Great Southern retains area's deposit market share crown

Bank of America, which ranked third on the market share report in June 2006, fell two spots to No. 5, but a spokesman downplayed the drop as only one of many indicators the North Carolina-based bank reviews when assessing its annual performance.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. released the updated market share rankings Oct. 11. The most recent data is based on deposits at FDIC-insured institutions surveyed June 30.

Great Southern (Nasdaq: GSBC) has held the top spot for deposit market share since June 30, 2002, when the Springfield-based bank controlled about 15 percent of the market with more than $810.7 million in deposits. In just five years, Great Southern has grown its market share by 5 percent.

“We feel like if we do a good job taking care of our customers, we’re going to wind up growing our market share as a result,” President and CEO Joe Turner said.

The philosophy seems to have worked in recent years. As of June 30, Great Southern reported deposits of nearly $1.5 billion at 22 branches in the five-county Springfield metro area. Commerce Bank had the second largest slice of the market share at nearly 10 percent, with deposits totaling $754 million at 12 branches.

Between June 30, 2006, and June 30 this year, Great Southern’s market share inched up to 19.4 percent from about 19 percent.

Deposit movement

Aside from Bank of America’s slide to about 5.5 percent this year from 8.3 percent of the market share in June 2006, most banks doing business in the metro area held their spots.

Bank of America spokesman Ernesto Anguilla said fluctuations in the bank’s deposit market share in the Springfield area aren’t as they appear. In 2006, Bank of America’s jump to third from fifth in the market was the result of deposits it moved from other markets, Anguilla said, noting that the practice is fairly common among larger banks.

“There’s a wide variety of reasons why those nonretail deposits would move from one area to another, but I think the underlying point is that that’s not a true indication of our retail performance in that market,” he said. “It’s not an indication of any real increase or drop for that particular bank in that particular market.”

Anguilla said Bank of America is “scrubbing” the FDIC market share data as well as other performance data it collects each year to get a more accurate picture of its financial health. Those results will be available in about three weeks, he said.

“I’m fairly certain that when those numbers come out, you’re going to see that our consumer performance stayed relatively stable over that one-year period,” Anguilla said. “From a retail perspective, we feel very good about where we are in the marketplace in terms of what we can offer customers, given our size and scale.”

On a national level, investors received word Oct. 18 that Bank of America’s (NYSE: BAC) third-quarter net income was down 32 percent compared to last year. The news immediately shook Wall Street.

New kid on the block

At No. 42, at the bottom of the most recent market share rankings, is Arkansas-based Arvest Bank, which opened its first Springfield branch in June. As of June 30, Arvest had $272,000 in deposits, and bank officials hope to aggressively gain ground in the Springfield market through its services, which include loans and asset management.

“We are going to be adding locations pretty quickly,” said Michal Moss Early, private banking manager and assistant vice president for Arvest in Springfield. “We’re just trying to get out there and be known … but we haven’t really put any (market share) targets on paper at this point.”

Early said Arvest as of June 30 surpassed Regions Bank as the deposit market share leader in Arkansas with 9.7 percent. The bank has 225 locations in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas.

“We don’t necessarily wait for the customer to have a need and call us,” Early said. “We’re trying to figure out … what is the next thing that they might need, and I think that’s something we’ve done in all our markets that’s been pretty successful.”