It has been four years since First Horizon Bank crossed the Mississippi River from Memphis into Arkansas,
a result of a $2.3 billion stock swap purchase of Louisiana-based IberiaBank. Jay Meador, president, central Arkansas, has been hard at work ever since to forge name recognition and expand the bank’s foothold in a marketplace that gets more crowded, seemingly by the week.
“It is a challenge to communicate who you are and what you’re about if you are a new name in the market,” he said. “There’s a lot of banks in central Arkansas, and anytime you’ve got a marketplace that is this well populated, the challenge to communicate and differentiate yourself is always going to be greater.
“I think the best way to do that is to do it through the hiring and deploying out into the market of good, qualified, skilled people. If they take care of clients, word travels fast that you’re doing a good job. That is ultimately how you differentiate yourself. It’s really about how well you take care of a client and how you present yourself to them.”
Meador preaches that message daily across the five branches that make up his market area, a theme that helped the team withstand the usual challenges of integration following the merger and which continues to underscore the bank’s products and services today. Meador heaped praise on the customer-facing employees who have persevered through the many changes of the past few years.
“Change is always challenging; there’s always hiccups to work through, without exception,” he said. “The employees bear the brunt of it because, ultimately, our job as the bank is to shield the customer from as much of that as we can and, ultimately, make the process of banking as easy as it can be.
“What we did a really good job of when we went through the integration is communicating changes in advance of the actual integration and then being available when we flipped that switch. I think we did a really good job and had a great plan in place.”
Meador said while his market is currently operating the correct number of branch locations with five, the company constantly looks at data to ensure Horizon Bank has the proper presence it needs to serve existing and new accounts.
“We’re very comfortable with our number of branches in this market, but what we continue to evaluate is are we in the right locations?” he said. “We like our locations now, but could we be in better ones? We’re constantly looking at that.
“At the same time, you don’t want to always just be chasing something, so what we’ve tried to do is leverage our retail branch network with a best-in-class technology offering. We believe that when you bring those two together, that makes for a really good presence in the market that delivers technology and a physical presence in the right locations.”
Looking ahead, Meador said the forecast for the Arkansas market in general and the local market in specific was healthy and offered growth opportunities for large and small banks alike. He said the institutions that manage the common challenges of regulation and labor are the ones best positioned to take full advantage of it.
“I think in the banking industry, the regulatory environment is always going to be top of the list of challenges,” he said. “There’s a large amount of uncertainty in that right now, and that’s always something to keep our eye on. You hope that it’s never restrictive for too long, but ultimately, we all figure out how to adapt to whatever that regulatory environment is and grow within it. It’s the name of the game if you want to survive.”
READ ALSO: Baptist Health Opens New Family Clinic in Rose City
