No longer subject to bank bailout rules, the banks regained more freedom to set executive pay, entertain clients and do deals as they see fit. Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program. "We have a huge compliance staff, 36 people, and they're trying to navigate the ship and monitor all the space junk flying around up there, on convoluted orbits bumping into each other."Īlong with $97 billion-asset Northern Trust, Wintrust has repaid the U.S. That's not his only metaphor: "It's like NASA," Wehmer said. Wehmer jokes that he feels like he's working "at a teaching hospital most of the time," with someone "always poking and prodding somewhere." Having numerous individual bank charters has meant that Wintrust is subject to regulatory exams for each one. Don't get him started on the regulatory environment. "In the long run, it's going to be walking the walk, not just talking the talk."īalancing his bank's identity shift hasn't been his only challenge. The branding, now including billboards on Interstate 294 and radio advertisements, is "a big move for us because we don't want to lose our positioning as the local alternative to the big banks," Wehmer said in an interview. "Until recently, you never knew Wintrust existed," the chief executive told the gathering.īut Wintrust believes it's time for consumers to learn what it has to offer as a larger financial-services business, one of the ideas being that the heft behind the homey-sounding bank names will comfort savers worried about the safety of the banking industry.
Instead, it positioned Lake Forest Bank and its 14 other individual institutions - and their 50 brands - as community-style alternatives to large lenders. Today, Wintrust is the second-largest locally headquartered banking company, by deposit market share, after Chicago-based Northern Trust Corp. "I had to call my wife and ask her to bring a card table over." "I had a briefcase and a phone the size of an old boot, and that was about it," Wehmer told the crowd, which included early investors, one of his five sisters and his dentist. But that evening he got nostalgic about the day when he opened the door to Lake Forest Bank & Trust in 1,200 square feet just around the corner. The jocular 57-year-old is known in the banking industry for his plain-spoken comments. On a September evening, in a large tent pitched outside his bank in downtown Lake Forest, Ed Wehmer took the microphone and addressed 350 people celebrating the 20th anniversary of what is now Wintrust Financial Corp.
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