by Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
When Cindy Delaparte moved to town in February 2004 to help run a small bank in Mandarin, she brought 18 years of banking knowledge with her . . . and an ATM.
In the past 11 months, Delaparte, the new president and CEO of First Bank of Jacksonville, has helped to change a small no frills bank in Mandarin into a customer service-focused financial operation on the rise.
“When I came here, they did not have an ATM and the bank really didn’t have any technology so we spent a lot of time focusing on that,” said Delaparte. “The bank was pretty much just standard banking and we wanted to do more than that.”
Since her arrival, Delaparte has helped bring a lot of new amenities to the bank that have helped greatly with customer service, which is her main focus. Some of her technological additions included a drive-up ATM, telephone banking, Internet banking and bill payment, e-mail versions of bank statements and cash management services. Delaparte has also been instrumental in doubling the bank’s staff from 10 to 20 employees, adding a mortgage department and increasing the bank’s commercial loan division.
“We understand that banks have similar products so you don’t want to differentiate yourself there,” she said.
Before moving to Jacksonville to take her position at First Bank of Jacksonville, Delaparte, a Tampa native, was the senior vice president and CFO for Millennium Bank in Gainesville. During her tenure at Millennium, Delaparte helped to cultivate the small, one branch bank into a $130 million institution with four branches around Gainesville.
After Millennium Bank was sold to Alabama National Bank Corporation in June, Delaparte decided she needed a new challenge.
“I decided to expand on a goal that I had long wanted, which was to eventually take a leadership role for an entire bank,” she said.
When she heard about the opening at First Bank of Jacksonville, Delaparte found her new challenge.
Delaparte said one of her main objectives at First Bank of Jacksonville was to concentrate on giving individual attention to customers everyday and making an effort to go beyond the customer’s expectations. That is why all employees at the bank are required to read Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles’ “Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service.”
“It is a good way of training on customer service and it outlines the true expectation of how we define customer service,” she said.
Besides boosting customer service at the bank through new technology, Delaparte said doing smaller things for customers like having fresh baked cookies in the lobby everyday and actually picking up a ringing phone has also helped bring in more customers.
“We still pick-up the phone,” she said. “We do have voice mail if someone wants to leave a voice mail, however we do pick-up the phone live and we will always do that.”
Besides the advances that have already been made since her arrival, Delaparte said she and the rest of the bank’s board of directors have big plans for expansion in Jacksonville.
“We are looking and doing some research now to see where the demographics are and where the best places to locate new branches will be,” she said.
Delaparte said placing a branch office downtown might be an option for the future but she will not really know until after the bank’s market research is complete. Though there are no concrete plans at the moment for new branches, she said they should have some definite plans after the new year.
“We are excited about the opportunity of building and growing this community bank that has been around the Mandarin community for quite some time.”