It you want to start a bank, it helps to play golf.
William Im is looking to form a Buena Park bank to serve the Korean community and is tapping his golf buddies as the co-founders and main investors.
But Im’s business partners aren’t just leisurely duffers: one is the past president of Los Angeles-based Hanmi Bank, two run import-export businesses and two are doctors. An accountant, an attorney and another local businessman round out the founders.
Im is the former chief executive of Los Angeles-based Wilshire State Bank and has been in banking for 30 years. He’ll be chief executive of the new bank, which is set to be called Unity Bank.
“Many of us play golf together,” Im said. “We are friends, and most of them I used to know with Wilshire State Bank.”
Im said he got the idea to start the bank after he left Wilshire State and took some time off.
“I decided to take some rest, but I saw an opportunity that wasn’t being taken advantage of,” he said.
So Im said he gathered his troops and set out to start a bank focused on OC’s sizable Korean business community.
“There is a growing Korean population in Orange County,” said Grace Wickersham, a senior consultant with Carpenter and Co., the Irvine investment bank and consulting firm that is helping Unity with the application and start-up process.
“The Asian community is growing in Orange County,” Im said. “As demand grows it is natural that banks come.”
According to Wickersham, there are 150,000 Koreans living in the county and few banks that focus on small Asian businesses.
Im chose Buena Park because it has a large Korean population and is close to Fullerton, La Mirada, Cerritos and Santa Fe Springs, which are areas the bank hopes to target.
“(Buena Park) is kind of a point between south LA and north OC, and we don’t have many independent banks in that area,” Im said.
There are other Asian banks with branches in Orange County, including Hanmi Bank, but Unity Bank hopes to bill itself as the only Korean-focused bank based in the county.
For now, Unity Bank’s founders have to put the golf clubs down to plow through the regulatory process of starting a bank, which can take 60 to 120 days. Pending approval, Unity Bank hopes to begin its capitalization campaign. Im said he expects to raise about $6 million. Forty percent of the bank’s capital is set to come from the founding directors. The rest could come from the founders’ network of friends and associates, according to Wickersham.
“The organizers have a circle of associates, and feel they can raise the rest of it from them,” Wickersham said. Im expects the bank to open its doors next summer.
Along with Im, Unity Bank’s founders are: Dr. Chul Chang, a dentist; Kimo Chung, an accountant who lives in Cerritos; Michael Hyun, an import-export business owner; Dr. Myong Cynn, a physician; Yong Kim, a Buena Park businessman; Young Oh, who runs the Alondra Golf Course and is a former director of Hanmi Bank; David Won, an attorney; and Shin Yoo, an exporter and importer of golf clubs.
The bank plans to have several employees fluent in Korean and familiar with Korean traditions, but Im said he plans to decorate Unity just like any other bank.
“We would like to entertain the other communities as well,” he said. “We do not want to have too exotic of a feeling.”
Unity Bank plans to be a commercial bank with an international division to help financing trade with Asia.
“The Korean community has been very supportive of banks that provide the extra amounts of service, and especially those knowledgeable in foreign trade,” Wickersham said.
The bank filed its application on Sept. 15, the beginning day of the Olympic Games in Sydney, where North and South Korean athletes marched arm in arm. Wickersham called the timing “a bit sentimental.” n
