Robert D. Davis is unfazed when he hears a skeptical reaction to his company's new name: Vist Financial Corp.
"I do have friends that have teased me they're going to send me a hundred bucks so I can buy a vowel," said Mr. Davis, the president and chief executive officer of the Wyomissing, Pa., company formerly known as Leesport Financial Corp.
But using an actual word such as "vista" would invite preconceived notions about what the name means, he said. Vist prefers to define itself — or redefine itself, as the case may be.
The name change, which united seven separately operating and differently named units in banking, wealth management, and insurance, is much more than a cosmetic makeover for the 99-year-old company; it signals a transformation that is meant to carry it through another century, Mr. Davis said.
Vist has set some lofty short-term goals. Within three years it wants to double its $1.1 billion of assets, both through organic growth and acquisitions, and increase its wealth management unit's assets under management from $200 million to between $500 million and $1 billion. And it plans to keep expanding its insurance business, which now accounts for 25% of its revenue.
Mr. Davis said the rebranding should help Vist move closer to those goals, through improved efficiency and cross-selling. He is also counting on it to help the company garner some more attention from the investment community.
Vist wants fee-based businesses to generate at least half of its revenue, so that investors will give it credit for having a "blended" income stream, Mr. Davis said.
"We could materially break out of the pack, once shareholders understand the components of our revenue," he said.
Over the past decade the company has bought three insurance agencies, two investment advisory firms, and two banks, one of which also had a mortgage unit. Almost all of them continued to operate under their own names until the company rechristened itself in March.
Having seven brands — including Leesport Bank and Madison Bank — confused customers, Mr. Davis said. And employees in the various units knew little about one another or all the products available to customers.
"Vist Financial wasn't a name change. It was a unification of seven confederate states," Mr. Davis said. "The company is literally acting as one now, and we're confident that will be quantifiable."
Jason O'Donnell, an analyst at Boenning & Scattergood Inc., said the move is a good one. He initiated coverage of Vist with an "outperform" rating this month.
Mr. O'Donnell said the rebranding, while expensive, should pay off in greater profitability as cross-selling improves and fee income increases.
Vist is targeting the Philadelphia area for its growth.
Mr. Davis said about 80% of his company's assets are in Berks County, where it is based, and neighboring Schuylkill County.
The remaining 20% is in suburban Philadelphia. But Vist wants to have half of its assets there within a few years, and it is seeking a bank acquisition or a merger of equals to help it reach that goal.
"I do believe scale is important," Mr. Davis said.
It is also actively scouting for insurance agencies and wealth management firms to buy — Vist has hired investment bankers to help identify targets — and it continues to pursue organic growth in those businesses, Mr. Davis said. It recently moved the managing director for its Vist Capital Management unit from Berks County to a Philadelphia suburb, to attract new customers there.
Mr. Davis conceded that many other companies are targeting the same markets in the southeast corner of Pennsylvania. "It's far more competitive," he said. "But it's where the money is."
Vist's earnings are already "very un-bank-like," but its strategy calls for boosting fee income even more, Mr. Davis said.
The reason: Historically community bank stocks trade at 13 times earnings, while the stock prices for fee-based businesses like insurance and wealth management trade at 20 times earnings. Mr. Davis said he hopes Vist's shares can eventually trade somewhere between those two earnings multiples.
But for now, the stock — which hit a 52-week low of $14.59 the day Vist announced it had completed the rebranding — is hovering around $17. Based on earnings power, that is well below similarly sized financial companies in southeast Pennsylvania, according to Mr. O'Donnell.
Vist's first-quarter profit jumped 289% from a year earlier, to $1.6 million. But Mr. O'Donnell said one-time items, including a $2.5 million charge for a balance-sheet restructuring in last year's first quarter and $422,000 in marketing expenses related to the rebranding in this year's first quarter, created "a lot of noise" in Vist's net income, clouding its true earnings potential.
One change that should aid cross-selling is that the company now has a single operating system for the banking, insurance, and wealth management units. Previously an insurance customer would not have been on the company's system at all.
Vist is also developing relationship-based packages to reward those customers who do more business with the company.
Mr. Davis said Vist surveyed customers last year to find out what values they associate with the company, and each letter of the new name comes from words that he said popped up repeatedly in responses: vision, integrity, solutions, trust.
As for Vist not being a word itself, Mr. Davis points to financial services companies such as Axa and ING. "These are not words. These are companies that prefer to define themselves, not to be typecast by a word."
Brownstein Group in Philadelphia came up with the new name and logo. Joe Weinlick, Brownstein's chief brand strategist, said he was pleased that Vist was willing to be bold.
The attitude was, "Let's do something that forces people to stand up and take notice and say, 'Wow, that is different,' " Mr. Weinlick said.
Like the new name, Vist's logo stands out in bright orange (a color that has been put to perhaps its most prominent branding use by ING Direct).
"When you go by one of their locations, you can't miss it," Mr. Weinlick said.
Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst for Millward Brown, a brand research and consulting firm in New York, said he likes the name because it is "short and punchy, and using the word "financial" as part of the name makes "a very clear distinction as to what their business is."
The challenge now, he said, is to define the name in a way that inspires a positive reaction whenever people hear it.
Mr. Davis said that is the plan. "When we open our office 100 years from now in London, they won't have to guess what Vist is, because it'll be a brand that isn't limited by an American president or a small town in Pennsylvania called Leesport."
