Cinco de Mayo may get a lot of attention this week, but Hispanic entrepreneurs have something else to celebrate. Last week the first Hispanic-focused bank in more than 25 years was incorporated in California.
The new institution, tentatively called One America Bank, has support from some of the biggest names in business, both locally and nationally. Board members include Ed Roski, chairman of Majestic Realty Co. and part owner of the Staples Center; George Keiffer, partner at the law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips and past chairman at the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce; Henry Cisneros, former Secretary for Housing & Urban Development and former chief operating officer at Univision; and Sol Trujillo, former chief executive at US West.
“For a Latino-owned, Latino-managed bank targeting the Latino community, this was the time, Los Angeles was the place,” declared Maria Contreras-Sweet, the main personality behind the bank and a former state Secretary for Business, Transportation & Housing.
Most large banks in the Los Angeles market already have programs catering to Hispanic consumers. Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Washington Mutual have translated material into Spanish, hired bilingual and bicultural employees, and launched advertising campaigns to appeal to Hispanics. Simultaneously, they developed services such as cross-border remittances specifically for Hispanic customers.
Even foreign banks have moved into the market. Last year Valley Bank in Diamond Bar changed its name to BBVA Bancomer USA, after it was purchased by a Spanish financial conglomerate that also owns Mexico’s Bancomer. In 2001, Citigroup purchased Banco de Mexico and has leveraged it to reach Mexican-Americans.
To carve out some space for itself, One America will work on the intersection of two Hispanic values: family and entrepreneurship.
“Our focus will be to build wealth for families who are here trying to build a legacy, but haven’t because they never had a close relationship with a banker,” said Contreras-Sweet. “This will be a higher touch institution.”
“The bank will be different in that it will focus on the huge Hispanic market in a way that has not been done for decades,” explained Keiffer. “I’ve had a number of requests to be on bank boards. This is the only one I would agree to join.”
The idea of starting a bank first came to Contreras-Sweet when she helped with outreach for the 2000 Census. The experience convinced her that Hispanics were forming businesses and accumulating wealth without the benefit of succession or financial planning.
Census 2000 confirmed that Hispanics in Los Angeles County numbered 4.2 million, or about 45 percent of the entire population, but didn’t tell a lot about their economic status. However, recently released data from the 2002 Economic Census shows that the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside area hosts 277,908 Hispanic companies with total sales of $35.1 billion. By 2010 “Hispanics will account for 9.2 percent of all U.S. buying
