Sacramento Commercial Sells Bankruptcy Unit to First of Calif.

Sacramento Commercial Bank has sold its SCB Financial Software division, which sells accounting software, hardware, and technical support to bankruptcy trustee depositors, to First Bank of California for an undisclosed sum.

Though the deal, which closed last week, did not include Sacramento Commercial’s $25 million of bankruptcy trustee deposits — liquidated assets from estates in bankruptcy, which trustees deposit in banks for safekeeping until disbursing them to creditors — the bank said it expects most of its trustee customers to switch their accounts to First Bank in Sacramento.

Sacramento Commercial, a $243 million-asset bank, was bought in February by Belvedere Capital Partners Inc. of San Francisco.

Daryl B. Foreman, Sacramento Commercial’s president and chief executive officer, said the bank’s trustee customers are not required to switch accounts to First Bank but probably will do so in order to retain accounting support.

“There are fairly involved accounting requirements that the bankruptcy trustee needs to address while managing the estate, so we have provided our own software to help them facilitate their cases with the court,” Mr. Foreman said. “First Bank is buying our software, so our trustee customers will probably go with them.”

Belvedere, which owns four community banks in California, decided that the cost of running the bankruptcy trustee deposit business were not justified, Mr. Foreman said.

The deposits are “a very stable funding source to help us make loans, but it’s a big job to upgrade the software on an ongoing basis and provide support for the users,” he said. “It’s cost-effective if you have enough volume of deposits, and so it will probably be very profitable for First Bank because they have a much larger system.”

Sacramento Commercial hopes to replace the deposits it expects to lose to First Bank with deposits from business customers in the Sacramento area, he said.

First Bank is a subsidiary of $1.5 billion-asset First Banks America Inc. of St. Louis, which has bought more than a dozen community banks in California since 1994 and has deals pending for two San Francisco banks that have combined assets of $280 million.

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