HISTORY
In late summer 2005, Stephen Fleming, former President & CEO of National Bank of the Redwoods in Santa Rosa, California, and James Woolwine, former CEO & Chairman of Golden Gate Bank in San Francisco, partnered with Belvedere Capital, a successful San Francisco-based private equity firm, to organize a great new business bank. This would be the first new locally-owned and managed business bank based in San Francisco in more than twenty years.
A highly prominent and successful group of twenty-one Bay Area business and civic leaders quickly came together to form the Founding Organizing Group for the proposed bank. In order to finance both the bank's founding and its applications for state charter, membership in the Federal Reserve System, and FDIC deposit insurance, $2 million was raised as seed capital.
The Bank's Board of Directors was formed from a subset of the Founding Organizing Group. Significantly, six of the eight Directors have prior bank board experience and the other two are highly accomplished in the area of financial services.
Shortly before opening the Bank on July 24, 2006, the Bank completed a hugely successful capital raising campaign. The $35 to $40 million common stock offering was materially oversubscribed and the Board elected to limit the size of the offering to $40 million. These monies, a record amount for a start-up bank in California, were contributed by approximately 375 local investors.
Presidio Bank offers successful small and medium-sized Bay Area businesses--including non-profit organizations, real estate investors and developers, professional service firms, and their owners, partners, executives, etc.--a comprehensive array of commercial banking products and professional services.
Because Presidio Bank is small, it can provide clients the highly-individualized professional service attributed to community banks. And because Presidio Bank has the capital base of a larger bank, it can serve the credit and financial needs of businesses ordinarily too large for a newly-established community bank.
This larger capital base also affords the Presidio Bank all the latest bank technologies, allowing consistent delivery of innovative and customized solutions for its client's growing financial needs.
