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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024
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S.D. Bankers Help Umpqua Bank Make the Connections For Banking Relationship Success

Joe Quinn, chief financial officer of defense contractor Epsilon Systems Solutions, needed to close a deal before year’s end.

It was around Christmas, and tracking down all the people needed to complete the paperwork was daunting.

Like those he needed to get a hold of to complete the necessary paperwork, he was on a holiday vacation.

He called Mark Lee, who heads Umpqua Bank’s corporate banking division in San Diego, and caught him at a family dinner; Lee put Quinn in touch with banker Bob Jondall, who works closely with Umpqua’s defense industry clients.

With Jondall’s help, “we were able to close this transaction, which, had it not been closed that day, we would have had a lot of problems,” Quinn said. “I know I couldn’t have done that with a big bank…with the layers of bureaucracy we would have had to go through to get that done, it would have been impossible.”

It’s that kind of service and accessibility that Portland, Oregon-based Umpqua says sets it apart for clients considering with whom to bank — and San Diego, with its reputation as a business community where relationships are essential to doing business, is a growth market for the bank.

Following a series of acquisitions that brought Umpqua to its current size — nearly $26 billion in assets — the bank is now targeting other West Coast markets where it believes its personalized service can gain traction. It was nearly a foregone conclusion San Diego would be among them: the bank’s first chief banking officer and senior executive vice president is Tory Nixon.

Nixon, who headed California Bank & Trust’s San Diego division until he was hired by Umpqua in 2015 to run

Target S.D. Market

Nixon was promoted in April to the newly created role of chief banking officer. He’s based in Oregon, but says he had expanding Umpqua’s corporate banking business to San Diego in mind since the day he joined the bank.

To plant the Umpqua flag in San Diego, Nixon tapped Lee, another California Bank & Trust alumnus, to launch its commercial banking efforts in the region in January 2016.

Lee’s career in banking in San Diego spans more than 30 years; he previously worked for Nixon for 10 years at California Bank & Trust.

“In corporate banking you really want to work for an organization that has growth in mind; we finance growth companies, and we ought to be a growth company ourselves,” Lee said. “(Umpqua executives) wanted to grow the organization, and I wanted to grow with that organization, so it was an easy decision.”

At the time Umpqua only had a small retail branch in La Mesa, and little name recognition in the region.

Lee’s first weeks with the company were conducted at Starbucks and at his kitchen table, where he would make calls while shushing his dogs.

“It was like working for a $25 billion startup,” he said.

CEOs he pitched would say: “Umpqua? Who?”

But his local ties paid off.

“I have people we deal with here today as clients that I’ve had relationships with for 25 years,” he said.

With a handful of hires, most of whom he had previously worked with, Lee recorded $200 million in loan commitments as of the end of 2016. Since, that total has more than tripled, rising to $700 million.

This year the bank hired away a four-person team from City National Bank to expand its wealth management business in Southern California, including three San Diego-area bankers.

Post-Profit Companies

Today the bank has three locations in the region, including a newly built office in Carmel Valley from which Lee works, with Torrey Pines State Beach visible from his office. The building, just east of I-5, is a few doors down from a California Bank & Trust branch.

Umpqua Bank works primarily with post-profit companies with about $25 million to $30 million in revenue or more. Generally, clients it works with are seeking a loan of $10 million or more; on average a client borrows about $12 million, Lee said.

Bolstered by the region’s robust economy, particularly its defense, tech and construction sectors, he expects the business to grow more rapidly this year than the 3 percent to 5 percent rate anticipated for the corporate banking market.

Southern California, including San Diego, remains Umpqua’s highest priority among the geographic locations it has targeted for expansion, according to Nixon.

“The strategy really at this point isn’t to grow the bank through acquisition as it did before,” he said. “The strategy today is really more around how we leverage technology, how we become much more focused on customer centricity and what markets and business lines should we expand and even maybe de novo into.”

All banks like to claim they focus more on the client than on his or her money.

Umpqua’s local team says it uses a holistic approach — although Lee isn’t exactly a fan of the term — to prove they mean it.

Relationship Organization

“We don’t just provide debt; we’re not a loan shop,” he said. “We’re a full relationship organization, so what that means is we bank a company and their needs not just by providing great loans and great growth capital, but everything to do with their cash cycle.”

That includes advice on international business, M&A and raising capital. The bank has about 60 clients in San Diego, and Lee said each of the lines of credit available to those companies was customized.

“It’s completely client dependent, depending on what their needs are both today, and in the future,” Lee said. “I think there’s a lot of room for somebody like us to be successful in the marketplace.”

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