Check your checkbook.
    For San Diego, it’s not nearly as significant as the forced sales of Great American Bank and HomeFed Bank in the early 1990s, nor the voluntary sale of San Diego Trust & Savings Bank. But with 44 Great Western Bank branches and 41 offices of Home Savings in San Diego County, their combination by Seattle-based Washington Mutual deserves more attention than it’s received in the local press.
    It certainly has San Diego bankers' attention.
    Maintaining 85 offices of the new Washington Mutual in San Diego isn’t likely. Even a cursory look at their locations suggests some obvious overlaps:

    You know some of these have got to go. Companywide, Washington Mutual expects to close some 170 offices and lose 3,500 jobs to fully absorb Home Savings. But even after trimming, Washington Mutual could wind up with 65 to 75 San Diego offices and 1,000 local employees, rivaling the traditional banking powerhouses, Bank of America, with 77 San Diego offices; Wells Fargo Bank, with 110 locations (including 71 in grocery stores and only 39 remaining in traditional free-standing locations); and Union Bank of California with 49 branches (including eight in grocery stores).
    Of course, Washington Mutual's strength, like Home Savings and Great Western, is in home mortgage lending, while BofA, Wells and Union specialize in business loans. Still, BofA is one of California's largest home-mortgage lenders, while Great Western and Home Savings have been building their commercial lending units. "The savings banks don’t have the (commercial bank) culture," says San Diego banker Pete Davis, "but they'll get there; they certainly have the asset base."
    The line continues to blur between traditional banks and traditional savings and loans.
    John Moores didn’t select Glendale Federal Bank, an S&L, as the "official bank of the San Diego Padres" because he needed a mortgage. Glendale Federal was selected because it could meet the Padres' commercial banking needs — its multi-million-dollar payroll and merchant processing — plus satisfy the Padres' marketing appetite in ways that San Diego’s remaining, genuinely local institutions could not afford.
    When Great Western and Home Savings merge, Kevin Dunigan believes Washington Mutual will end up with the largest deposit base in San Diego, $5 billion to $6 billion, followed by Wells Fargo with $4.6 billion (according to Wells), then BofA and Union Bank. Dunigan is a first vice president of Home Savings and the Rancho Santa Fe-based group sales director of its San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardo retail branches.
    A veteran of HomeFed Bank, Dunigan recalls that Charles Fletcher, the HomeFed founder, and Home Savings builder Howard Ahmanson were friends who'd agreed not to compete: Ahmanson, convinced by Fletcher in the 1940s to go into the S&L business, would stay in Los Angeles and Fletcher would remain in San Diego. That territorial exclusivity ended in 1971 when Home Savings opened one of its big signature branches in Pacific Beach, but the families remained friends and they remained dominant in their respective regions.
    Washington Mutual's acquisition last year of Great Western, which acquired the bulk of HomeFed's San Diego operations from the Resolution Trust Corp. in 1993, ironically brings together the hearts of the Ahmanson and Fletcher thrift empires, if not the full breadth of what the Fletchers had built.
    Home Savings' own growth in San Diego, since the opening of the P.B. branch, was modest until 1991 when it acquired all of Coast Savings' operations in San Diego, netting 10 new local branches. Coast had recently taken over Fred Stalder's Central Savings. In 1995, Home acquired Household Bank, netting seven new San Diego offices. In '96, it acquired four divested First Interstate Bank branches, three of which had been San Diego Trust & Savings offices.
    Dunigan, who runs Home Savings local retail operations, had spent years with HomeFed. It’s a little harder getting a handle on who's responsible for San Diego for Great Western, since its region from Ventura County south is run by Mike Amato out of Irvine, a provincial no-no in San Diego that obviously was lost on Great Western's headquarters brass in Chatsworth, but is even less relevant to 48-year-old Kerry Killinger in Seattle. He's the chairman, president and CEO of Washington Mutual, which currently manages $97 billion in assets and will manage something like $150 billion when the merger with Home Savings is done, perhaps by September.
    Another HomeFed veteran — "I was one of the first fired by Tom Wagemen" — is Tim McGarry, now a spokesman for Great Western, who says Washington Mutual is impressively aggressive in its effort to expand its consumer base, from its introduction of free checking accounts that reversed Great Western's substantial decline in its number of consumer accounts, to its familiarity with retail construction loans. Great Western loan officers also say they're impressed with the variety of home loan products available through Washington Mutual, the nation's largest portfolio mortgage lender.
    "There's a perception that the large commercial banks have not been doing too good a job in providing good service, so the opportunity is certainly there for us," says McGarry. "To be successful we’re going to have to provide superior service if we want to retain the Great Western and Home Savings customer base and expand on it at the expense of our competitors."
    Meanwhile, Glendale Federal, with $16 billion in assets companywide and 23 branches in San Diego County overseen by Sandi Matheus in Vista, proceeds to merge with California Federal, with $31.5 billion in assets. Kirt Tisdale, also based in Vista, oversees Glendale's business banking practice throughout San Diego.
    Bob Trujillo, Glendale's executive vice president in charge of franchise management and marketing, says the combination will have no direct impact in San Diego, where CalFed has no presence, except perhaps to "accelerate" Glendale's aggressive marketing approach to "out-local the locals." Glendale will convert to the CalFed name when the deal is done.
    On another front, Zions Bancorporation, fresh from its acquisition of San Diego-based Grossmont Bank, is still digesting its acquisition of First Pacific National Bank in Escondido. With $9 billion in assets, Utah-based Zions just disclosed its intention to purchase Sumitomo Bank of California, with $5.1 billion in assets, begging the questions:
    Will Zions change Sumitomo's name, combine it with Grossmont, take the Grossmont name statewide, consolidate its one downtown San Diego Sumitomo office with its two new Grossmont offices nearby, and still get away with calling Grossmont San Diego’s largest community bank?
    Hey, if it’s good enough for Glendale Federal, "California's community bank"...
    Allan Severson, president of Grossmont, says the intended Zions-Sumitomo merger is so new it’s too early to answer.
    "We’re looking at a number of alternatives right now," says Severson. "We’ve just been focused on acquiring the bank, Sumitomo. First Pacific is a pretty easy merger because we have such confidence in their people and we know each other so well. Sumitomo is more complicated because of its size and its presence in the other two major metropolitan markets (L.A. and San Francisco). So we’ve really been concentrating on putting that deal together and haven't thought much as to where the headquarters would be, or the name, or some of the other operating issues."
    Peninsula Bank President Larry Willette and Chairman John Rebelo are so put off by the out-of-towners claiming to be San Diego’s community bank, they've registered the phrase, "A Real Community Bank" and put out a three-page press release "to confirm to area residents and businesses that our principal investments and genuine, long-term interests are dedicated to our local San Diego community and county."
    Rebelo adds, "Our ownership is local. We’re as true a community bank as exists in California. Glendale Federal is not a community bank. Particularly since they're being sold, I'd like to hear what their response is now to being 'California's community bank.' A community bank is one that is fairly responsive to a local, local market."
    To which Glendale Federal's Mark Hoaglin responds, "I think that defines us to a 'tee,' and that rhymes with 'C' and that stands for community."
    Pete Davis, who has grown and chairs the largest San Diego-based commercial bank that has not come under the ownership or control of out-of-towners, Bank of Commerce, says Bank of America is his most worthy out-of-town competitor because of its size, number of full-service branches and aggressive loan pricing. He predicts Sumitomo, FP and Grossmont will be known as "Zions up and down the coast." (Severson assures Davis "is 100 percent wrong.") Davis says City National Bank's hiring of Fred Baranowski was a major-league move. And he says "it’s silly" that San Diego banks, including his own, have not learned to lend into the high-tech and biotech niches, as Imperial Bank and Silicon Valley Bank have learned. In the high technologies, "San Diego is second only to the Silicon Valley and the San Diego banks won’t touch it," he says.
    And that suits Silicon Valley Bank just fine.
    In the last three years since Rita Pirkl opened Silicon Valley Bank's San Diego office, the region that includes her Irvine and West L.A. offices (the narrowest she’ll disclose publicly) has grown from 125 to 400 technology and life science clients. "The question I ask is how much of any bank's lending practices is dedicated to these niches. One hundred percent of our San Diego practice is so dedicated.
    "While Silicon Valley Bank is not a locally owned institution, we’re extremely committed to this marketplace, demonstrated by our commitment to UCSD Connect, the San Diego Software Industry Council, BioCom and the San Diego Venture Group. We think we were somewhat instrumental in getting some of the venture capitalists here, not in terms of, "Oh gee, you've got to come to San Diego.' But, 'Here's an opportunity with a company I think you'd be interested in.'"
    Harley Sefton, the vice chairman of San Diego Trust & Savings Bank when his father, Chairman Tom Sefton, decided to sell to First Interstate, suggests that hundreds of San Diego bank executives, tellers and support staff are living through some anxiety right now.
    "That's what happens to people in a situation of being taken over," he recalls. "The people with the organization doing the buying don’t have that problem as much, unless there's overlap. Often the acquirer throws all the positions in the air and picks from the pool."
    Rebelo of Peninsula Bank says the San Diego banking market has become more competitive than ever, an irony because San Diego has fewer institutions competing than one, two or three decades ago. But with everyone's liquidity high and nearly every bank enjoying record earnings, "it’s been a really healthy competition and not contrary to the benefit of consumers and businesses."