Spotlight On: Parker Hensley, Market President, San Antonio, Bank of Texas
April 2025 — Bank of Texas has a clear strategy regarding how to differentiate itself among the competition: having a combination of the best people and the best products and services to ensure it is always helping the customer. “If the customers can win, the banks can win, and everybody wins,” Bank of Texas San Antonio Market President Parker Hensley told Invest.
What was the motivation to open the bank’s first physical branch in San Antonio?
We made our entrance into San Antonio and more broadly, Central Texas, in 2023. We weren’t just opening a loan production office, or LPO, as people call it. We were committed to being in this region. And we are the Bank of Texas, so we need to be in all the major markets in the state. We’re in Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and now we’re in Central Texas.
The next step was to open a branch. We knew we were going to do this from day one. It just took a little bit of time to find the right location for the first one. This won’t be the only branch that we open in San Antonio, but it’s the first one, and we’re pretty proud of it.
We think it’s a great location to serve customers while also being a great billboard for our brand. We’re excited to be there and to be serving the community. This continues to show our commitment to San Antonio and Central Texas more broadly.
What other key milestones, or achievements, would you highlight for the bank in San Antonio?
In 2024, we completed our first full year in San Antonio, and it was a banner year for us. We beat all our expectations, from loan production to deposit production. We’re happy with how things went. The momentum we generated in the second half of 2024 has already carried over into 2025.
We also finished the build-out of our permanent San Antonio headquarters office. That was a big milestone for us as well in 2024. More broadly speaking, in Central Texas, we recently completed our Central Texas Austin office to serve our private wealth clients. That’s been exciting as well. In San Antonio, we’ve planted our flag, and we’ll continue to grow and build on this momentum.
Are there any specific services or industries that the bank is targeting for growth?
We’ve seen a wide variety of service needs in San Antonio. Our product and service offerings at Bank of Texas are vast. One of the fun things about our job is that we get to find many ways to help serve customers. We’re not coming out here just to sell a product. We’re here to find solutions and services that add value to our customers’ everyday lives and that also help grow their businesses.
When you talk about industries that we’re targeting, there’s a lot of great sectors in San Antonio, including manufacturing and the various service industries. But we are industry-agnostic.
Luckily for us, San Antonio has many successful businesses. We get to go out and form relationships and figure out the best options for each individual client.
How are you maintaining a personal touch and relationship-driven initiatives while addressing the need for digital innovation?
We’ve seen big changes in technology in the banking space. Today, you can do everything, even from a corporate standpoint, on your phone. I can make deposits on my phone, I can move money on my phone. For me personally, for my company, all of that is important, but it doesn’t change the human factor. You still need people to deliver consultative conversations – not consultative decisions — about decisions you need to make. I know that AI is an increasingly prevalent tool that’s truly a double edged sword. It’s an incredibly valuable tool and there’s a lot to be said for the productivity boost from automation — but AI can’t replicate human interaction, personal history, and consultative relationships. It has to do with thinking outside the box and it has to do with compiling data, which is more than just numbers, by making sense of all the different sources, and coming up with solutions.
We think the winning recipe is combining a best-in-class technology approach with the personal touch of bankers who have done this for a long time and have deep experience to come up with innovative ideas and be creative. While we continue to build out a robust digital roadmap, we’re also investing in another, more valuable resource — our people. Combining these together is great for the customer and for the bank so that both win in the end.
What is your outlook for San Antonio banking’s ecosystem?
The banking ecosystem of San Antonio is strong. We’ve got a lot of really good players here. I think we’re all competing for the top talent in banking, and we have to make ourselves stand out. I think the available market and the economic growth that we’re seeing in San Antonio are also strong.
When you combine those two, there’s a lot of opportunity for a lot of banks in this market. The hardest part is differentiating yourself. We differentiate ourselves based on our people combined with our technology and our solid financial platform in terms of liquidity, safety, and security standpoint. Other banks might differentiate themselves on price or some extra fancy, slick technology product that serves a specific industry.
But at the end of the day, the way we differentiate ourselves is by helping our customers and adding value. We’re always focused on finding appropriate solutions that help customers win. If the customers can win, the banks can win, and everybody wins.
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