Beth Touchton took on a new role Oct. 1 at Florida Capital Bank (branded as FLCBank) as vice president and director of mortgage credit and operations, a position created to include oversight of mortgage loan operations staff, credit policy and quality assurance, taking advantage of her 35 years in Jacksonville’s mortgage industry. FLCBank is one of the only two banks based in Jacksonville (the other is TIAA Bank). She also is Community Reinvestment Act Officer.
I was born in old St. Luke’s over on Eighth Street in 1962.
My sisters were 11, 12 and 16 when I was born, so my parents weren’t really expecting to be expecting.
My dad was in the Army Air Corps, which turned into the Air Force. He also was in the Air National Guard for his day job.
He loved to fish and hunt. Apparently he was going on a fishing trip and he was so excited about the fishing trip that he wanted to share that excitement with my mother. So here I am.
I started taking piano lessons at 8 years old and I started taking organ and voice lessons when I was in college.
I got a couple of scholarships to go to Jacksonville University and thought the music business route would be fun.
I interned at Stereo 90 (now 89.9) when it was on Main Street.
I helped with the move to where they are now (near Metro Park), boxing up thousands of LPs.
It was a small crew of people. That was fun.
One of my sisters worked at a credit union in town and I wanted a summer job during college.
They were redoing their filing system. I worked there and then I got married and moved to Kentucky for my husband to go to graduate school.
We came back and I needed a job. She had an opening.
Music and math really go together so I started working in credit unions and found I liked that.
I worked in the loan department.
Music is a lot like putting a puzzle together because you practice sections of a piece and then you put them together. It clicked.
I’ve always been good at math. I had a friend at Barnett Mortgage who set up an interview. I got in and just really loved it.
Underwriting was natural to me. It was just putting puzzles together and you’re hopefully helping people get into the home of their dreams.
I was promoted and stayed in that kind of role and was able to do that throughout in Bank of America. (Barnett evolved into Bank of America.)
I worked there for 27 years, all in the mortgage area.
The division closed, I was laid off and through volunteer activities, I played the piano for chapel services at a retirement community.
The pastor said Beth is looking for a job, please pray for her. One of the women I had gotten to know said her daughter was an underwriter.
It turns out her boss was someone I had mentored 20 years ago.
The person I would be working for, I found out had a mutual friend, and that’s how I got to Florida Capital Bank.
That was a little more than seven years ago.
We’re primarily a business bank.
We focus on small business, large business, and supporting them with lending and depository products.
On the mortgage side, we work with brokers all over the country.
Our main tenet is excellent customer service and personalization.
We will hold your hand through the entire process and we’ll be there for you.
We have two formal nonprofit partnerships in Jacksonville, and also support other organizations here and where our other bank branches are in Florida.
We have had a partnership with Raines High School since 2018, which includes monetary donations for the ROTC program to help them travel or take the students to military bases so they can see what it’s like if they want to join the military.
And this year, we were the title sponsor for Operation New Hope’s inaugural Hope Starts Here 5K. (The group provides support and training for people affected by the criminal justice system.)
Last year we were a sponsor for their golf tournament.
That’s important to our CEO and to me, because we all deserve second chances and we probably had them more frequently than we realize, and maybe didn’t even realize it was a second chance.