InBank CEO hails expansion to Boulder

BOULDER — “I’m a lifelong banker. My dad and grandfather were all bankers. My mother, my brother — all bankers.”

With a background like that, it’s no wonder relationships were a top priority for Edward Francis when he decided that InBank would open a loan-production office in Boulder.

“This will allow us to support our existing clients in this market and attract new customers who are looking for a relationship-banking experience with local decision-making and experienced banking professionals who understand the nuances of business,” said Francis, who serves as board chairman, president and chief executive for InBankshares Corp. (OTCQX: INBC) and its wholly owned subsidiary InBank.

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Francis, 55, speaks with the Deep South lilt that reflects his background in Mississippi and Louisiana. He grew up in New Orleans, attended Ole Miss, and then spent three decades ascending through the banking business including serving as executive vice president and chief banking officer at Hancock Whitney, a $27 billion financial-services company.

InBank’s office at 2505 Walnut St., Suite 200, opened in early June with a staff of five, including market president Adrianne Tracy, senior vice president Andrew Sauer, vice president Stephanie Miller, assistant vice president Zac Claeys and senior loan assistant Charlene Garcia.

“We hired the team at the very end of March, early part of April,” Francis said, adding that the bank has “aspirations of growing the market, so we’ll continue to selectively add staff as we see opportunities for talent.”

The office, Francis said, “is really to service those customers in the Boulder and Northern Colorado markets. It’s a launching pad for those bankers who reside here and sit here and call on businesses all around here. It’s mostly commercial, but our goal is really to bank the business and the business owner, so we do have an array of private-banking products.”

Boulder is “a market we’ve had our eye on for a while, and we’ve been working on the right opportunity,” he said. “I think that Adrianne and her team represent the right opportunity, the right skill set, the right cultural fit, the ability to build a real foundation and build a bank around this great team that we hired. We really feel like they’re a great fit for our strategy of helping that segment of businesses between $1 million and $50 million that really need a banker and need us to help them customize solutions, whether that’s on payments or that’s in loans. It gives us the ability to really add value.”

InBank has Colorado offices in Aurora, Greenwood Village and Trini dad, but opening a branch in Boulder required more than a little thought, Francis said.

“Locations are not necessarily how we built this company,” he said. “We built the bank on a foundation of technology. Most banks are looking to get out of branches today, not build new ones. Locations don’t really drive our business like they used to. What drives our business is our ability to help clients, deliver sound financial principles and advice, and really meet their needs and customize their solutions. That’s way more important these days than having a branch location close to them.”

Still, he added, “we’ve got to have a place for people to sit and do their work.”

Francis had led an investor group made up of former bank executives that created InBankshares Corp. to acquire Raton Capital Corp., the New Mexico-based banking holding company that previously owned International Bank, in a $46.3 million deal.

“We closed on our transaction to buy International Bank June 21, 2018,” Francis said, “so we just had the third year of our journey, so to speak.”

Francis delights in telling the story of how International Bank was founded and got its name. An Italian named Joe DiLisio “immigrated, like many folks, to work in the coal mines in and around Raton,” he said. “Mr. DiLisio noticed as he was working in the coal mines that there really wasn’t a general store or any place to do shopping, so as a true entrepreneur the next move for him was to open a general store called DiLisio Brothers. His clients would bring their paychecks in or vouchers in, and they would buy goods and services, so Mr. DiLisio would carry a credit balance for them. He’d put the cash in a cigar box and write the customer’s name on it.

“Over time, from the years 1913 to just before 1918, he had accumulated somewhere around $40,000 in customer deposits. He got worried about the safety of that money, and so he decided to charter a bank. The reason why he named it International Bank in 1918 was to make sure that those 26 countries and nationalities that were represented in that surrounding area felt welcome to the banking environment in America, where they really had no idea of how banking worked. So he named it International Bank in a way to be inclusive to all that were there.”

When Francis’ team purchased International Bank, he said, “not being an international bank caused some problems with our brand, so we decided to modernize that brand. As we were thinking about that in 2019, we chose to use the name InBank to continue on the theme of inclusivity but to make it less about international bank but more about InBank.”

InBank still operates in Raton and ranks tops in market share there, Francis said.

In first-quarter figures issued May 3, InBankshares Corp. reported net income of $661,000, net interest income of $6.1 million, year-over-year core loan growth (total loans excluding Paycheck Protection Program loans) of $77 million, and year-over-year deposit growth of $286.4 million.

“We really built the foundation on a backbone that’s really strong and really tech-forward, and we built it around bankers, with the thought that we go out and see most of our customers,” Francis said. “They don’t necessarily come into a bank these days, so we want to make sure there are places they can get out and see our customers pretty efficiently and effectively.”

Still, he said, “we think Northern Colorado is full of opportunity. We see a lot of growth happening with businesses moving here. The cost of land in Denver is very expensive if you want to put a manufacturing or distribution facility, so it’s natural for those kind of businesses to look to places that are convenient to the metropolitan area but are less costly. We think those businesses have shown that pattern. We think there’s lots of opportunity for a really C-and-I (commercial and industrial) value-oriented bank to help those businesses that are trying to grow and prosper here in Boulder and Northern Colorado.

“I could see us potentially adding another location further north from here,” he said, “but it’s a little too early to say.”