's and will continue well into the next decade. Experts expect that half of the nation's 59,000 branches will disappear over the next 10 years, as banking organizations must reduce their overhead to remain profitable. These consolidations are due, in part, to the large number of branches built in years past when all financial transactions took place in person. Now, many customers prefer to perform transactions through a variety of alternative methods such as those offered by CB Financial, decreasing the need for the large number of branches that proliferated in the early 1970's.

Steven W. Seely stated, "As part of our re-engineering process, an analysis was performed by MARKETECH Systems, a consulting firm, to determine a number of issues. The issues were: profitability of each financial center; potential for growth in each financial center's market area; proper placement of current financial center locations within the markets we serve; facility attributes; and growth markets where consideration should be given to locating financial centers. "Based upon information obtained from this analysis, a retail delivery system strategy was developed to produce the desired result; financial centers that perform to their optimum."

CB Financial Corporation, with assets of $826.2 million, as of December 31, 1996, is the parent holding company for City Bank and Trust Company in Jackson, City Bank in Lansing/St. Johns and CB North in Charlevoix. CB Financial Corporation and its subsidiaries have 39 Financial Centers providing commercial, trust and personal banking services in northwest and central Michigan.

CONTACT: CB Financial Corporation, Jackson

C. Sue Barron, 517/788-2760