Mr. Cappelli: Sterling is a banking and financial services firm headquartered in New York City. We conduct business in the New York metropolitan area and elsewhere in the country. Sterling has been in business for 80 years and has assets in excess of 2 billion. While our primary activities are business focused, we operate a franchise of retail branches as well. We believe Sterling is quite unique, thanks to our ability to provide our clients with high-touch community bank service along with an extensive product portfolio. Sterling provides traditional commercial lending, asset-based lending, factoring, payroll funding, trade finance, leasing, select commercial real estate financing and deposit, trust and cash management services. In addition, we have a residential mortgage company where we primarily create and sell the mortgages to investors. So if a customer needs a particular type of banking product or service, we have it all. All of Sterling's products are managed from respective units headed up by experts in that particular field. So we fully understand these various lending activities at a very high level.
TWST: What are the key factors that differentiate your bank from its competition? Is it the business focus, the geography, quality of your assets? What might some of those factors be?
Mr. Cappelli: With what's going on in the banking community today, I'd say that the quality of our assets is notable. We do not have a significant portfolio of commercial real estate loans, and so we've been able to avoid meaningful exposure in this area. We also don't have exposure in other high-risk areas, such as home equity and auto loans or credit cards. So we have been able to avoid some of those pitfalls. The banking activities in New York City are concentrated primarily in the major institutions, and we've been able to carve out a niche in small and middle-market banking activities, and have thrived there. We are very hands-on. We give a high level of personal service and can react quickly to our client's needs. Small and middle-market businesses are usually entrepreneurial. We have found these business owners, who have worked hard to build their companies, respect and enjoy having the kind of a relationship Sterling offers as opposed to a revolving door of bank officers. Here's where we have distinguished ourselves from the larger institutions - these clients do not want to continually have to train and orient new banking officers in relation to their business activities.
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