Meet & Greet

Buying, But Also Selling

Matthew Wagner has been a banker for nearly three decades, though his recent moves suggest he may be a trader at heart.

The CEO of the $5.4 billion-asset PacWest Bancorp agreed in July to sell 10 branches in Los Angeles and San Diego, along with $145 million in deposits, to Opus Bank in Irvine, Calif. The deal, which excludes loans, is expected to cut PacWest's staffing expenses and other costs by an annual $2 million.

"Pure efficiency play, nothing more to read into it," Wagner emailed in response to a query from American Banker.

But the sale stood out given Wagner's recent acquisitive streak. Earlier this year, he outbid Umpqua for American Perspective Bank in San Luis Obispo, Calif. He also made an aggressive run at First California Financial in Westlake Village, Calif. But his unsolicited offer, for $212 million, was rebuffed by the company.

Veterans' Advocate

Turnout was strong for the second annual "Veterans on Wall Street" job fair, hosted in New York this summer by a group of large banks. But the industry's reputation and its rickety health are complicating some hiring efforts, as executives like Citigroup's Suni Harford acknowledged.

"The biggest issue we have is educating [veterans] about what financial services is. This is where the misnomer 'Veterans on Wall Street' is a problem-they think Gordon Gekko," says Harford, Citi's regional head of markets for North America and the senior business sponsor of the firm's CitiSalutes initiative. She thinks veterans should know that Citi considers itself "one of the largest technology companies in the world" and has "huge security networks." She says that jobs related to technology and security are something that many veterans "are eminently qualified for, and not necessarily something they think of when they think financial services." Citi has hired 1,000 veterans so far as part of the commitment that it and other large banks have made, and the company plans to hire another 1,000 this year. But Harford laments that a tough economy is getting in the way of her full agenda for the initiative. "We're not hiring as many people as we would like to, and training programs are smaller than they've been," she says.

Kovacevich's Godfather Moment

Nearly four years on, former Wells Fargo CEO Dick Kovacevich remains bitter that the federal government forced even the healthiest large banks to take Troubled Asset Relief Program money in that momentous fall of 2008. "Why didn't I just say no and not accept the TARP money? As my comments were heading in that direction in the meeting, Hank Paulson turned to Fed Chairman Ben Benanke sitting next to him and said, 'Your primary regulator is sitting right here. If you refuse to accept these funds, he will declare you capital deficient Monday morning.'

"'Is this America?' I asked myself," Kovacevich recalled at a June gathering of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. "This was truly a 'godfather moment.' They made us an offer we couldn't refuse."

Kovacevich, whose comments were reported in the San Francisco Business Times, said he might have objected more strongly if Wells had not been maneuvering at the time to purchase Wachovia.

Fixer-Upper

An ailing Ohio community bank has turned to Louis Dunham, head of a consulting firm called CAMELSolutions, to find some solutions of its own.

First Place Financial, which expects a "material adverse effect" on capital levels as a result of restating its financials, brought Dunham in as CEO on June 27. He replaced Steven Lewis, who was fired in April. Chairman Samuel Roth said Dunham, who previously ran community banks in Illinois and Florida, would be "a great fit" for the $2.8 billion-asset First Place, which launched an internal review centered on its loan-loss accounting.