David Baumgarten, former president and chief executive officer of Bank Mutual Corp., has joined Old National Bank as Wisconsin region chairman, the company announced today.
Baumgarten led the Brown Deer bank’s $482 million sale to Green Bay-based Associated Banc-Corp., which was completed in February 2018. He then served for one year as a consultant to Associated president and CEO Philip Flynn, aiding in client retention, employee engagement and community activities.
In this new role, Baumgarten will help guide Evansville, Indiana-based Old National’s Wisconsin strategy in cooperation with Wisconsin region CEO Kevin Anderson. He will work out of the Milwaukee office. Both executives will report to Jim Sandgren, president and chief operating officer of Old National.
Baumgarten formed a relationship with Old National CEO Bob Jones while he was working to sell Bank Mutual. It was one of the banks in contention, he said.
“Through that process, I got to know Bob and some of the other people on the team and I was always very impressed with the culture and the feel of what that organization represented,” Baumgarten said.
While he had planned to spend the first year after the sale relaxing, that wasn’t a fit for him.
“I was going to do a lot of stuff that I hadn’t done for a while, but then I realized six months into that year, it’s nice to have a lot of time but you kind of lose a lot of things I love doing,” he said. “I was sitting back on my lanai in Florida and I was thinking, ‘What could I do to use my experience and the length of time that I’ve been in Milwaukee to do something to help an organization and also give me the pop I wanted to stimulate my mind and my daily activities?’”
Earlier in his career, Baumgarten was executive vice president at Associated Banc-Corp., overseeing eight Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota banking regions; president of southeast Wisconsin for Associated Bank; president and CEO of U.S. Bank Wisconsin; president and CEO of U.S. Bank Colorado; and senior vice president of First Bank in Minneapolis.
Baumgarten holds an MBA and a bachelor’s in business administration from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is chairman of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce’s affiliate, Milwaukee Development Corp., a board of trustees member of Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee, and a board member at the Badger Institute and the Greater Milwaukee Committee.
“Someone with the depth of expertise and resume that Dave has and the decades of experience, was a no-brainer to try to make sure we brought him on the team,” Anderson said.
Anderson and Baumgarten will make the top priority growing their commercial lines of business, with plans to expand headcount in commercial and wealth management this year. The Wisconsin strategy also includes additional branches, though they declined to get into specifics.
Old National has 30 branches and about 350 employees in Wisconsin. The bank has a total of 207 branches and $19.7 billion in assets.
“We are incredibly excited to welcome David Baumgarten to the Old National team,” Sandgren said. “His unmatched resumé as a banking executive, coupled with a deep passion for community, make him an ideal fit for Old National and the clients and communities we serve in the great state of Wisconsin.”
