Dec. 13--First Business Bank-Madison has no teller windows, just one office and fewer than 1,500 customers.

But the bank has $735 million in deposits locally and has the sixth-largest deposit market share in the Madison area. It has increased deposits by 84.5 percent over the past five years.

Founded in 1990 and part of the publicly traded First Business Financial Services of Madison, the bank has stuck to a purely business model instead of trying to expand into retail banking, said president and chief executive Mark Meloy.

First Business Financial Services has six subsidiaries including business banks in Madison, the Milwaukee area and Oshkosh-Appleton as well as First Business Trusts & Investments, First Business Capital Corp. and First Business Equipment Finance.

Meloy grew up in Platteville and graduated from Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. He came to First Business Financial Services after 17 years at what now is U.S. Bank, becoming head of the Madison bank in 2006.

Q: How is First Business Bank different from other banks and what has contributed to its success?

A: The obvious things that one would recognize right away are we don't have a multitude of branches, We have one location here in Madison, one location in the Milwaukee area and in Oshkosh and Appleton -- sort of one per community.

The reason we do that is because we've carved out a very particular niche of the marketplace -- small business and low end of the middle-market-type businesses. For that marketplace, the numbers of locations are less important because those types of bank clients get their deposits to the bank in a number of different ways and in mostly fairly high-tech ways, either electronically by ACH (Automatic Clearing House), wire transfer or over the Web through our remote deposit product. In the pre-Web days, we had -- and we still have -- a courier service.

The second thing is the number of clients that we have. A bank our size would have about 20,000 to 25,000 account holders if we were a retail and a commercial bank. With our business bank focus, we probably have 1,800 clients across our company. In Madison, we probably have 1,300 to 1,400 clients.

The comparison I like to draw is to think about the teacher-to-student ratio in school systems. I sort of describe it as the banker-to-client ratio in our model, which is very much tilted to the advantage of our clients where they get a lot of personal attention that enables us to be very proactive in the relationship. It's frankly related to the growth we've been able to enjoy.