11 Hoosier Banker March 2015 Continued on page 12. into the Junior Achievementsponsored Central Indiana Business Hall of Fame in 2008. Last month College Mentors for Kids bestowed on Becker a Lifetime Achievement Award in Mentoring. As an extension of Becker’s commitment to mentoring, First Internet Bank participates in a multiyear campaign to increase and enhance local student mentoring programs in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). A native of Monrovia, Indiana, David Becker credits his greatgrandfather, a North Dakota homesteader and transplanted Indiana farmer, for sowing the seed of entrepreneurship within him. Hoosier Banker recently interviewed Becker about the origins and growth of First Internet Bank of Indiana. Why did you form First Internet Bank of Indiana? “Prior to starting the bank, I’d been in the software services industry for about 15 years. One day I was making a sales call on a large Indiana institution, explaining how the bank could expand and become a national player electronically, versus brickand-mortar branches. “I made the presentation to the CEO, the board of directors and the senior management team, and it went well. But at the end, the CEO said, ‘It can’t be done. It’s physically impossible to do what you’ve outlined to us.’ “That stoked my entrepreneurial spirit, because the best thing anyone can do is tell me it can’t be done. My VP of sales was in tow with me, and he asked me as we were leaving, ‘What are we going to do now?’ I said, ‘I’ll go start it myself.’ “That was in the summer of 1996. I called the Federal Reserve, and I think the gentleman on the other end of the line fainted. I called the OCC and was told, ‘Buy a thrift and do what you want, and we’ll worry about it when we examine you.’ But that wasn’t what I wanted to do. “Then I called Jim Cooper, who was director of the Indiana Department of Financial Institutions. He was pretty excited about the idea. Indiana had been losing banks, and I think he felt that this was a chance to put Indiana back on the map. “It took almost three years to get through all the regulatory hoops and hurdles. Traditionally you could start a new bank in Indiana for $5 million in capital, plus obtain approval. For our approval, the application had to go all the way to Washington, D.C. Plus, instead of $5 million in capital, I was told I needed $15 million ‒ I think as a polite way of telling me no. “Lo and behold, 45 days later, we had the $15 million in capital. Within 90 days of opening, we had customers in all 50 states. We’ve now been in business for 16 years, and we’re servicing 50,000 accounts of nearly $1 billion in assets, with a strong nationwide distribution. “Timing was everything when we started. The tech bubble was going strong, and everything was booming.” What are your responsibilities as president and CEO? “I’m more of an entrepreneur than a banker, so my responsibility is to look at new opportunities to generate revenue and new ways to provide better services to customers. I’m not a technologist – my degree is in political science – but I understand how things go in one side of the box and come out the other. I’m the sounding board for new programs, new technologies and new ideas. “I keep us not on the bleeding edge of technology, but on the leading edge. We’re an efficient organization. We are running a $1 billion institution with fewer than 40 employees. We have a sales team on the loan side, plus a mortgage team, but the day-to-day banking ‒ the everyday checking, savings and loan administration ‒ is being run by 40 employees. “In our first FDIC exam, the examiners came in and gave us a list of loan files they wanted to see. I said I’d be back in a few minutes. Five minutes later I came back with a CDROM with all the loan files on it. The examiner looked at it and said, ‘No, I want the documents.’ “I said, ‘We don’t have documents. It’s all electronically captured.’ He said, ‘You can’t do that.’ News sources stream continuously into the office of David Becker. David Becker presides over First Internet Bank of Indiana from his high-rise office located on the north side of Indianapolis.
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