Scottsdale, Ariz., is home to some of the nation's wealthiest families and individuals, and community banks there are trying to outdo one another to win those customers.
Legacy Bank, for example, offers remote deposit services to its high-net-worth customers, so they can deposit checks from any of their homes using a portable scanner.
Home National Bank, a Blackwell, Okla., unit of HNB Corp. that has five branches in Scottsdale, offers a third-party concierge service that customers can call if they need dinner reservations or theater tickets.
And Goldwater Bank, which opened in April, has an in-house concierge that can do everything from finding a personal shopper to booking a private jet.
The focus on the select few seems to be paying off. Legacy, a Terrapin Bancorp Inc. unit that opened in January 2005, was profitable in its fifth quarter and already has $200 million of assets.
Goldwater gathered $7 million of loans and $8 million of deposits in its first quarter of business, well above the pace of other recent Arizona start-ups, according to Director Services Inc., a start-up bank consulting firm in Mesa, Ariz.
"Our philosophy is quality, not quantity," said Larry Sheffield, Goldwater's chairman and one of its co-founders.
John Matheny, director of sales and marketing for Brintech Inc., a subsidiary of United Community Banks Inc. in Blairsville, Ga., said it is easy to see why banks are targeting "that little sliver of the population" with the most money. "They are the users of the most services and keep the highest deposits and loan balances, so they are the most profitable, and everybody is trying to figure out" how to serve them.
Arizona has long been one of the nation's fastest-growing states, and the Scottsdale area in particular has become a hot spot for entrepreneurs and wealthy retirees.
The Census Bureau estimates that the median family income in Scottsdale is $80,218 a year, or nearly 44% above the national average.
In neighboring Paradise Valley, the median income is more than $160,000.
Julian Fruhling, Legacy's president and chief executive officer, said its niche is small businesses and their owners who have a net worth of at least $5 million.
Like many small start-ups, it uses couriers to pick up deposits from customers who are too busy to visit the bank. But Legacy has gone a step farther — it is one of the few banks in the country offering a remote deposit capture service to individuals, not just businesses.
"Many of our clients have multiple homes around the country, and it allows them to utilize technology so they have the ultimate in convenience," Mr. Fruhling said. "Our whole objective is to make things as convenient as possible for high-net-worth clients, but when they actually need a banker, they have a high-level banker available to them to help with lending and financial investment planning needs."
Angela Whitney, senior vice president at the $750 million-asset Home National Bank, said that even though it does not target the wealthy in its home markets of Kansas and Oklahoma, it does offers its concierge services there.
Still, "our concierge is mostly used in Arizona," she said. "It's more retail in the Midwest."
Goldwater is the brainchild of Mr. Sheffield, who has made his living as a commercial real estate developer in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado.
He had been an investor and director at First Federal Bank in Roswell, N.M., before Washington Federal Savings and Loan of Seattle bought it in February.
He said that when he moved to the Phoenix area in 2001, he felt there was a need for a "high-tech, high-touch kind of bank," so he gathered a team of experienced bankers and set out to create one.
Kelly Dunn, Goldwater's president and CEO, said it does not target customers according to their net worth, but those who keep at least $25,000 of deposits at the bank get free access to the concierge and courier services. Others are charged a fee of $100 a month.
Greg Faris, the president of Director Services, said that because Goldwater's leaders "have done a lot of things right," they have been able to gather loans and deposits quickly. "They have a diversified board that knows the market and can drive business to the bank."
Mr. Matheny, who has been consulting with banks for more than a decade, said he is not surprised that Goldwater has been able to find customers so quickly.
"It's snob appeal," he said. "People want to demonstrate their success. … He's saying, 'We are going to be exclusive and selective,' and people want to be in that group."
