Mr. Koch: Charter One is now the 22nd largest bank in the country, having converted to a national bank charter in May 2002. We are headquartered in Cleveland and our retail banking footprint goes from Chicago, where we have a significant presence, through Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester and Albany. We end up in Vermont where we have the number three market share in that state and a small presence in western Massachusetts. Our focus is primarily retail banking and our roots were as a thrift organization in Cleveland. We have been public since 1988 and have had a very good performance record over that time. If you were an initial public offering stock purchaser, your basis in the stock would be about $1.33. Our stock is trading in the $32.00/$33.00 range today. The institution has grown over the years through mergers, primarily with thrift institutions. Our focus today is very much away from a typical thrift, which would be a CD gatherer on the deposit side and a residential mortgage lender on the asset side. We are very focused on growing our core deposits, which we would consider to be checking accounts, first and foremost, followed by money market accounts and, to a lesser extent, passbooks. On the asset side we are rapidly shifting away from a predominance of residential mortgages into other kinds of consumer related products, such as consumer loans and auto loans. We have a commercial mortgage portfolio, a small business lending portfolio, a C&I portfolio and a fairly large leasing company, which does big ticket leasing to Fortune 1000 companies.
TWST: Does that give you an even broader geographic reach?
Mr. Koch: Yes, I mentioned our retail footprint where we have
over 460 branches; the leasing company operates in all 50 states
in the US through loan offices in about six different cities. We
also have a mortgage banking company which does traditional
mortgage banking out of Richmond, Virginia. It operates anywhere
where the retail bank is not ' predominantly east of the
Mississippi ' and its main locations are the mid-Atlantic states
and the Carolinas.
Tickers included in this excerpt: CF
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