CHEYENNE – American National Bank of Cheyenne is proud of its 77-year-old history, but president Gary Wickam isn’t resting on the bank’s laurels or banking on tradition as it approaches a new century.Instead, American National wants to be the dominant community bank in Cheyenne by offering nontraditional banking services and customer convenience.
To that end, ANB will take its services directly to customers by opening its third full-service branch – in a newly remodeled Buttrey’s supermarket on Cheyenne’s busy Dell Range Boulevard.
“A new, state-of-the art concept in banking is coming to Cheyenne,” Wickam told ANB’s staff recently. “This is the first in-store bank branch in Cheyenne – and only the second one in the whole state of Wyoming. We’re going to the customers É to make banking more convenient for them.”
American’s Buttrey’s Branch, scheduled to open in late December, will occupy 400 square feet between the front doors of the new Buttrey’s Big Fresh store (formerly Dan’s County Market) and have a full-time-equivalent staff of four, providing seven-day-a-week service.
To Wickam, the new branch is the logical extension of customer conveniences that include two other branches, 24-hour telephone banking and six automated teller machines (ATMs) or cash dispensing machines around the city, all steps designed to make banking more convenient to people.
“Banking for many, many years was exactly where we’re at right now – brick and mortar that was put here for the customers to come and do their banking,” he explained. “We said, ‘you come and you bank on our time, you bank at our place and you bank on our hours.’ Those banks that are still doing that – they’re going to be very few of them.”
“Change must occur to be competitive,” he added. “Through deregulation, you’ve got to realize we’re competing not with just banks but with a lot of other financial institutions out there. And to get their business, one of the things we have to do is to be able to afford them the convenience to do their banking.”
Wickam announced the move to ANB’s staff during an after-hours party that featured macarena-dancing staff members dressed as fruits and vegetables and Wickam donning a Buttrey’s apron and scoffing at gray-suited colleagues still dressed in “traditional bankers’ outfits.”
Wickam’s bank already has a branch at F.E. Warren Air Force Base on Cheyenne’s west side and provides twice-a-week service at the Pointe Frontier retirement complex north of Dell Range. ANB also owns the Bank of Laramie and banks in Buffalo and Worland, and it has a two-person loan origination office in Casper and has a loan officer that regularly serves clients in Fort Collins.
Earlier this year, Wickam told the Business Report that his institution is interested in possible expansion into Fort Collins sometime in the future.
“There’s a lot of things happening in Northern Colorado,” he said earlier. “It’s a very competitive market, but we’ve been able to compete with some loans. We’re always looking at opportunities to expand in Wyoming, in Northern Colorado or in Western Nebraska.”
That is still the case, though Wickam told the Business Report in late October there are still no concrete plans for expansion into Colorado. Wyoming’s status with interstate branch banking under federal legislation taking effect next June is still undetermined, but the State Legislature is expected to consider the issue this coming January.ÿ