American Banker will honor three individuals — John M. Eggemeyer 3rd, Jerry Williams, and Luz Lopez Urrutia — as its 2006 Community Bankers of the Year.
Mr. Eggemeyer is the chief executive of the Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., private-equity firm Castle Creek Capital LLC and the chairman of two banking companies and an automobile finance company. He and his investment partners have acquired stakes in dozens of banks, and he is being honored for his decade of success in building community banking companies.
Mr. Williams, the president and CEO of the $2.1 billion-asset Orion Bank in Naples, Fla., earned the award on the strength of his bank's performance in one of the nation's most competitive markets.
Ms. Urrutia is the president and chief operating officer at El Banco Financial Corp. in Roswell, Ga. She is being honored for her commitment to meeting the financial needs of the unbanked and the underbanked, primarily in the Hispanic community.
She joined what was then Nuestra Tarjeta Servicios Inc. in 2003. The company, which adopted the El Banco named in June, was founded in 2001 to offer stored-value cards to Hispanic immigrants, but its founder saw opportunities in offering check-cashing, remittance, and even traditional banking services to unbanked immigrants and brought in Ms. Urrutia, a former Wachovia Corp. executive, to help.
Hispanic immigrants are known to be distrustful of banks, and it is Ms. Urrutia's mission to get them into the banking mainstream. El Banco now has 12 fully bilingual branches in the Atlanta area.
It also offers its check-cashing platform to other banks and credit unions that are interested in reaching out to the unbanked. Woodforest National Bank in The Woodlands, Tex., recently struck a deal with El Banco to offers the service in its roughly 170 branches in Wal-Mart stores.
Mr. Eggemeyer occupies an unusual place in the banking world in that he is both a banker and a bank investor. Castle Creek is the majority shareholder in four banking companies, the largest being the $4.6 billion-asset First Community Bancorp in Rancho Santa Fe, of which he is also the chairman.
Mr. Eggemeyer started buying California banks through his investment fund in the mid-1990s, combined them into Western Bancorp, and sold Western in 1999 for 4.4 times book value. A year later he created First Community through the merger of two community banks. Since then First Community has acquired 14 banks, and it has a 15th purchase - its largest yet - in the works.
He has made no secret of his plan to sell First Community when the time is right, and that plan helps explain why the company's stock price has more than quintupled since its public offering six years ago.
But investors also like First Community because it performs. It keeps its deposit costs low, because Mr. Eggemeyer insists that lenders avoid business loans that do not come with deposit relationships. The result: First Community has had double-digit earnings growth in every year since its inception, and its net interest margin is among the highest in the industry.
Orion is privately held and not as well known to investors as First Community, but it has caught the attention of one investment bank. Alan C. Ewing & Co. in Jacksonville named Orion the top-performing community bank in Florida for 2004 and 2005, and, judging by its year-to-date returns on equity and assets, the bank could earn that distinction again this year.
Under Mr. Williams, Orion has more than doubled its assets in the last two years - without making acquisitions - by capitalizing on western Florida's housing boom.
Demand for new homes in Florida is slowing, but Mr. Williams said he is not worried about credit quality. Orion has been making loans to developers for a long time, and it knows how to manage collateral, he said; it has not charged off a development loan in 15 years.
Mr. Eggemeyer, Mr. Williams, and Ms. Urrutia are scheduled to accept their awards Nov. 30 at a black-tie event at New York's Pierre Hotel.
American Banker has already announced that Angelo Mozilo, the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Countrywide Financial Corp., will receive the 2006
