By Evan Sparks
Jim Ryan has a fever — an Indiana Fever, to be precise. When I sit down with him over Zoom, he’s just gotten back from a meeting to discuss a new marketing partnership with Old National Bank and Indianapolis’ WNBA team, which has outpaced the NBA’s Indiana Pacers in attendance thanks to the presence of superstar Caitlin Clark.
As any fan of the movie Hoosiers knows, Indiana loves its basketball, and Ryan — chairman and CEO of Old National Bank — is no exception. “We’re so proud and honored to be associated with a brand like the Indiana Fever,” he says. “The WNBA has absolutely caught fire. This is an amazing opportunity to think about how do we support Indiana teams and the WNBA in particular.”
But while Ryan is a proud resident of Evansville, Indiana, Old National’s hometown, he’s also got his eyes on bigger horizons — including continuing to grow the Old National model of banking and, at the national level, bring some new perspectives to big issues like deposit insurance.
Growing the bank
Ryan began his banking career in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as a college intern at Old Kent Bank. When I point out that he must like working for banks with “Old” in the name, he jokes, “There is a bank in Chicago called Old Second Bank, and occasionally I see them when I’m in the Chicago markets and I joke that ‘If this Old National thing doesn’t work out, I’m going to come work for you all,’” he says with a smile.
He’s been at Old National since 2005. “I had the opportunity to come join their treasury management section,” he says. “I used that as a point to volunteer to do just about everything in the organization: take on new assignments, move for the company to, to bring the best of Old National to partnerships that we’ve done.” He rose through the ranks of M&A integration executive, head of corporate development, CFO and finally CEO since 2019 as part of a planned transition.
Since then, Ryan has continued growing Old National through what he calls transformative partnerships — $21 billion-asset Chicago-area First Midwest in 2022 and $16 billion-asset Twin Cities-area Bremer Bank earlier this year, plus a smaller acquisition in the Nashville market. Those, plus organic growth, have brought Old National to $70 billion in assets stretching across the Midwest and the Mid-South regions — 250% growth since Ryan took the top job.
But it’s not only “partnerships,” as Ryan calls them. “We’re focused in on the organic growth first.” He doesn’t close the door to future deals, but he notes that “nothing would make me happier if we were just able to grow in the next five years organically and continue to do the great things that we do. I think we’ve reached the scale necessary to compete. We have great growth opportunities in the marketplaces we serve.”
The bank’s growth has provided it the resources to deliver the tech platforms and solutions that many customers expect — but that’s table stakes these days. “There are a lot of people out there that compete with the technology and mobile experience, and those are important — and we need to be competitive,” Ryan says. “But we really win when we have the opportunity to build deep relationships with clients that oftentimes last multiple generations.” A 190-year-old bank — with the “Old” part of old-fashioned literally in the name — can convincingly make that pitch.
The continued choice of Evansville — population 120,000 — for Old National’s headquarters is also part of that pitch. “We often get asked if Evansville’s the right place to maintain your headquarters,” he says. “I think it’s our secret sauce.”
He adds that Evansville, an Ohio River town that bridges Midwest and South, “is not so much a physical place as a state of mind. Being very grounded in a smaller community like Evansville allows us to be a little bit more successful. When I say ‘I’m from a small town and I recognize the importance of what small town means and our impact in those small towns,’ I think that really resonates well with those team members and the clients that I speak with.”
A family comes together
One extraordinary challenge Ryan faced during his time as CEO was the April 10, 2023 mass shooting at an Old National branch in Louisville. Five victims — all of them bank employees — lost their lives, and eight more were injured.
Ryan hasn’t talked publicly about the shooting before. He found out about it from his chief risk officer that morning when still at home, and he drove straight to Louisville to help the team there respond. “It was a time for us to rally behind the families of those five team members and our other team members who were at our office,” he says. “We did our absolute best to rally behind all of those people that were affected. But to go to five funerals and five visitations and five services — you just can’t even imagine how terribly difficult that is for those families.”
One lesson he took from the experience: it changed the way people at Old National talked to each other. “We always felt like we were a family, but that definition of family was completely reinforced,” he says. “After you go through a tragedy like that, it takes a lot of love, it takes a lot of support, and it takes a lot of care. I send out a weekly communication and I talk how we need to love one another, care for one another and be there for each other.”
‘What makes America so special’
In addition to his volunteer work with local healthcare and economic development in Evansville, Ryan took on a national role as chair of ABA’s American Bankers Council, a peer group for midsize and regional bank CEOs. One priority as ABC chair is working to modernize deposit insurance.
“Money moves so much faster than it moved before,” he notes. “You have the social media phenomenon. Banks have gotten bigger. It really is time to step back and think about how FDIC coverage should work.”
Given ABA’s unique role as the only association representing the entire span of FDIC-insured banks, “this is one that I think is important for ABA to take a lead on,” he adds. There are still plenty of thorny issues to work out, but “there’s broad support and recognition that the FDIC coverage should change.”
In the absence of change, Ryan worries that consumers’ and businesses’ misunderstanding of the safety of the banking sector might erode the deposit base of smaller and midsize banks in a crisis.
“What makes America so special is that we have this really diverse set of financial institutions that serve places like Evansville, Indiana, or Minot, North Dakota, or Ann Arbor, Michigan — pick your favorite spots,” he explains. “The largest financial institutions in our country are amazing. They do things that, quite frankly, banks like Old National probably could never do. But we also do some pretty amazing things too — when we show up and we take care of our communities. We really benefit when we have this healthy, diverse set of banks across our country.”
