When James Horton accepted the chief operating officer role at First Security Bank, it represented the closing of a circle in more ways than one. Not only is Horton in his hometown of Searcy with the job, but it caps a career with the bank that started at a tender age in the humblest of roles.
“I started with First Security Bank right out of high school in 1997, and I worked in banking my entire college career,” he said. “When I started with the bank, I actually started as a courier and then went into the mail room. I started literally at the bottom.
“My marketing degree had a logistics emphasis, and I thought I was going to go into logistics, but when I graduated college, I found out real quick that I could work in logistics on a dock out in the elements, working all days of the week and holidays, or I could stay with banking, which I was really enjoying, and work inside on a normal schedule. I stuck with banking and have not looked back.”
Horton made the most of his career choice. He split his collegiate years between Arkansas State University-Beebe and Arkansas State University in Jonesboro and, after graduation, worked in First Security’s booming northwest Arkansas market. There, he mastered retail banking and began his climb up the company ladder as branch manager, followed by a string of operational roles with increasing responsibility. Every promotion pushed him to work harder and learn more, another attribute that has existed since the beginning.
“I think the thing that has allowed me to get to where I am today is my willingness to do anything asked, partly because I wanted to learn and also because I needed the money,” he said. “I came from a single-parent household where I had work, and that just carried on through to when I was in college. I wasn’t somebody who got a job just so that they could learn what responsibility was. I had to work to be able to go to college.
“For that reason, I have always been eager to learn whatever anybody would teach me, starting from when I was working in the mail room. I would hang out when I was distributing mail or whatever, standing around the teller area, curious as to what they did, asking if I could train to be a teller so I could work on Saturdays.”
Horton, 45, found himself leading the institution during a period of great change in the banking industry. Once slow to adopt customer-facing technology, banks have since become leading providers of tools for conducting business at all times of the day or night, and First Security Bank is no exception. He said the challenge is striking the right balance between high tech and high touch.
“You have to have the technology to meet the younger generation where they expect you to be,” he said. “Even the days of sitting down at a PC are gone; you’ve got to meet these consumers on their phone with the technology that a big bank offers. At the same time, as a community bank, we still maintain relationships. We still have a call center that runs right here out of Searcy, so when you call, you talk to a person in your state. We also have a pretty vast network of retail locations across Arkansas.
“Sooner or later, everybody is going to reach that point in their life when they need something more. Maybe it’s a mortgage, or maybe you need a loan for something to get by, or maybe you’re starting to invest some money. When people get to those larger monetary events in life, they get less comfortable doing that without a face. We strive to provide that face-to-face interaction, that community feel, that relationship-based banking, to meet those needs.”
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