Mike Perry

Larry (Willette) was at Peninsula for 25 years; Brian (Gowland) was at San Diego Trust & Savings for 26 years, Dan (Herde) was there for 34 years,” says Mike Perry. “If you look at the group of directors, we have about 300 years of experience in this market spanning four decades.”

Perry, president and CEO of San Diego Trust Bank, is bragging about the pedigree of the board of his de novo, which has been open little more than a year and came in at the end of the boom that saw more than a dozen banks open their doors at the start of the century. “Someone asked me, ‘Don’t you think you’re a little late to the party?’”

Actually, opening at all in the Mr. A’s building on Bankers Hill proved a bit of a challenge, since the bank planned to open a few days after last October’s wildfires. San Diego Trust opened on Oct. 30 (“with ash still falling around town,” Perry recalls), got down to business in earnest in January, and from an initial $11 million dollar stake has grown its asset base to $53.6 million by the end of the third quarter in September. Deposits were $43.7 million and loans reached $30.2 million.

“We’ll get to an operating profit in the next couple of months,” Perry says, with an asset base in the neighborhood of $60 million to $65 million.

Before helping organize San Diego Trust, Perry managed commercial banking in San Diego for US Bank, which had bought Scripps Bank, where Perry had managed North County lending.

“US Bank wanted to migrate $500 million worth of business to Portland, Ore., and asked me to do it,” Perry says, but a voice in his other ear was whispering to him to start his own bank. At lunch, Regents Bank chief Dan Yates suggested Perry get in touch with California, bank guru Ed Carpenter which led to discussions with former Peninsula Bank president Willette, who was sought by a number of de novos but instead became chairman of the board at San Diego Trust.

So even if he was late for the party, “three years earlier it would not have come together in this fashion,” Perry says.

The CEO wants to build a “private bank with a slant toward real estate developers and investors.” While he’s bullish on San Diego, he doesn’t know if there’s enough of a party in town to satisfy shareholders of his de novo competitors. “Go up to North County, they’re killing each other; how many banks can be in La Jolla? They’re climbing over each other for the same business,” Perry says.

Some of the de novos were formed by senior management teams that have an incentive to build a bank up and sell it, he says. San Diego Trust has no pressure to grow quickly, says Perry, because his relatively young management team is in for the long haul, the bank’s operation is fairly lean (14 employees), and the board and executive management own 40 percent of the stock. “That’s twice as much as any other community bank in town,” he says.