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COPYRIGHT 2001 Texas Monthly, Inc.
HOW DID LAREDO-BASED IBC BECOME ONE OF THE MOST PROFITABLE BANKS IN THE COUNTRY? BY DOING EXACTLY WHAT ITS COMPETITION WOULDN'T.
IN 1966 THE SLEEPY, REMOTE BORDER TOWN OF LAREDO was not the first place you would have picked to start a bank. The town had chronically high unemployment, no manufacturing, and scant retail business. It was just a river's width away from a Third World country with even fewer economic prospects. Ever since 1840, when it became the capital of the ill-fated Republic of the Bio Grande, whose first and only president was executed by a firing squad after a year in office, Laredo had remained a poor, isolated place.
But that year Antonio R. Sanchez, Sr., who owned a store that sold typewriters and other office equipment, and a few friends decided to start a bank anyway, a tiny institution called Bank of Commerce-Laredo. The idea was to do what the local banks, which preferred to lend to big ranchers, would not: make loans to small businessmen on both sides of the border. It was supposed to be a bank for the little guy. If there was one thing Laredo had plenty of, in 1966, it was little guys.
As it happens, Typewriter Tony, as the newspaper called him, had a knack for spotting hidden assets. He later bought land leases on property that turned out to be part of one of the biggest natural gas fields in the United States. Profits from his gas wells made him hundreds of millions of dollars. And 35 years after he co-founded his little-guy bank, the International Bank of Commerce, as it would later be called, has grown into a border-straddling, mnltibillion-dollar behemoth that dominates South Texas. The bank--now controlled...
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