Many small banks don’t have a true chief financial officer, but with Marnie Oldner, Stone Bank got a CEO and experienced CFO in one.
Originally a CPA from California, Oldner had been the chief financial officer for the original Twin City Bank in North Little Rock, a bank consultant with DD&F Consulting Group in Little Rock and president and CFO of Diamond Bank of Murfreesboro.
All that experience showed.
When she was hired in July 2011, the national bank then called Ozark Heritage was under strict orders from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to clean up its balance sheet.
The former First National Bank of Altheimer had moved to Mountain View and reorganized in the spring of 2009 — the worst timing imaginable. Oldner’s first job was to achieve compliance. “Obviously, we were faced with many articles of a consent order, and that lays out a laundry list of things you have to achieve perfection in,” she said.
Some things on the list were harder than others, with the most urgent being making the best of some loans that should never have been made in the first place. “We were successful on about half of those,” she said.
By the fourth quarter of 2011, Ozark Heritage was back in the black; by the first quarter of this year, Oldner had something amazing to report: the highest return on assets of any bank chartered in Arkansas at 2.73 percent.
In April, the OCC finally lifted its order, allowing Oldner and her directors to begin planning for the future rather than recovering from the past. They promptly converted to a state charter and adopted the Stone Bank name in honor of its home county. A loan-production office is coming to Little Rock, as well as a new branch in White Hall, the bank’s continuing presence in Jefferson County.
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