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Oak Hill National Bank Confident of June Opening
Oak Hill Bank Confident of June OpeningBy Bill Walsh
Times-Democrat Staff Writer
The capitalization drive is still about $400,000 short of goal, but President Mike Ewing is confident that Oak Hill National Bank (in organization) will open its doors on June 8 — or soon thereafter.
Despite the confidence, the fundraising drive for the new community bank with branches in Warrenton and Marshall has been a bit more of a slog than the new bank's organizers probably originally envisioned, and why not?
The economy has tanked since the effort started about a year ago.
This last bit of investment gathering is not even the hard part. That came last fall, when Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs and others were prominent in the news, and many potential investors felt the pinch of Wall Street investments that lost their value by half.
The bank had collected $13.4 million of is $13.7 million goal as of late last week.
"We have prospects that will put us over," Ewing said in the Warrenton office at 128 Broadview Avenue last week, "but, of course, we can't count that until you have the checks. We are absolutely looking for more prospects, and we'd love to get to $14 million or $15 million in capital.
"If we can raise $13.7 million by April 16, we can close the capital raise and we can...open on June 8 on a very tight timeline."
A lot of other potential start-up banks have decided to wait for better days, Ewing said. In the past 12 months, 78 new banks have opened their doors nationwide, down from 173 in the prior 12 months, down from 184 in the year before that.
But "this is an ideal time to open a community bank," Ewing opined in the nearly finished Warrenton branch office on Thursday. "We will have an emphasis on personal relationships, and we have a very experienced board and management team. We will have a bank with state-of-the-art technology and yet a relationship-type banking — the best of both worlds in that regard. And access to local decision-makers" within the bank, he said.
That will go a long way toward solving situations before they become problems, Ewing said.
"There are so many loans out there today that have been sold so many times, that have been securitized, and no one can make a decision. So you go to foreclosure, and everybody loses.
"Hopefully, we won't make bad loans in the first place, but there are a lot of ways community banks can find solutions that aren't available to some other institutions," Ewing said.
Oak Hill and others of its ilk are not investment bankers, notorious now for investing in instruments that they didn't understand — who did?
Neither are they mortgage bankers, notorious now for enabling people to buy houses they couldn't afford.
"We're a community bank; that's what we are, and [community banks] are doing fine," Ewing said. "While the giants are reeling, the community banks are doing fine."
Proof? Oak Hill is not even a bank yet, but has already committed to $6 million in loans, Ewing said, loans that are currently "warehoused" at another community bank out of the area. Oak Hill will buy those loans back as soon as it is operational.
In addition to the loan package with which Oak Hill will launch, Ewing expects that the new bank will kick off with a significant number of customers.
"It's hard to put a figure on it," he said, "but there is a lot of pent-up demand. Our biggest challenge has been asking people to be patient. We are going to be flooded."
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