The small-business lenders; Indiana's leading SBA lenders shatter some myths.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve

Some Hoosiers are of the opinion that a bank based outside of Indiana simply can't serve the state's needs as well as an indigenous institution. These people obviously haven't asked the U.S. Small Business Administration.

The SBA keeps tabs on which banks are most active in small-business lending, and some of the top lenders in Indiana are banks with parent companies based out of Indiana. The SBA's top Indiana lender, in fact, is Huntington National Bank of Indiana, the Noblesville-based subsidiary of an Ohio banking giant. According to SBA figures, small-business loans that Huntington made through SBA loan programs in fiscal 1993 were responsible for the creation or retention of more than 1,000 jobs.

Huntington was the top overall SBA lender as well as the top lender in the administration's "regular" loan program, where the SBA guarantees a portion of the loan.

Another SBA loan initiative is sometimes referred to as the certified development company loan program, where loans involve the bank and a development company such as Mid City Pioneer Corp. or the Indiana Statewide Certified Development Corp. For that program, the top Indiana bank was another institution with out-of-state ties: National City Bank, whose SBA lending could be traced to the creation or retention of more than 650 jobs.

Still another bank with out-of-state-ties, NBD, earns kudos from the SBA for its small-business efforts. In fiscal 1993, the bank was involved in SBA loans that resulted in more than 460 jobs being created or retained. Thus is shattered another erroneous impression: that big banks don't care about small customers.

"It has been very important to us to counter the perception that we, as a large bank, would be less likely to provide services to the small-business market," says Ken Sonner, a first vice president in charge of commercial lending at NBD, the state's largest bank. "If we don't take care of these customers, someone else will."

Clearly, then, the amount of support a bank gives to the small-business community has nothing to do with its size or where its home office is. It has to do with the bank's philosophy, says Linda Zappia, executive vice president at Huntington. For her bank, she says, "it was a strategic move to focus on small business. And we saw the small-business market as being underserved."

That situation may be changing, notes Thomas Bale, a senior credit officer at National City Bank. More banks, he says, are eyeing the small-business...