Old National Bancorp

Old National Bancorp

Founded in 1834 as Evansville's first bank, Old National Bancorp survived the Panic of 1837, the Great Depression, and the 2008 financial crisis. James C. Ryan III joined in 2016 as CFO, rose to CEO in 2019, and has since driven a strategy of dense urban consolidation across Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The wealth-origin is diffuse: it is a publicly traded commercial bank whose earnings derive from a mix of traditional spread business, fee-based wealth services, and capital markets activity concentrated in the Chicago metro. The bank operates through three segments: Community Banking, which accounts for the bulk of its deposit and lending relationships; Wealth Management, which houses Old National Wealth Management and its registered investment advisor Old National Investments; and Treasury and Capital Markets, which manages the fixed-income portfolio and interest-rate hedging. Its loan book is dominated by commercial-and-industrial and commercial real estate credit, with additional portfolios in residential mortgage and indirect auto lending. The 2022 First Midwest merger added roughly $20 billion in assets, deep Chicago market share, and a growing equipment-leasing niche that now extends Old National's credit exposure beyond its legacy six-state retail deposit base. Confirmed relationships include lending to middle-market manufacturers in the Upper Midwest and sponsorship-backed healthcare groups, though specific portfolio-company names are kept private as a matter of commercial banking practice. Post-merger integration concluded in 2023, and Old National now operates with approximately 250 branches and a workforce of over 4,000 full-time employees. The firm runs a comparatively lean branch network for its asset size, signaling a deliberate pivot toward digital banking and treasury-management fee income rather than physical expansion. Old National Wealth Management, which provides trust, estate planning, and private-banking services, is small relative to the bank's commercial lending arm — a structural feature common among Indiana- and Ohio-headquartered regionals that have historically prioritized credit over advisory scale. In March 2024, Ryan disclosed during a quarterly earnings call that the bank had fully migrated First Midwest customers onto Old National's core banking platforms, completing an integration that began in late 2021. This milestone freed capacity for organic commercial-loan growth in a rising-rate environment that had pressured net interest margins industry-wide (per the firm's Q4 2024 investor presentation). Old National's structural differentiator is the sheer longevity of a single-charter, single-headquarters banking franchise that has never relocated its home office in 190 years. This continuous legal identity gives the trust operation an unusually long track record of fiduciary continuity — a quiet selling point among multi-generational Midwestern families who value institutional permanence over national-brand cachet. The company remains a regional commercial bank without the investment-banking or proprietary-trading ambitions that reshaped the large superregional franchises, and its decision to integrate First Midwest rather than be acquired positions it as an ongoing consolidator in the fragmented Midwest banking landscape.