Last week’s news that Citizens Bank of Batesville is buying Parkway Bank of Rogers should surprise exactly no one who has been watching Citizens since Phil Baldwin was hired as CEO two years ago.
Citizens opened a loan production office in Fayetteville last fall and then expanded to a full-service branch over the summer.
When Baldwin hired, en masse, 10 Hot Springs staffers away from Southern Bancorp Bank last December, Citizens didn’t even have a branch in the Spa City. By April it had two.
Whispers asked Baldwin how that Hot Springs adventure was working out.
“We thought we might do $40 million in loans there this year,” he said. “We had almost $50 million by June. We’re running about twice what we thought we would do in that market.”
As of June 30, Citizens’ two Hot Springs branches, one on Central Avenue near the Hot Springs Mall and one on Airport Road, had a total of $1.6 million in deposits.