Signature Bank of Arkansas

Gary Head, CEO of Signature Bank of Arkansas, would be the first to admit that 2009 was not a great year to be a 4-year-old bank doing most of its business in northwest Arkansas.
“We’ve had our share of clients with difficulties, and we’ve put more in loan loss reserves and charged off more than we’ve done in the past four years together,” he said.
But Signature Bank was profitable last year, which is more than 22 other Arkansas banks can claim, including seven chartered in Benton or Washington counties.
It’s also a time, according to Head, when community bankers are needed.
“The borrowers who are sort of fly-by-night were gone a long time ago. Good people are struggling now,” he said. “Sometimes you wish you were in a big tower and didn’t know these people, but I go to the grocery store and the basketball games, and when someone is struggling, you struggle with them.”
Signature Bank’s parent company, White River Bancshares, raised $45 million in startup capital in the fall of 2004, the largest initial stock offering for a new bank in Arkansas history. It raised another $15 million a year later and added some geographic diversity with the purchase of the Bank of Brinkley in 2007. Its assets at the end of 2009 stood at $691.5 million.
Signature has six branches in northwest Arkansas and two in Brinkley, and that’s likely to be the extent of the footprint for some time.
“We’re just looking to make sure the banks that we have and that we run are taking advantage of all the opportunities we have right now,” Head said. “And there are lots of opportunities to move business. A lot of people aren’t particularly happy with their banks.”
Signature hopes to benefit from the growing national trend away from “too-big-to-fail” megabanks, even without much advertising.
“We do it with feet on the ground,” Head said. “We have someone in every Elks Club and every Rotary Club asking people in all parts of this community for their business.”

Previous Honorees