Phillip Baldwin

Phillip Baldwin spent 20 years in traditional businesses, working at Ernst & Young, Dillard’s and Pinnacle Bank before taking on the community development challenges represented by Southern Bancorp.

The Arkadelphia-based holding company has more than doubled in size and increased annual earnings by 900 percent since Baldwin became president in 2001.

Southern Bancorp, with $550 million in total assets, ranks as the largest and most profitable rural development banking group in the United States.

The company’s mission is to improve the lives of ordinary people in rural Arkansas and Mississippi by making loans most conventional banks wouldn’t touch.

Despite this nonprofit goal, Baldwin operates the organization much like a conventional lender. “You’ve got to stay in the black, and I expect our organizations to be high-performing banking institutions,” the 48-year-old executive said.

Southern Bancorp’s staff of 250 is spread across a network of 40 locations in rural Arkansas and Mississippi and three banks: Elk Horn Bank & Trust in Arkadelphia, First Bank of the Delta in Helena and Delta Southern Bank in Clarksdale, Miss.

The Southern Bancorp family has provided $1.6 billion in development loans to low- and moderate-income individuals and small businesses, helped train the unemployed and aided home ownership for the very poor.

Baldwin was named CEO of Southern Bancorp in 2002 and is a member of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He said his overarching goal is to revitalize the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta.

Towards that end, Southern Bancorp, its five-affiliated nonprofits and a stellar list of philanthropic shareholders are working to build a foundation of change in Phillips County and Clark County in Arkansas and Sunflower County in Mississippi.

Baldwin gets a double charge out of maintaining the pace of a high-performance banking group while helping rural communities make their plans and ideas reality.

“I get two levels of satisfaction,” he said. “It’s more than just running a business.”