Cars are big in California,and United PanAm Financial Corp. makes money on them.
Newport Beach-based United PanAm makes, buys and services loans to car buyers with less-than-perfect credit. The company’s United Auto Credit Corp. arm buys loans from used car dealers.
For the 12 months ended June 30, United PanAm had revenue of $126 million, up 155% from three years ago.
That was good for the company to debut at No. 12 on the Business Journal’s list of fastest-growing companies.
Even with the growth, changes are afoot at United PanAm. Once billed as the state’s largest Hispanic-owned savings and loan, United PanAm recently sold off its thrift, which it used to fund auto loans.
The lender ran into trouble earlier this year when regulators warned that it had “unacceptable” risks in its auto loans.
So United PanAm spent the better part of this year selling off the deposits of its thrift and exiting the savings and loan business.
That closed a chapter in the history of the company, which was founded after Chairman Guillermo Bron and other investors bought the assets of Pan American Federal Savings Bank from the Resolution Trust Corp. in 1994.
Now United PanAm strictly is an auto financier, similar to Irvine-based Consumer Portfolio Services Inc. It relies on investors to fund its auto loans, instead of deposits.
In September, United PanAm did its first sale of auto loans packaged as securities, selling $420 million worth to Wall Street investors.
Also last month, United PanAm struck up a $200 million warehouse line of credit with Deutsche Bank AG.
Bron, a wealthy Los Angeles businessman, owns more than two-thirds of the company.
Earlier in Bron’s career, he worked for junk bond king Drexel Burnham Lambert as managing director of corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions.
At Drexel, Bron said he did 32 deals with a total value of $4 billion.
Bron’s path to Drexel started with a stint at the World Bank’s International Finance Corp., which lends to businesses all over the world, and consulting work with businesses in Costa Rica and a major commercial bank in Mexico.
In the 1990s, he and Daniel Villanueva, a former kicker with what was the Los Angeles Rams, started private equity investor Bastion Capital Fund LP in Los Angeles, where he’s a director and principal shareholder.
Bron’s also a former director and investor in Telemundo Communications Group Inc., now part of General Electric Co.’s NBC.
United PanAm isn’t without quirks.
The company was threatened with delisting from Nasdaq in August after it delayed the filing of its second-quarter results.
The company said it needed more time to restate results for 2002 and 2003 after determining it needed to add provisions for loan losses of $2 million to $3 million for 2002.
United PanAm said it was in compliance with the exchange’s rules in September.
In June, the company withdrew a planned offering of 2.2 million shares, saying only that the offering was “not in the best interest” of the company or Pan American Financial LP, which owns 70% of United PanAm and is controlled by Bron.
