Five years from now, we’ll be surprised if …

A: Everyone isn’t offering Internet banking. Not that it will necessarily be the primary delivery channel but it will certainly be a complimentary piece to the branch system.

What keeps you up at night?

A: Maintaining strong growth in the loan and deposit base without negatively affecting the integrity of our balance sheet or loan quality of the portfolio in a more competitive market than a few years ago.

How competitive is it?

A: We’ve had 12 to 14 banks established in the last two years. Three years ago, we were down to a couple of community banks and now we’re up to 15 or 16. At some point, you have to ask yourself ‘at what point to we reach saturation.’ So one of the issues is, how do you compete in this environment without affecting the bank’s credit quality and growth.

Care to venture a guess on your earnings for 2003?

A: As the head of a publicly traded company, you have to be very careful talking about projections, because of Sarbanes-Oxley. (This is the corporate reporting bill passed in the wake of the Enron scandals.) It’s like walking on pins and needles these days. We’ll show significant improvement.