Frank Mercardante

In just six years, chief organizer and CEO Frank Mercardante has taken Southwest Community Bank to nearly $350 million in assets with a healthy 1.21 return on assets. In the past year, SWCB’s loan growth jumped 48 percent to $189 million and the bank continues to add an office a year in its geographically desirable neighborhoods of North San Diego, Riverside and Orange counties.

In October, the bank jumped into Glendale with a loan production office and into Northern Florida, following a valued employee who had to relocate for family reasons. “I’m asked where I’m going to open up next,” says Mercardante. “It depends on the right set of people. If it’s the right opportunity, it could be Timbuktu.”

In the fourth quarter, bank earnings rose by 59 percent to a record $944,000 or 49 cents per common share while the holding company Southwest Community Bancorp rang up a 62 percent annual increase.

A year after the bank opened, Mercardante found the service of a national data processing vendor “deplorable,” and convinced the board of directors to take the bank in a new direction with a data processing center.

“I started my career on that side of the business,” Mercardante recalls. “I did a market analysis and found a window of opportunity to get into the business. This was a bold step for a bank not a year old, and we had to go back to the regulators, but we got the approval because of my background.”

Today, Financial Data Solutions Inc. is a statewide operation, with a recently opened office in the Oakland suburb of San Leandro. FDS has 36 clients with assets of about $20 billion.

“It’s indicative of the entrepreneurial mentality of the board,” Mercardante says. “If we see an opportunity, we’ll seed it.”