Arkansas Business

Bank of the Ozarks Inc.

Bank of the Ozarks Inc. is a Little Rock-based company that owns a state-chartered bank subsidiary, Bank of the Ozarks. It conducts banking operations through 112 offices, including 66 Arkansas offices, 27 Georgia offices, 11 Texas offices, four Florida offices, two North Carolina offices, and one office each in South Carolina and Alabama. It went public in July 1997.

A selling frenzy hammering most financial stocks nationwide sent its stock to a near 52-week low in June 2008. The bank took an unusual step to provide information for stockholders in response to all the activity, saying it "continues to believe it is on track to achieve its paramount goal for 2008, which is to once again return to a record quarterly earnings pace at some time during the year."

In August 2009, the bank bid for and received a contract to handle banking business for the new Arkansas lottery.

In recent years, the company has aggressively expanded thanks to a series of FDIC-assisted acquisitions of failed banks in the southeastern United States, including Georgia.

By April 2011, the company had made its sixth and seventh FDIC-assisted purchases, expanding its total assets by nearly $1.3 billion. The acquisitions came as the company outperformed just about every bank of comparable size in the nation, with profit through the first nine months of 2011 soaring to $83.8 million, a year-to-year gain of 77.9 percent.

Its stock soared as well, prompting a two-for-one split effective Aug. 16, 2011, the company's third since its IPO 14 years ago.

In 2010, Gleason was named American Banker magazine's Community Banker of the Year.