Wood and Huston Bank finds niche in local market

Wood & Huston Bank opened its Springfield location at 204 W. Primrose St. in 1994, but the bank, which began in 1874, had a rich history with which to expand its boundaries.

H.J. Huston, president of Wood & Huston Bank, works in the Springfield location and is the fifth generation of his family to be involved in running the bank.

The bank has two locations in West Plains, one in Cape Girardeau and four locations in Marshall, where Wood & Huston began. The bank has 150 employees system wide and about 12 at the Springfield location, he said.

The starting point

In addition to the four locations in Marshall, Wood & Huston Bank's holding company, Wood & Huston Bancorp, also is located in Marshall.

H.J. Huston said the two men who founded Wood & Huston Bank Will Wood and Joseph Huston Jr. operated a trading business in Arrow Rock, once a thriving commerce center along the Missouri River.

Huston said the Civil War was damaging to the partners' trading business, which was located at the starting point of the Santa Fe Trail.

"After the Civil War, the southwest part of the country became, as I understand it, a dangerous place to be traveling through. There were a lot of leftover renegade troops from the Civil War so the Santa Fe Trail diminished in importance."

About that same time, the railroad came to Marshall, and the Saline County seat was moved there from Arrow Rock.

Wood and Huston followed that move, and in 1874 they opened Wood & Huston Bank with just $20,000 in original capital.

The bank was incorporated in 1881, and in 1906, a building that still houses a Marshall location was built.

However, Huston said the bank doesn't really consider Marshall as its headquarters.

"That's just where we started. We try to allow each location the appropriate autonomy to take care of their market, because every market is different, and to treat them the same wouldn't work out very well," he said.

What's in a name?

Huston said Will Wood's family is no longer involved with the bank.

"Their involvement ended, I believe, in the early 1930s, but we really believe in tradition and have a lot of respect for the history we have," Huston said. "It was decided then, and still maintained now, that we respected Mr. Wood's involvement and his family's involvement in the beginning and we thought that they deserved still to be incorporated into the name."

Coming to Springfield

As for the bank's entry into the Springfield market, Huston said his education played a role.

"I had gone to (Southwest Missouri State University), and just very much enjoyed the university and also the Springfield area. During that time at SMS, my parents would come down and visit and we started to look at Springfield and decided it was a big small town," Huston said. "You know, we're a community bank, and we thought we would be able to open a facility here and find a good market niche, which is how things have worked out."

Huston has worked for his family's bank since 1989, and he's been at the Springfield location since 1994, starting out here in a lending capacity.

Local market niche

Huston said there are many factors and services that figure into the local market niche for Wood & Huston Bank in Springfield, which provides U.S. Small Business Administration lending.

"The size bank we are, we're able to react quickly and not have the bureaucracy of the regional or the mega-banks. We're about a $300 million asset-sized bank," Huston said. "What that boils down to for a small-business customer, or any commercial customer, is that we have a large lending limit; and we're able to accommodate some pretty good sized loan customers and still give them the community bank service."

The bank also provides retail services, and Huston said the demand for those is affected by commercial activity.

"We have a wide spectrum. We do quite a bit on the retail side, which is home loans, car loans, home improvement, recreational second homes on the lake, those kinds of things," Huston said. "And then on the commercial side, with all the growth down here, we've been involved in quite a few real estate developments."

He added that builders and developers tend to be good ambassadors for the bank in terms of referrals.

Huston said in terms of home lending, the bank works to keep rates as low as possible, and to make homeownership an option for people who might not think it's something they can pursue.

"We see home loans as being a great opportunity to get to meet people that may not be familiar with the bank, and we intentionally make a conscious effort to get the very lowest rate possible for those people," he said.

Home buyers have changed, Huston said, and there are more products available to facilitate homeownership.

"We're trying to give the opportunity to anybody who wants to buy a home that we can find a way to get that done. reduced down payment loans the down payment is one of the biggest obstacles for a first-time home buyer," he said. "More and more people are having the opportunity. Part of the American Dream is to own your own home, and I feel like we've been innovative in developing and delivering those new loan products and trying to reach out to those people that historically maybe have not thought that they could get into a home."

Technology

Wood & Huston bank offers Internet banking via its Web site, www.wood hustonbank.com. Huston said that convenience is important for customers.

"We live in a larger market, logistically speaking. People are spread out all over town. A lot of people operate on the direct deposit, online bill pay," Huston said. "It's not necessary anymore for a lot of people to have a brick-and-mortar facility to come into."

Even so, he added that Wood & Huston bank still believes that physical facilities have an important function.

"Physical locations look good. You can drive by them and they're impressive to look at, but they drive the cost of your operation up," Huston said.

Because businesses often have to pass operating costs onto customers, Huston said Wood & Huston Bank has opted to focus on existing locations and Internet services, and "not spend a lot of money on physical locations when a lot of customers bank electronically, or by mail, (or) telephone banking."

Security

While electronic banking poses its own security issues that banks must deal with, it's also important that banks protect their physical locations, Huston said.

"We continuously train on security that involves both a hold-up scenario as well as the biggest loss to banks (which) is driven by fraudulent activity counterfeit checks, stolen checks," Huston said.

He said the bank respects the potential for hold-ups, and takes the appropriate precautions, including video surveillance, sophisticated alarm systems and training.

"For the bank, our main concern is keeping our staff safe," he said. Huston added that the Springfield location has only had one hold-up attempt, and the would-be robbers didn't get away with any money.

As for security equipment, Huston said, "You need to be able to give the police a good picture," but he said that requires spending some money.

"We believe in investing in good camera equipment so that if we do have incident, we're able to give police a good picture to go off of a good color photograph," he said.

Focus

Huston points to 1996 deregulation that gave regional banks the ability to do business coast-to-coast as something that provoked change in the banking industry.

But he said Wood & Huston's focus remains on its system of banks in Missouri, and each of the markets where those banks are.

"We react to the market, so there (are) different needs that you have to meet with your guests at the bank, your customers," he said.