Web consultant Rosalind Resnick blogs about opening her first corporate account for Net Creations at the Citibank on Montague Street in 1997:
Back in November 1995, a few days after my partner and I moved from Hollywood, Fla., to Brooklyn Heights, we walked down the street looking for a place to open our company’s bank account. There were three banks on the corner of Court and Montague. We chose Citibank because Citibank had the most ATMs in New York City.
Once inside, we were introduced to a bank officer named Denise. We told Denise that we wanted to open a checking account for our Web design firm, NetCreations, that we had started out of our house in Florida earlier that year. We handed her a $500 check to deposit. Denise welcomed us to the branch, helped us fill out the necessary forms and told us to call her if we ever needed anything else.
And we did. Two years after we opened our account, we ran into a cash crunch (it was August 1997 and our customers’ accounts payable clerks had apparently left for vacation) and had to start putting money back into the company just to make payroll. I called Denise, and she told me to bring her our accounts receivable report from QuickBooks. I ran down to the branch, and, three weeks later, we had a $100,000 credit line. Once I understood the power of debt financing to help us grow our business without selling shares to investors, I called Denise again. By the time our company went public in 1999, we had a credit line of $1 million and an equipment lease of another $1 million. And that original account that we opened with $500 in 1995 had close to $60 million running through it by 2000.
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