MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: CERN/3.0 Date: Thursday, 18-Dec-97 13:08:25 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 18319 Last-Modified: Friday, 08-Nov-96 07:13:26 GMT Wealth Management





MISSION STATEMENT

From the family or investor just starting out to the retired professional seeking complex trust and estate planning, wealth preservation and transfer services, The Pacific Bank has all of the latest tools and services to meet your financial needs. As you progress through various stages of wealth creation, accumulation and preservation, we provide a team of financial overseers who will work with you every step of the way.

As a bank we want to be the best in class at providing wealth accumulation, wealth management, wealth protection and wealth transfer products and services. This challenge to ourselves, to be viewed as the very best, is what drives and motivates us.

Prologue

"The toughest thing about being a success is that you’ve got to keep on being a success.
Talent is only a starting point in this business."
-Irving Berlin

THE IMPORTANCE OF MONEY LIES in the fact that it links the present and the future," John Maynard Keynes once noted. This is true in investment planning. If you have not thought much about planning your future finances with all of the changes and opportunities in the investment world, it’s time to start.

How much will you really need to retire, to finance an education, or to protect your family in the event of an emergency? We have two credos that drive us at The Pacific Bank. 1) People need our help. 2) We want to view ourselves as the Premier Solution Provider to help solve people’s investment and financial services needs....In essence, their Business Partners.

How much capital will it take to generate the necessary additional income? How will you amass it? A sound investment plan will answer these questions. Effective investment planning is step-by-step problem-solving. You know what you have today; you know your present cost of living and liabilities. The challenge is to determine, first, how much you will need on hand to live comfortably in later years and, second, the best investment strategy for achieving it. Also, through our Private Banking Division how much liability management do you need to assist you in achieving your long-term investment goals? In addition, through our Trust Division, how do you grow, protect, preserve and transfer these assets for your family and loved ones in the future?

Like most institutions, Wealth Management at The Pacific Bank starts with managing assets of $500,000 or more...WRONG!

There are disciplined processes and tested tools to draw on in this exercise, taking into account inflation, taxation, your benefits, saving and spending patterns, debt and the typical behavior of the world’s investment markets. Employing all of these tools on your behalf may be the most important function we can provide you.

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply willing is not enough; we must do."
- Goethe

It goes much further than this, however; perhaps the most important aspect of all of the planning dynamics is forcing all of us to focus and constantly scrutinize for the best solutions. To evaluate exactly what you want with the proper risk horizons is critical.

As your partner, we use the latest tools and analytics to help you establish these horizons. Then we act from there and constantly monitor and readjust if necessary, due to market changes.

In this day of The Information Age, there are numerous sophisticated tools and research that we can apply both through ourselves and our established investment partners. We are a major institution. This gives you a considerable competitive edge. A new generation of investors will need help in making better, more informed decisions. For them, as well as our more experienced clients, we will constantly develop new tools, products and services to help them achieve their goals. One of the major components to your success will be consistency over a long-term action plan. Our basic values can be summarized below:


These values are even more important today as this arena becomes increasingly more complex.

One final note: No investment plan can ever guarantee outcomes. Like all aspects of investing, investment planning is probabilistic; it deals in likelihood, not certainty. But knowledge and discipline put the odds seriously in your favor. That is our goal and fundamental vision: helping our valued clients build, protect and transfer their wealth.

Thank you for your interest in The Pacific Bank.


PRIVATE BANKING DIVISION

Throughout history, visionary, yet highly disciplined and eminently practical Private Banking houses have helped their clients build successful enterprises and commensurate wealth.

Introduction

The Private Banking Division draws upon the expertise in all areas within The Pacific Bank to assist affluent individuals and privately and closely held companies in serving their financial needs. Our Private Bankers have years of banking experience to help you manage the diverse elements of your finances. Our Officers’ close personal involvement with the client’s needs provides a proactive relationship that benefits the client by providing the best solutions to financial issues. Our mission is to provide exceptional, superior service and attention to detail, in this age when so many larger institutions through cost-cutting or downsizing are moving away from premier service.

Concierge to the Other Parts of the Bank

Many of our business clients are also individuals with substantial private assets. Accommodating and expediting the special financial requirements of such individuals is one of the Bank’s strongest specialties. The Bank can assist in business and personal needs with full banking and trust services including international banking and import/export financing.

Credit

Our compact, less cumbersome size, together with our strong capital base, allows us to provide our clients with timely, creative and competitive solutions to their credit needs. Our Private Bankers have years of banking experience and the understanding to assist in special financing needs of our clients. Here the loan officers can devote the time and attention necessary to truly learn and appreciate each client’s individual needs. The mission of our lending officers is to use their broad experience to structure financing that not only meets current requirements, but also accommodates long-term objectives. This continuity of service from a lending officer who has become completely familiar with the clients financial needs is a primary objective of The Pacific Bank.

Our lending facilities include special individual lines of credit, secured and unsecured, and a variety of customized lending arrangements. Additionally, we tailor credit facilities specifically to meet your unique situations.

Over the years, each officer has developed a deep reservoir of contacts in a wide variety of businesses throughout the community. In the course of "networking", our officers frequently discover and arrange advantageous transactions for our clients that would otherwise not be made.

Deposit

In addition to the traditional deposit services, we offer a variety of certificates of deposit and Wealth Management Deposit Accounts to maximize return on idle funds and customized market interest accounts.

With the cooperation of The Pacific Bank’s investment officers, we can provide long-term investment options including both FDIC insured and non-insured products, taxable and non-taxable, specifically designed to meet your needs. This close attention to your asset management and credit needs allows you to maximize the efficiencies of your money.


TRUST SERVICES

Trust: A confidence reposed in one person...for the benefit of another...respecting property which is held by the trustee..." (Black’s Law Dictionary)

In mid-1985, the Bank formed its Trust Division whose business is divided among individual, pension and institutional accounts.

The establishment of the Trust Division was largely in response to a growing client demand that trust services be offered by the Bank. Today, the Trust Division provides highly personalized financial services to individual and corporate clients seeking an alternative to the trust relationship many have come to expect at other banks.

In addition to the Bank’s clients requesting that trust services be offered, other factors prompted the Bank to enter the trust business. Among them was a concern that, because of several bank mergers and the pronouncement of major policy changes, some San Francisco trust departments had (1) ceased to exist, (2) significantly increased the price of their services or (3) become very impersonal or inconvenient in their client dealings. It was felt, therefore, that in the Bay Area a need existed for a traditional trust department, where the client beneficiary would be accorded a level of personal service and attention that previous generations have enjoyed and relied upon.

Client Philosophy

In attempting to explain the trust business and just exactly what we do for beneficiaries, we often over-simplify our role by merely saying that we are in the "people" business. It is our responsibility to serve a variety of individuals and institutions with distinctly different personalities and needs in accordance with written instructions which are found in wills, trust documents and contracts.

Over the past few decades, we have witnessed with concern the shifting of priorities in many trust departments with the result that one can inquire whether trusts are being administered for the beneficiaries’ benefit or for the benefit of the bank trustee. The Pacific Bank's commitment to the client beneficiary is to satisfy his or her personal and financial needs in a distinctly different manner.

Investment Management

We believe that flexibility is the cornerstone of a successful relationship, and nowhere is the element of flexibility more important than in the area of investment philosophy, strategy and asset management.

As an example of flexibility, The Pacific Bank has elected to offer its client beneficiaries a wide range of investment choices. That is, an investment portfolio can either be managed by the Bank or the Bank will be advised and assisted in the management of securities portfolios by independent investment counseling firms. For fiduciary account relationships, the Bank at all times retains full fiduciary responsibility and does not delegate its investment authority should independent investment advisors assist in portfolio management decisions. Fiduciary accountability is maintained at every level of a trust relationship.

Internal Portfolio Management

The Wealth Management Group, in its capacity as a fiduciary or agent, provides professional investment management services for both individual and corporate clients. Prior to any investment decision being implemented, a client’s specific needs are identified, an investment objective is established, investment guidelines are prescribed and the client’s total understanding of the process is assured. Performance of these duties imputes to The Pacific Bank that reasonable care has been exercised and principles of loyalty have been adhered to by the Bank.

Investment portfolios are managed on a discretionary basis by a Senior Investment Officer with extensive skills and experience. Echoing the Bank’s commitment to flexibility, the investment officer may enter into a co-management agreement with an independent investment advisor to aid in the more complex management of a particular securities portfolio. The Bank fully recognizes the need to be on the leading edge of the investment process in the constantly changing and ever-demanding investment environs.

In addition to serving individual clients and fiduciary relationships, the Bank offers liquidity management for corporate clientele. The proactive investment of liquid cash balances can benefit significantly a company’s near term cash flow strategies and generate a premium return when compared to more passive investments. A combination of well defined investment guidelines and strict compliance to them can produce rewarding results.

A broad range of investment alternatives are made available to our clientele to satisfy differing criteria. In all circumstances, an emphasis on investment quality and value is stressed. The investment management team is disciplined to achieve reasonable expectations; increasing a client’s tolerance for risk can only be done by the client, not the portfolio manager.

Account Administration

Earlier in this discussion, we expressed the view that the basic business of a bank trustee is that of being in the "people" business. Having just concluded our explanation of managing investments, we now turn our attention to the "people" side of our business, the administration of trust accounts. We believe we can best serve the trust beneficiary by focusing on those certain areas in which trust departments used to be recognized as having a high level of expertise: the interpretation and implementation of trust documents, the exercise of discretion and the safe custody of investable assets.

We believe that assigning one individual, dedicated to the daily financial affairs of a relationship, is both practical and desirable in order to enhance the quality of service we wish to provide. The Pacific Bank’s trust officer is that individual and is the primary beneficiary contact when dealing with our bank. This officer is comparable in talent and knowledge to a seasoned department supervisor. For consistency and assistance, each trust officer has a qualified backup, capable of assuming administrative account responsibilities, who works closely with the trust officer during all phases of account administration.

Securities Custody and Settlement

By means of contractual relationships, The Pacific Bank is a participant in the Depository Trust Company, one of two national depositories which holds most securities in book entry form and settles security transactions. This participation improves our control over transactions and our service flexibility by enabling us to settle most security transactions through a national depository. We have separate on-line, real time computer compatibility with the depository, and are able to transmit or receive information and determine our asset positions at any time.

With respect to clients’ assets, all depository eligible securities are held at the Depository Trust Company in its nominee name. Those securities not eligible for depository safekeeping are maintained in our vault, registered in our nominee name. Government securities eligible to be kept in book entry form are held at the Federal Reserve Bank.

We settle securities transactions for accounts in our normal method, which is to debit a client good funds and pay the broker on purchase settlement date, as well as credit a client good funds on sale settlement date.

All trades are settled on the basis of delivery versus payment. Our policy on called bond items is to guarantee credit to the account of good funds on call date if we have actually received or should reasonably be expected to have received notice of the call. Accounts are credited with good funds on payable date for all income items.

Reporting

We provide monthly portfolio valuations and statements of transactions for each client’s account, showing the month’s activity in chronological order. In addition, we can provide cash balance reporting as client needs dictate, either orally or by hard copy, or both.


CONCLUSION

Reaching The Vision

The Pacific Bank has the long-term strategic plan of becoming a valuable full service resource for families, companies, and individuals who want to take control of their financial future. We have developed the tools to help people meet increasingly complex financial objectives like planning and investing for retirement, care of elderly parents and planning for the education of children. We are uniquely positioned to help people build, protect, and transfer their wealth.

The Pacific Bank is stronger than ever as we approach the turn of the century. We are clearly focused on customer-driven growth. We have the resources, the dedication to quality, and the vision to play a growing role in how our valued clients prepare for the future.

One final thought. Please don’t hesitate to contact us and let us know your thoughts on how to do an even better job for you. Some of the most innovative and creative products and services we have started and areas we have augmented, have been a direct result of proactive communications from our clients. As we partner together for your successful future, your valuable ideas and input give us a competitive edge in serving you. We value your input.