Mr. Haligowski: ITLA Capital is the holding company for our two operating subsidiaries, Imperial Capital Bank and Imperial Capital Real Estate Investment Trust. Imperial Capital Bank is a California state-chartered industrial bank that has been in business for 28 years. We changed its name in January 2000 to Imperial Capital Bank from Imperial Thrift and Loan Association. It was formerly owned by Imperial Bank and was subsequently sold to a Japanese consumer finance company based in Osaka, Japan. I became the CEO 10 years ago in 1992 when the bank developed difficulties. I was brought in by the Japanese shareholders to turn around the organization and to position it for sale. Our efforts were successful. We were able to take the bank public in October 1995. Subsequently, ITLA Capital Corporation was established as a holding company and was listed on the NASDAQ. When we went public, we were a 500-million organization with approximately 137 associates and 50 million of paid-in capital. Today we have about 150-million in capital, and total assets of approximately 1.5 billion, we still operate our much larger business with around the same number of associates.
TWST: Could you expand on the breadth of services you provide
today?
Mr. Haligowski: We're a company that's in the commercial real
estate finance sector. We handle basically all three facets of
commercial real estate lending: our core business, which is
middle-market business, or commercial real estate loans in the
2-7 million range, the upper end of the market with loans in
the 10 million-plus range and in addition, the lower end of the
market with average loan sizes of about 500,000. I like to
compare our market strategy to that of a cola product. We start
with a strong brand presence, our core commercial real estate
business, which is original cola. And we've been able to
extrapolate that brand equity down to the lower end of the market
and also to the higher end of the market, like caffeine-free cola
and diet cola. In addition our savings operation offers diverse
CD and other products to a large customer base mainly throughout
California via our six savings branches and our Website.
Tickers included in this excerpt: ITLA
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