Wintrust Brand Guidelines: A 1991 Lake Forest Bank & Its Family of Community Charters

A 1991 alternative to the big banks.

Wintrust is a young bank by the standards of American banking. The company says its founders opened a storefront community bank in Lake Forest, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago, in December 1991, with the aim of offering an alternative to the big banks. English Wikipedia names Ed Wehmer as founder, and the company lists Edward J. Wehmer as its founder, senior adviser and chairman emeritus; Timothy S. Crane is president and chief executive.

The holding company, Wintrust Financial Corporation, is based in Rosemont, Illinois, and trades on Nasdaq under the symbol WTFC. From one bank in one town it grew, the company says, into a group with roots across Chicagoland, Wisconsin and Michigan and with bank and non-bank units in more than 30 US states, Canadian provinces and territories.

Growth came largely by buying banks. Wikipedia says Wintrust received capital from the US Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and used the 2008 financial crisis to acquire small troubled banks around Chicago, deepening its local footprint. The Federal Reserve Board’s records show the pattern continuing: in October 2016 the Board approved Wintrust’s merger with First Community Financial Corporation of Elgin, Illinois, with First Community Bank merged into Wintrust’s St. Charles Bank & Trust. Wikipedia lists later purchases including Veterans First Mortgage of Utah in 2018, Rush-Oak Corporation, parent of Oak Bank, in May 2019, and STC Bancshares in October 2019.

In February 2019 the Federal Reserve Board announced a consent order and civil money penalty against Wintrust Financial Corporation for internal control deficiencies; the order was dated 25 February 2019.

Many banks, one family.

What sets Wintrust apart is that it keeps local names. Unlike most large US banks, Wikipedia says, its strategy is to retain the identities of the community banks it acquires rather than rebrand them, while each uses the tagline “A Wintrust Community Bank.” The company says its banks are named to reflect the communities they serve and that many of their staff live locally.

The structure is layered. Wintrust holds a set of separately chartered banks — the company says 16 community bank charters today, while Wikipedia lists 15 — and under each charter sit local bank names. Wikipedia’s list includes Lake Forest Bank & Trust, named for the town where the company began, with names such as Highland Park Bank & Trust beneath it; Hinsdale Bank & Trust, with names including Oak Park Bank and Riverside Bank; and Barrington Bank & Trust, whose division Wintrust Mortgage handles home loans. Other charters include Town Bank, Village Bank & Trust and Wintrust Bank, N.A.

The company says the Wintrust Community Bank family has more than 200 locations in and around Chicago, southern Wisconsin, northwest Indiana and west Michigan. The Michigan reach widened on 1 August 2024, when, Wikipedia says, Wintrust completed its merger with Macatawa Bank Corporation of Holland, Michigan.

Alongside the banks sit specialist businesses. The company names Wintrust Commercial Banking, Wintrust Mortgage, Wintrust Wealth Management and First Insurance Funding among them, along with Tricom; Wikipedia adds Great Lakes Advisors and The Chicago Trust Company, and notes a move into equipment finance in 2015. In 2021 Hinsdale Bank opened Oak Park Bank in a former restaurant space in a historic building, Wikipedia says, a sign of how the local names keep multiplying.

The company’s careers pages put the idea plainly. It says its founders knew customers needed a bank that knew their names and understood their needs, and that today its tellers know customers by name and its bankers care about local businesses. More than three decades on, it describes itself as a multi-faceted financial services organisation rather than a single retail bank, and calls its business model a competitive strength.

US regional banks.

US regional banks tend to present themselves through place. Many carry a state, a city or a region in their names, or keep the name of the town where they were founded long after they have spread across several states. Their identities usually rest on a short wordmark in blue, green or red, set beside photographs of local streets, branch staff, small-business owners and families buying homes. Founding years matter too: several of the banks in this guide trace their roots to the nineteenth century, and their histories are told through the names they have carried since.

Their websites follow a familiar pattern. Pages for checking and savings accounts, mortgages and personal loans sit alongside sections for commercial lending, treasury services and wealth management, so that one brand speaks both to households and to companies. Several of the banks in this guide also run more than one name: local brands kept after a merger, or a single brand carried into new states.

Visibility outside the branch often comes through sponsorship. Ballparks, arenas, theatres and arts seasons have carried bank names, and those names change when banks merge. Annual reports, community reports and investor presentations form a second public record, setting out where a bank operates, which brands it uses and how it describes its history.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — when and where it was founded, which mergers shaped it, and what has happened to its name — and keeps the bank’s own claims separate from what dated sources report. The palettes and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations, not the banks’ own.

Chicago’s Bank, and a W at Wrigley.

Above the local names, Wintrust presents itself as “Chicago’s Bank,” the phrase its website uses. English Wikipedia, citing a 2011 Chicago Tribune report, describes it as the second-largest banking company in Chicago.

Sport carries much of the parent name. Wintrust is the official banking partner of the Chicago Cubs, Wikipedia says, with its name on the left-field video board at Wrigley Field; the “W” in Wintrust flashes after every Cubs win and stays lit afterwards, as part of the club’s traditional win flag. The bank also holds naming rights to club seats at the Chicago White Sox ballpark, Rate Field.

That gives the identity two levels. The parent name appears in ballparks and on the commercial, mortgage and wealth businesses, while dozens of town-named banks carry it only in a tagline. A customer in Hinsdale or Lake Forest deals with a bank named for that place, and the Wintrust name sits underneath.

For a design guide, Wintrust shows how one parent name can sit lightly over many local ones, joined by a shared tagline rather than a single sign. Compare Fifth Third Bank, another Midwestern regional bank, and First Horizon, which went the other way and folded its businesses into one name in 2019. For this guide we use a lake blue, a prairie green and a limestone grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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