JPMorgan Chase & Co. is hiring banking executives to help build its commercial banking unit in Irvine.
Chase has recruited three bankers from the local offices of rivals San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co., Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp and Charlotte, N.C.-based Wachovia Corp., which was bought by Wells last year.
Leading the team is Paul Kaufman, market president for Chase in Orange County who moved here from Chicago earlier this year.
Kaufman said he plans to hire another commercial banker by the end of the year.
Chase hopes to grow to about 15 senior bankers in the next three years. The commercial banking unit will have about 70 workers after adding support staff.
“We’re here to grow,” Kaufman said.
The unit will cater to larger companies with business lines of credit, payment collection, cash management, retirement plans and global services.
Chase is using last year’s takeover of failed Seattle-based Washington Mutual Inc. as the basis for its commercial banking push here. It acquired the assets of WaMu for $1.9 billion after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized the former savings and loan.
Absorbing WaMu gave Chase branches and the county’s third-largest share of deposits at about $8 billion, according to 2008 government data.
But it’s building business banking from scratch as WaMu had focused on gathering consumer deposits and making home loans.
Kaufman declined to comment on whether the bankers brought accounts with them from their former employers. As a relatively new player in the county, Chase relies on hiring people who already have connections here.
Kaufman said he received about 45 applications for the jobs and ended up hiring bankers who had an average of 15 years experience.
“They came because they wanted to take part in our growth,” he said.
Chase now is the No. 3 bank operating here after Wells Fargo and Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America Corp., which each had more than $14 billion in deposits as of late last year. They also dominate commercial banking here.
Chase is looking for customers among businesses with yearly revenue ranging from $5 million to $100 million.
So far, the unit has been lending, but Kaufman didn’t give specific figures.
Wealth management and investment banking are other services Chase plans to expand locally, making it more of a direct competitor of Wells and BofA. Wells still is in the early phases of absorbing Wachovia, which was taken over by the government last fall.
WaMu had about 1,900 employees in the county, mostly working from 60 branches that were rebranded with the Chase’s blue octagon sign in March.
The conversion of WaMu’s branches won’t be complete until the end of the current quarter when its computer system is upgraded to handle the expanded offerings it has with Chase.
Andy Carney, who previously worked in New York for WaMu, is heading the local branches for Chase. He works from Irvine and replaced WaMu’s George Kaye, a senior vice president who left earlier in the year.
Most WaMu executives stayed on with Chase taking newly created roles, as was the case with Pablo Sanchez, who oversees the company’s Western region as a senior vice president in Los Angeles.
During the past year Chase has shed about 600 local workers, mostly those with overlapping jobs, such as data entry and accounting.
