Dennis Nixon
Christy Wilson says: IBC bank ( and others) are making millions off of very small people’s mistakes. This summer my 23 year old daughter who’s only income is Social Security Disability was out of state receiving treatment. She made a mistake in her account which snowballed with each use of her debit card. Over a two month period she acrued $1200 in overdraft charges. She received weekly emails to check her balance, but no courtesy call from the branch manager. Since she didn’t have email access, she was unaware of how she was spiraling into the hole. She didn’t learn of the error until she had gone in the hole $1,000 and her card was declined. Charges aside, she was essentially overdrawn by $60. Currently, she would be in the black $69 without the charges. We have been to the branch manager and started going up the chain. So far the only resolution we have been able to come up with is they will refund $150 in charges and give her a 0% loan for the money charged. We feel strongly that our daughter made a mistake and should have some responsibility, but clearly the penalty does not fit the "crime". We have been told that this is a Corporate policy to not refund penalty charges. Of course, you go to the website and personal customer service is touted and customers are told they will be treated as individuals. Sure, their policy is legal, but ethical--I think not. I have been reading about Mr. Nixon and all of his philanthropy. It seems that Mr. Nixon should be encouraging his managers to use some common sense. Our daughter was not some irresponsible young adult writing checks for extravagant things, if you look at her account you will quickly see that this is an annomaly and the first time she has been overdrawn in the five years she has had the account and yet there was no branch manager alerting her to her error. $1,200 isn’t much in the big scheme of things, but it is overwhelming when you are young, disabled and living on less than $600 a month. Her account manager assured her that she was allowed to go $1,000 in the hole because she had been such a good customer. Ha! Im sure IBC is not the only bank with these policies, but they are the bank my daughter is dealing with currently and they are refusing to look at her situation individually. I hope you will pass this along to Mr. Nixon. These kind of penalties are not what one would think Mr. South Texas would represent. (August 19th, 2009 at 10:28pm)
I think the challenge of all business today is the people challenge— being able to create a cohesive team that makes people happy and committed to the job. Today people get less focused and less interested in an institutional kind of environment; they're mobile and tend to jump from place to place. So the challenge is to get people committed to staying for the long term.
You have to completely immerse yourself in the process, and the only way you are going to be successful at that over time is to love what you are doing. I came out of high school and started working part-time at a bank. The president of that little bank sort of mentored me. He said, "You know, you've got a kind of flash for this business, seem to love what you're doing. You ought to think about making a career in the banking business." So off I went to the University of Texas and got a degree in finance and then went to work for the federal government as a bank examiner, which in those days was like the graduate school of banking. I was examining banks of all sizes; it was almost a continuous case study, plus it gave me huge regulatory knowledge that gave me a leg up on a lot of people because I understood how to manage in a regulatory environment.
I'm a detailed kind of person. I like working in the guts of a process instead of from 40,000 feet up looking at it, although I do stand back and look at the company from that perspective from time to time. But I'm more action-oriented. I'm proud of the fact that I've worked in and participated in practically every phase of our business. It excites me to be able to sit down with somebody in the operations part of the bank and be able to talk his talk and understand what he is saying. I like to see something start from the ground up and work through it and not just be there for the results.
Dennis E. Nixon, the CEO and chairman of Laredo-based International Bancshares Corporation, was born in Pennsylvania and lived all over the United States before his family moved to Corpus Christi when he was in high school. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in finance in 1964 and worked as a bank examiner for six years before landing a position with Union National Bank in Laredo. In 1975 he joined the Bank of Commerce, the predecessor to the International Bank of Commerce (IBC) and International Bancshares Corporation. Today the company has more than ninety locations in Texas and $5.6 billion in assets.
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