Ozark Heritage Bank Wants New Name in Stone

Ozark Heritage Bank seeks its third rebranding in six years.

First National Bank of Altheimer kept that name from the time it was chartered in 1955 until it moved from Jefferson County to Mountain View in 2009 and reorganized as Ozark Heritage Bank.

Now another name change is in the works, along with a new state charter.

If an application filed with the Arkansas State Bank Department is approved later this summer, Ozark Heritage Bank will become Stone Bank, in homage to its home county.

President and CEO Marnie Oldner says state charter approval will also be followed by formation of a holding company, Ozark Heritage Bancshares, which should give it a lot more latitude to do a lot of other things — like building a permanent location for its remaining branch back in Jefferson County (at White Hall) and opening a loan-production office in the Little Rock area.

So what’s behind all this activity?

It’s the pent-up energy of a bank that reorganized at the worst possible time, grew too fast and then spent almost five years under the thumb of federal regulators at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The OCC order wasn’t all bad, said Oldner, who joined the bank in June 2011, 10 months after the OCC lowered the boom. “Directors needed to hear the truth” about some bad loans, she said.

But the additional costs and the OCC’s mysterious timetable made Oldner nostalgic for her previous experience with the “more responsive” regulators at the State Bank Department.

“About 85 percent of Arkansas banks are state banks, and I think there’s a reason for that,” Oldner said.

That OCC order was finally terminated in April, and the first thing Ozark Heritage did was apply to convert to a state charter. Oldner said the bank has worked with Hot Springs ad man Kirby Williams on the new brand.

Keeping the Ozark Heritage name would have been simple, but it could create confusion in markets that already have Bank of the Ozarks. And the Heritage part of the name could create confusion with the old Heritage Bank of Jonesboro, now part of Bear State Bank.

Before leaving Jefferson County, Ozark Heritage was the state’s smallest bank with $10.7 million in assets. It’s still not big — 85th out of 107 with assets of $85.4 million — but it is profitable: The little bank earned $601,000 in the first quarter, for a return on assets of 2.77 percent and a return on equity of 21.57 percent.