Vintage 1980s Standard Federal Bank Stock Certificate 🏦 Detroit / Troy Michigan, Common Stock Scripophily, Icon Since 1893 RIP

How Did an 1893 Detroit Savings and Loan Become Standard Federal Bank? 🏦 A Vintage 1980s Standard Federal Bank Common Stock Certificate, Troy, Michigan

Size: 12" x 8"

A real, issued common stock certificate of STANDARD FEDERAL BANK, Chartered under the Laws of the United States of America, engraved in blue and black by the Security-Columbian United States Banknote Company. A robed classical woman sits in the lower left corner, the blue seal reads STANDARD FEDERAL BANK, TROY, MICHIGAN around an eagle and shield, and the face carries the Standard Federal Savings / Financial Services logo, $1.00 par common stock, CUSIP 853389 10 4, and the Registrar and Transfer Company of New Jersey as transfer agent. Each one was signed, stamped and cancelled when the shares moved.

Spend a minute with the lady in the corner. She has a scroll rolled up in one hand, a long sheet spread across her lap, a drawing compass in the other hand and a bundle of rolled plans at her feet - the engraver's way of saying "we keep careful records here," which is exactly what you want a savings bank to say. The little ©S.C.B.Co. at the edge of her circle is the printer's own mark.

The fine print is where the history hides. The face calls Standard Federal "a federal savings bank chartered by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board" and warns that the shares are not insured by the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation. Congress abolished both of those agencies in 1989 in the savings-and-loan cleanup, so that wording belongs to the 1980s. Turn one over and the back spells out a rule from the bank's federal stock charter: for five years after the bank converted "from the mutual to the stock form," nobody could buy up more than 10% of its stock. That conversion is the reason these certificates exist at all.

🏦 Since 1893 - and it started in a basement

Standard Federal started in downtown Detroit on April 25, 1893, as the Standard Savings & Loan Association, taking over the charter of the Workman's Savings and Loan Association. It opened with about $31,000 in assets, and its first offices were down in the basement of the old McGraw Building, on the corner of Griswold and Lafayette. It did well enough that in 1927 it secured the corner of Griswold and West Jefferson for its own headquarters, and a nine-story limestone building stood there by 1930, credited to the Detroit architect George D. Mason.

That corner has a story of its own. It's where Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded Ste. Anne de Detroit, the city's very first church, in 1701, and the lot was known as "the Cornerstone of Detroit." The building is still there as One Griswold Street, and in 2009 it went on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Detroit Financial District. Not bad for an outfit that started below street level.

💪 The year it didn't close

Its proudest moment came in 1933. When banks all over Detroit shut their doors, Standard kept its open, because it had built up a big store of cash and never had a serious run. Plenty of Detroit banks and thrifts never reopened after the 1933 bank holiday; this one never closed. It opened its first branch, out in northwest Detroit, in 1948, and in 1950 it took a federal charter and became Standard Federal Savings & Loan Association.

👔 The men who ran it

Walter J. L. Ray, who'd started as a bookkeeper in 1908, ran it as president from 1946 to 1962 and stayed on as chairman until 1973. Robert J. Hutton joined in October 1929 - the very month the stock market crashed, which is some timing for a career in savings - and was president from 1962 to 1973, then chairman until 1981.

Then came Thomas R. Ricketts. He joined in 1956, fresh out of the University of Michigan law school, became president in 1973 and chairman in 1981, and the chairman's signature printed on the one in my pictures is his. He's the man who took Standard Federal public, and ten years later the man who sold it.

🏙️ Out to Troy

Like a lot of Detroit, it headed for the suburbs. Birmingham Federal Savings merged with it in 1970 and the main offices moved to Birmingham; then, after it passed a billion dollars in assets, it moved into new headquarters at 2401 Big Beaver Road in Troy in 1973, which is the town on this seal. It grew by merger: Wayne Federal Savings in 1975, First Federal Savings of Niles in 1980, Landmark Savings and Loan and First Savings Association of Dowagiac in 1981, and in 1983 the biggest merger in its history, four Indiana thrifts joining at once.

There was one ugly year in the middle of all that. In 1982 the thrift lost $331.6 million, most of it from selling off about $1 billion of low-yielding loans in a restructuring, and it answered with a wholesale banking strategy to get its profits back up.

📈 Going public

For most of its life Standard Federal was owned by its depositors. It took a mutual savings bank charter in 1985, becoming Standard Federal Bank, and in January 1987 it converted to a stock company on the New York Stock Exchange, issuing 30.4 million shares - by dollar amount one of the biggest stock conversions the thrift business had ever seen, and the place certificates like this come from.

By its hundredth birthday on April 25, 1993, it had about $10 billion in assets, more than 150 banking centers and over 200 ATMs, it closed about $4.18 billion in home loans that year alone, and it was the largest thrift in the Midwest and the seventh largest in the country. Eleven days after the birthday, on May 6, 1993, the Office of Thrift Supervision gave it an "Outstanding" rating for community lending. In 1990 it was putting money into affordable housing too - $309,775 from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Indianapolis went to the Historic Dunbar Corner project in South Bend and Gladstone transitional housing in Detroit.

🌷 What became of it

ABN AMRO of the Netherlands agreed in November 1996 to buy Standard Federal for about $1.9 billion; by then it was a $15.8 billion bank. Ricketts negotiated that sale and was set to stay on as chairman, but he died of cancer in April 1997, at 66, just days before the deal closed on May 1, 1997.

In 2001 ABN AMRO merged Michigan National Bank into it, and when the merger took effect that October the old thrift gave up its federal savings bank charter for Michigan National's national bank charter, becoming Standard Federal Bank, N.A. After 108 years as a savings institution it was, on paper, a national bank, and 59 overlapping offices closed in the bargain. By 2005 it had 265 branches, more than any other bank in Michigan, with about 1,000 ATMs and $23.3 billion in deposits. That same year it became LaSalle Bank Midwest. Bank of America bought LaSalle for $21 billion, closing in October 2007, and on May 5, 2008, the branches went up under the Bank of America sign. That's 115 years from a Detroit basement to somebody else's name on the door.

📅 How old are they

The stock only existed from 1987 until the 1997 sale, and this blue printing turns up from the late 1980s - these are 1980s paper. Each one carries its own date, number, owner, share count and stamps, so the one you get may look a little different from the one in my pictures.

🏦 About these

They're 12 by 8 inches. Frame one for a banker, anybody who had a passbook at Standard Federal, or a Detroit or Troy history wall. I love that a share printed for a Troy office can still walk you back to a basement in 1893 Detroit and the corner where the city's first church stood. The supply is finite - Standard Federal is long gone, nobody's issuing its stock again, and once these last ones are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.