Business View Magazine | Volume 8, Issue 11

123 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 8, ISSUE 11 BANK OF ST . FRANC I SV I LLE adding an addition onto the building and eventually opting to tear it down and build an all-new 18,000 square foot property on the same site where they began. “There were probably about five employees when we started the bank,” Lemoine says. “And now, we have close to 40.” And it’s not just the building and employees that have grown over the years – the bank’s assets have grown exponentially, too. “Looking back, we were at $129 million in bank assets in 2018, $153 in 2019, $194 in 2020, and we’re at $210 million currently,” says Jim Chaffin, Bank of St. Francisville’s Executive Vice President of Operations and Chief Financial Officer. “We have not doubled our size, but we’ve almost doubled our size over the past four years.” Today, there are two other banks in the small town but the Bank of St. Francisville has outgrown them both. “We consider ourselves the community bank,” Lemoine says. “There are two other banks and one is a big regional bank, Hancock Whitney, which bought the old bank in town and it’s basically a branch with five or six employees. So they’ve gone from being the big bank to now just a little branch of a big bank. And there’s another bank from nearby Baton Rouge that has a little branch here, with about five or six employees. So I think the community considers us the bank of the parish.” Many local businesses use Bank of St. Francisville’s services, and the bank has a loyal following, now seeing its third generation of customers coming through. “Everyone comes to us,” says Lemoine. “I think the majority of businesses in town bank with us. It’s different here than in a city. It’s a lot of mom and pops; we don’t have the Walmarts and Walgreens and those type of businesses. That’s the kind of community we have and we’d rather just keep it that way.”