People are already calling a northern Virginia bank in organization "the Little League bank."
That's because many of the organizers and board members of Chain Bridge Bancorp Inc. - including a former U.S. senator - are active in the McLean Little League and became acquainted at the local baseball diamonds instead of the country club or the chamber of commerce.
"It just is a nice kind of thread that the group has," said John J. Brough, Chain Bridge's president and chief executive officer.
"Everybody got to know each other and like each other and respect each other through an activity that was totally unrelated to banking."
The bank has received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and is awaiting approval from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Organizers hope to open it by the end of the summer.
The idea for Chain Bridge Bank began to germinate several years back, when a group of business leaders who were also involved in McLean Little League began lamenting what they considered a lack of banks catering to locally owned small businesses.
Though 17 banks have branches in McLean, an affluent Washington suburb with $16.7 billion of deposits, the market is controlled by large national and superregional banks.
Collectively, the $130.6 billion-asset Capital One Financial Corp., which is based in McLean, and the $683 billion-asset Wachovia Corp., of Charlotte, hold more than 87% of the deposit share, according to FDIC data.
"The local business owners who make up our board felt as though there wasn't a bank here that really provided excellent services to small businesses," said Mr. Brough, the former chief financial officer at the $542 million-asset James Monroe Bank, which was sold last year to Mercantile Bankshares Corp. of Baltimore.
But before the founders could start a community bank, they needed to find a lead organizer with the right mix of banking experience and leadership skills.
Paul Shiffman, a bank organizer who has coached in the McLean Little League for 40 years, knew just the person: former Illinois Sen. Peter G. Fitzgerald.
Mr. Shiffman met the Republican lawmaker through the league - Mr. Fitzgerald's now-teenage son grew up playing baseball in McLean - and knew he was from a long line of bankers. Members of Mr. Fitzgerald's family have been shareholders, organizers, or directors of 56 different banks since 1944, including the $8.2 billion-asset First Midwest Bancorp Inc. in Itasca, Ill., and the $1.4 billion-asset Suburban Bancorp of Palatine, Ill., which was sold to Bank of Montreal in 1994.
After retiring from the Senate in 2005, Mr. Fitzgerald wanted to return to banking. Together with family members, he was bidding on banks as far away as New Mexico when Chain Bridge Bank organizers approached him.
"I, of course, thought, 'Boy it would be much better to get a bank going in McLean,' " Mr. Fitzgerald said in a recent interview.
After agreeing to join Chain Bridge Bank in early 2006, Mr. Fitzgerald, 46, helped establish a board of directors that included six people involved in the McLean Little League. Then he began looking for a management team.
"We really are very thankful to Mercantile for buying the James Monroe Bank, because we wound up hiring a fairly intact senior management team that in my judgment is exceptional," said Mr. Fitzgerald, who owns about 37% of Chain Bridge's outstanding shares.
(Mercantile was sold to PNC Financial Services Group Inc. of Pittsburgh for $6 billion in March.)
The organizers set out to raise $16.2 million in capital and ended up with $18.2 million.
"We were really blown away by the response that we got," said Mr. Shiffman, who is to be the bank's vice chairman.
The organizers said they are convinced they could have raised more, because the company did not accept institutional investments, and with the exception of his family, Mr. Fitzgerald did not seek investments from his Illinois banking contacts.
"We felt it was better to have individuals who lived in the McLean area and who had businesses here and they would bank at the bank," Mr. Fitzgerald said.
The bank plans to target small, privately held companies and to use its Little League connections to generate business.
"A lot of the businesses based in McLean sponsor McLean Little League teams, and actually there is a waiting list … to be able to sponsor what they call a Major League team, which is the highest division," Mr. Brough said.
Chain Bridge officials hope that the organizers' ties to McLean Little League will help them turn some of those sponsoring businesses into customers.
Mr. Shiffman, for example, has coached "half the people in town," Mr. Fitzgerald said. "That has been a wonderful network for us."
Chain Bridge Bank is to operate out of a single branch at first, but it plans to add a second branch in two years.
