Ricardo Ramirez and the business of staying close

The name on the appointment was familiar. In December 2010, Ricardo Ramirez became president of IBC Bank-Zapata, the South Texas bank his father, Renato, had led since its opening in 1984. A family succession supplies an easy headline. The more interesting part is the eight years Ricardo spent getting to that meeting: lending, building a portfolio, managing sales and moving into executive leadership. The surname was already established. His working history had to acquire dates of its own.

There is a particular complication to following a parent in business. You inherit a set of comparisons along with the responsibilities. Every decision has a predecessor somewhere behind it. Ramirez addressed the matter directly when he became president, describing a wish to follow his father’s example while acknowledging how difficult it would be to match him. The undertaking can occupy a career.

In Zapata, that career stretches beyond the bank. It includes school governance, a youth club, a family ranch and an enthusiasm for cooking. The connections give his story its shape. A bank appears on an organizational chart as a discrete institution. In a person’s life, its boundaries can be much harder to draw.

Eight years before the title

Ramirez arrived at IBC in September 2002 as a lender. His loan portfolio subsequently exceeded $50 million. He became corporate sales manager for Zapata in 2004, then executive vice president in 2009. In December 2010 came the presidency and a seat on the board. Each step changed the scope of the work, from individual lending relationships toward responsibility for an organization.

His education followed its own sequence. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M University in College Station in 1991. In 2009, the year of his promotion to executive vice president, he graduated from the Graduate School of Banking at Louisiana State University. Agriculture and banking share an interest in what resources can produce over time. His qualifications put both subjects on the same résumé.

Look at the dates together and a less tidy sequence emerges. The agricultural economics degree preceded the IBC job by eleven years. His appraisal review board and Little League service also came before the lending role. Then banking school and the executive vice presidency arrived in the same year. Education, civic participation and management were overlapping parts of an adult life. The presidency gave that life a more visible title; it did not supply its starting point.

The chronology matters because succession can flatten everything that precedes it. A son follows a father, and the intermediate years disappear into the family connection. Here, there was a lending portfolio and a series of management jobs before the handover. Those details do not answer every question about leadership. They do establish that the appointment had a professional prehistory.

The roles also need their proper dates. When Ricardo became president in 2010, Renato continued as CEO and chairman. Today, Ricardo is CEO/President of the Zapata bank. The original handover was therefore a change within a continuing family presence, rather than a simple departure followed by an arrival.

A family business with public addresses

The Ramirez family’s commitments have taken several physical forms. The family partnership donated 70 acres for a municipal airport in Zapata County. It funded a $1 million scholarship endowment at Texas A&M International University in Laredo. The family also contributed to the effort to bring the Tejano Monument to the Texas Capitol, honoring Hispanic contributions to the state’s culture.

These were family undertakings. Keeping that attribution intact makes the story more useful: Ricardo belongs to a family with a record of local giving, and he has spoken publicly about continuing it. The airport land, the university endowment and the monument each serve a different purpose. Together, they show how broadly the family has interpreted participation in a place.

An airport concerns access. An endowment concerns students who will arrive long after a donation is announced. A monument concerns what a state chooses to remember. They operate on different schedules, which is part of their interest. A family can put its name into the present through a business, and into a longer conversation through the institutions it supports.

“I could never fill my father’s shoes, but I will follow in his footsteps.”

Ricardo Ramirez · on becoming president, 2010

The banking history has its own geography: Zapata, Rio Grande City, Roma, Hebbronville, Freer, Alice, Kingsville and Beeville. These are the communities listed in the Zapata bank’s service area. They give the story a regional scale that the IBC group’s broader corporate figures would obscure. Ricardo’s title belongs to a particular operation, with a particular set of neighbors.

The Zapata operation now has ten branches. Its history begins in February 1984, eighteen years before Ricardo joined as a lender. By the time he took the president’s job, he was joining the leadership of an institution with a past that customers and colleagues had lived through themselves. That is another feature of succession in an established local business: the institutional memory belongs to many people. A new president enters an existing conversation, with employees and customers as well as a predecessor.

Thirty-five years, and a room full of colleagues

On January 12, 2019, the bank celebrated its 35th anniversary at the Zapata County Community Center. Directors, employees, officers and guests gathered for a gala. Renato was the guest of honor. In the officers’ group photograph, Ricardo sits beside his father in the front row. It is a formal picture, but it makes the family chronology easy to see.

The celebration included $20,000 in donations to the Boys & Girls Club of Zapata, the Zapata Soil & Water Conservation District, the county fair and school mariachi groups. Music, youth programs, conservation and the fair made a fairly varied guest list for the bank’s money. An anniversary dinner can generate plenty of speeches. This one also produced checks.

Ricardo spoke of feeling blessed to continue his father’s tradition of philanthropy and service in Brush Country. The sentiment connected the family succession to the evening’s public purpose. The bank was marking years in business while supporting activities that made those years part of local life.

What $10,000 means on the way to college

In July 2020, IBC Bank-Zapata announced $10,000 in A.R. Sanchez, Sr. Memorial Scholarships for eleven area high school graduates. The awards recognized leadership and participation in school and community affairs. Ramirez spoke about assisting students with their higher education goals and about the pleasure of seeing their reactions when they received the checks.

“We love giving back to our community and know the awards are appreciated,” he said. There is a useful plainness to that sentence. Higher education can invite sweeping declarations. A scholarship announcement has a more immediate task: identify the students, provide the money and help with the cost of attending college.

The distinction between the bank’s awards and the family’s endowment is worth preserving. One was a stated annual distribution to a group of graduates. The other was a family contribution to a university scholarship fund. Both concern education, but they describe different commitments. Putting them in the same story should clarify the relationship rather than inflate a single person’s tally.

The responsibilities that stay nearby

Ramirez’s civic service reaches back before his arrival at IBC. Between 1997 and 1999, he served on the Zapata County Appraisal District Review Board and as vice president of the county Little League. Those dates complicate the idea that community involvement simply followed the president’s title. Some of it was already part of his life.

He went on to serve ten years as president of the Zapata County Boys and Girls Club. He has also served as chairman of the county appraisal district and president of the Zapata school district’s board of trustees, with more than 22 years as a board member. A decade at a youth organization and two decades on a school board are substantial stretches of a calendar.

There is little glamour in a list of local boards. The nouns are administrative; the meetings recur. Yet the duration gives them weight. An appointment can be announced in a paragraph. Continuing to serve requires returning to the business at hand after the announcement has lost its novelty. In Ramirez’s case, the repeated subjects are young people, education and the institutions of his home area.

After the meeting, the grill

Outside those responsibilities, the family has a ranch where it raises cattle. Ramirez runs a whitetail deer breeding operation with his wife and children. He and Erica have four children. Their family interests include summer visits to the beach and fishing in South Padre Island Bay. His agricultural degree has company in the rest of his life.

Then there is the kitchen. Ramirez enjoys cooking and spends time grilling outdoors. It is a welcome detail in a biography otherwise populated by titles and committees. A bank president’s résumé has little room for the person preparing dinner, although the person preparing dinner presumably has opinions of his own.

The resulting portrait is rooted in a small set of places: the bank, the school district, the ranch, the bay. Ricardo Ramirez has spent his banking career adding responsibilities within that geography. His father’s example remains part of the story. So do the years of lending, the students receiving scholarships and the local organizations to which he has kept returning. Following in someone’s footsteps still leaves a great deal of walking to do.