CoBiz Inc. is bulking up in Arizona and has hired two bankers with big-bank resumes and local books of business to help it steal market share from their former employers.
The $1 billion-asset Denver banking company this month named Kyle P. Kennedy, a first vice president at Bank One Corp., and Jack W. Jensen, a vice president at Wells Fargo & Co., to head the two new offices of its Arizona Business Bank. Mr. Kennedy will run the branch in Tempe, which will open in September, and Mr. Jensen will head the Scottsdale branch, which is slated to open this year.
Arizona Business, which was called First Capital Bank of Arizona until CoBiz bought it last year, currently has two offices in Phoenix.
Jon C. Lorenz, CoBiz's president, says he expects to see substantial economic growth over the next few years in the area from Phoenix to Tucson. The region is rich in start-up businesses has no community bank large enough to serve them "appropriately," he said.
"The really big banks such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Bank One have the bulk of the market share here, and then there's a number of very small independent banks," Mr. Lorenz said.
Those three big banking companies control close to 75% of the deposits in the metropolitan Phoenix area, while Arizona Business controls just 0.3%, according to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. statistics.
CoBiz will take the same approach there as it has in Denver with its Colorado Business Bank - "offering an array of products and technology comparable to what the big banks can offer, but with a very high customer relationship banking approach," Mr. Lorenz said. "We think there's an opportunity to really compete as a middle-tier bank as we've done in Colorado with Colorado Business Bank."
Colorado Business has nine branches in the Denver area and recently hired a Wells Fargo senior vice president, Margaret J. Brown, to run a 10th that it plans to open in the fourth quarter near Denver International Airport.
Joseph K. Morford, an analyst with Royal Bank of Canada's RBC Capital Markets in San Francisco, said CoBiz's strategy of hiring bankers with existing books of business has worked well in Colorado, and he predicted that it would have similar success in Arizona.
He said he expects each of the four Arizona branches to have about $35 million of deposits within a year.
"CoBiz has an opportunity to duplicate their model that was so successful in Denver - by hiring talented bankers and then building a bank around them, rather than buying the infrastructure of an existing bank," Mr. Morford said.
Mr. Lorenz said the company plans to cross-sell nonbank products and services to its new business customers in Arizona. CoBiz's holdings include a property/casualty insurance firm, an employee-benefits consulting firm, and Green Manning & Bunch, a middle-market investment banking firm it acquired last year.
