California Federal Bank, the second-largest banking institution based in the state, plans to expand its operations in Orange County by going after new customers and adding more branches.
Later this year, Cal Fed plans to open a full-service branch in Westminster, catering primarily to minorities in the area.
“There is a large Asian as well as Hispanic community there,” said Karin Kostich Guerrero, a Cal Fed vice president. “We want to serve that segment.”
The new branch is set to have eight employees to start and could add more staff depending on the growth of the branch. Workers are expected to speak Spanish and Vietnamese as well as English.
The full-service branch is set to supplant a smaller, in-store branch in Santa Ana that closed in December. The Santa Ana branch mainly catered to Hispanics. The new branch is about nine miles from the former Santa Ana office.
The new branch allows Cal Fed to offer more services, from lending to investments, according to Guerrero.
“There are some limitations that you have when you are in-store,” she said. “You have a limited amount of space to operate in so you cannot offer all the services that you would in a more traditional branch.”
Guerrero projected the Westminster branch could have deposits of $20 million within three to five years.
Cal Fed will be among the few large banking institutions in OC that is setting up a full-service branch to service the minority population here. In the past couple of years, the thrift was busy consolidating its operations in OC after merging in 1998 with Golden State Bancorp Inc., parent of Glendale Federal Bank. Cal Fed has 29 full-service branches in Orange County and two smaller offices. In California and Nevada, the thrift counts some 350 branches.
Cal Fed is looking at other locations in OC besides Westminster. The bank has more than $2 billion in deposits in the county.
“We are also looking at an Irvine location,” Guerrero said. “The weird thing is we don’t have a location in Irvine. The preference was that we would have, through acquisition, acquired a location in Irvine.”
Guerrero did not specify when Cal Fed would be opening a branch in Irvine. Other parts of South County also are on the thrifts’ radar, she said.
“I would like to see branches in Rancho Santa Margarita, Ladera Ranch, Foothill Ranch. The whole of South County is growing,” she said.
Cal Fed now has branches in Aliso Viejo, San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Mission Viejo, Laguna Niguel, Lake Forest and Laguna Hills. n
