The Bank is headquartered in Dallas, with primary banking offices in Austin,
Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio, the five largest metropolitan areas
of Texas. All of our business activities are conducted through the Bank. We
have focused on organic growth, maintenance of credit quality and recruiting
and retaining experienced bankers with strong personal and professional relationships
in their communities.
We serve the needs of commercial businesses and successful professionals and
entrepreneurs located in Texas as well as operate several lines of business
serving a regional or national clientele of commercial borrowers. We are primarily
a secured lender, with a majority of our loans being made to businesses headquartered
or with operations in Texas. At the same time our national lines of business
continue to provide specialized lending products to businesses throughout the
United States. We have benefitted from the success of our business model since
inception, producing strong loan growth and favorable loss experience amidst
a challenging environment for banking nationally.
While the Texas market continues to be central to the growth and success of
our company, we have developed several lines of business, including our mortgage
finance, mortgage correspondent aggregation, homebuilder finance, insurance
premium finance and lender finance lines of business, that offer specialized
loan and deposit products to businesses regionally and throughout the country.
We believe this helps us mitigate our geographic concentration risk in Texas.
We launched a correspondent lending program, mortgage correspondent aggregation
("MCA"), to complement our mortgage finance warehouse lending program.
Through our MCA program we commit to purchase residential mortgage loans from
independent correspondent lenders and deliver those loans into the secondary
market via whole loan sales to independent third parties or in securitization
transactions to government sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae, Freddie
Mac and Ginnie Mae.
Drawing on the business and community ties of our management and their banking
experience, our strategy is to continue building an independent bank that focuses
primarily on middle market business customers and successful professionals and
entrepreneurs in each of the five major metropolitan markets of Texas as well
as our national lines of business. To achieve this, we seek to implement the
following strategies:
Targeting middle market businesses and successful professionals and entrepreneurs;
Growing our loan and deposit base in our existing markets by hiring additional
experienced bankers in our different lines of business;
Continuing our emphasis on credit policy to maintain credit quality consistent
with long-term objectives;
Leveraging our existing infrastructure to support a larger volume of business;
Maintaining stringent internal approval processes for capital and operating
expenditures;
Continuing our extensive use of outsourcing to provide cost-effective operational
support and service levels consistent with large-bank operations; and
Extending our reach within our target markets and lines of business through
service innovation and service excellence
We offer a variety of loan, deposit account and other financial products and
services to our customers.
Business Customers. We offer a full range of products and services oriented
to the needs of our business customers, including:
commercial loans for general corporate purposes including financing for working
capital, internal growth, acquisitions and financing for business insurance
premiums;
real estate term and construction loans;
mortgage finance lending;
mortgage correspondent aggregation;
equipment leasing;
treasury management services;
wealth management and trust services; and
letters of credit.
Individual Customers. We also provide complete banking services for our individual
customers, including:
personal wealth management and trust services;
certificates of deposit;
interest-bearing and non-interest-bearing checking accounts with optional features
such as Visa® debit/ATM cards and overdraft protection;
traditional money market and savings accounts;
loans, both secured and unsecured; and
Internet banking.
Lending Activities
We target our lending to middle market businesses and successful professionals
and entrepreneurs that meet our credit standards. The credit standards are set
by our standing Credit Policy Committee with the assistance of our Bank’s
Chief Credit Officer, who is charged with ensuring that credit standards are
met by loans in our portfolio. Our Credit Policy Committee is comprised of senior
Bank officers including our Bank’s Chief Executive Officer and President,
our Texas President/Chief Lending Officer, our Banks Chief Risk Officer and
our Bank’s Chief Credit Officer. We believe we maintain an appropriately
diversified loan portfolio. Credit policies and underwriting guidelines are
tailored to address the unique risks associated with each industry represented
in the portfolio.
Our credit standards for commercial borrowers reference numerous criteria with
respect to the borrower, including historical and projected financial information,
strength of management, acceptable collateral and associated advance rates,
and market conditions and trends in the borrower’s industry. In addition,
prospective loans are also analyzed based on current industry concentrations
in our loan portfolio to prevent an unacceptable concentration of loans in any
particular industry. We believe our credit standards are consistent with achieving
business objectives in the markets we serve and will generally mitigate a portion
of our risk. We believe that we differentiate our Bank from its competitors
by focusing on and aggressively marketing to our core customers and fitting
our products to their individual needs.
We generally extend variable rate loans in which the interest rate fluctuates
with a specified reference rate such as the United States prime rate or the
London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and frequently provide for a minimum floor
rate. Our use of variable rate loans is designed to protect us from risks associated
with interest rate fluctuations since the rates of interest earned will automatically
reflect such fluctuations.
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