Security Pacific's merger gives technologist leisure.

Security Pacific Corp.'s former vice chairman and chief technologist, John P. Singleton, is weighing offers to manage a technology company, but his golden parachute is giving him the luxury of time.

This week, he is vacationing in Hawaii with his wife and youngest son.

Mr. Singleton, the man that Euromoney magazine called "the world's best bank technologist" in a May 1989 cover story, was one of the casualties of the megamerger mania.

Reputation as Aggressive

Since his official departure from the bank, Mr. Singleton, 55, has devoted more time to community work. He is a member of Workforce LA, a community group that is attempting to restructure Los Angeles' secondary school system to give students basic grounding in problem solving, reading and writing, and ethics.

Mr. Singleton, who officially left Security Pacific on the date of its merger with BankAmerica Corp., April 22, was widely admired for having made the difficult transition from top technologist to chief operating officer.

He was also noted as an aggressive manager who created a highly competitive culture at the technology unit he ran, Security Pacific Automation Corp.

Mr. Singleton said he bore no ill feeling about the merger. He said BankAmerica chairman Richard M. Rosenberg "has gone out of his way to be fair to people."

However, "as far as going back into banking, I'm not looking into that." Among the job offers he is considering is managing an image processing company. Security Pacific was one of the earliest proponents of imaging technology for check processing.

However, with a severance package that is estimated at at least $1 million, Mr. Singleton can afford to take his time choosing his new path.

As chairman and chief executive officer of Security Pacific Automation Co., Mr. Singleton cut Security Pacific's data-processing costs by hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and had a budget of over $400 million. Security Pacific's data-processing costs were rising by about 28% annually before the creation of SPAC. Under Mr. Singleton, Security Pacific's costs were growing at a decreasing rate.

|Feeling of Unity and Trust'

He cites the unusual team spirit at the automation unit, which became well known for developing back-office trading systems for others. "There was a feeling of unity and trust in the organization, the feeling we were the best in the industry," Mr. Singleton said.

"The fact that I was promoted out of the technologist's job was a tribute to the whole team of people I worked with." Security Pacific's technology won awards from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Born in southern New Jersey, Mr. Singleton moved across the country to study business management at Arizona State University. He has crisscrossed the country ever since, working in the aerospace industry, at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington as chief operating officer, and at Bank of New York.

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