BOULDER — For Adrianne Tracy, senior vice president and Boulder market president for InBank, a Thursday reception celebrated more than just the opening of the bank’s first Boulder branch.

She also recently was able to hire a teller.

“We got approved to open for full service late last year, but it’s taken us a long time to find a teller,” Tracy told BizWest Thursday. “Hiring a teller was difficult, and so my loan assistant and I kind of ran teller shifts for the past three weeks.”

InBank, a wholly owned subsidiary of InBankShares Corp. (OTCQX: INBC), celebrated the opening of its Boulder branch — and the hiring of a teller — with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and reception attended by representatives of the Boulder and Superior chambers of commerce.

The branch at 3223 Arapahoe Ave. officially opened in mid-April, almost two years after the bank opened a loan-production office in the city.

Tracy said InBank focuses on commercial and industrial lending — known in the industry as C&I, providing loans to businesses.

That’s a niche that Tracy, who earned a master’s in business administration degree from the University of Colorado Boulder, knows well. She worked at Colorado Business Bank for nine years, then worked at Centennial Bank & Trust, which was acquired by Heartland Financial USA Inc. Later, Heartland acquired Citywide Bank, with Centennial merging with Citywide.

“So I stuck through all those mergers and stuck around mostly for my customers,” Tracy said, “just wanting to help them through all those transitions.”

Tracy eventually was approached by InBank CEO Ed Francis, who welcomed her C&I experience..

“When Ed approached me and the team that came with me, he approached us because we’re well-known to be C&I lenders,” she said. “We’re not real estate lenders. His vision really was to create a C&I bank. And so we just fit that model perfectly.”

Boulder’s robust business community and innovation economy also represent a perfect fit for InBank, Tracy said.

“The business owners here make us look really smart because they’re really smart, right? But it’s just a dynamic market. It’s a great community,” Tracy said.

“When I first moved here, it felt big,” she added. “And now it feels very small and tight-knit. It’s just a great market to be in. There’s great businesses, they’re doing exciting things, they are extremely educated and smart, and you know, just the amount of knowledge they provide for us. I mean … I learn as much from them as they do from us.”

Tracy noted that InBank, though chartered in New Mexico, maintains its corporate offices in Colorado. That proximity provides advantages to customers, including local decision-making and access to Ed Francis, InBank’s CEO, who attended the reception Thursday.

“We found that our customers like that,” Tracy said. “They can meet the CEO of our bank, they can meet the chief credit officer …. They can meet anyone within the bank and they know our market. They know we know the market.”

Francis echoed Tracy’s comments on the Boulder market, noting that expansion northward from Denver was a natural progression for the bank, which also maintains numerous branches in southern Colorado.

“It’s a booming, well-diversified (market),” Francis said of Boulder. “You’ve got a lot of income in Boulder. It’s just a great place to do business. It’s natural for us to be thinking about our I-25 corridor. It’s a natural expansion from Denver.

“But the real reason is we were lucky enough to get Adrianne and bring the talent into the bank,” he added. “You know, banking is a lot about people right? So if we can find talent, we usually build businesses around talent.”

Eventually, that could lead to additional locations, Francis said.

“I think, absolutely, there’s potential for additional expansion,” he said. “We are a growth company. We want to be the dominant locally owned commercial bank in Colorado. We’re five years old as of June 21st, this year and so we really think there’s a lot of opportunity to take our value proposition into other markets and to expand in our existing markets.”

InBank reported assets of $1.3 billion as of March 31, 2023.