Bank of the West 2006 Annual Report Download - page 5

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Don J. McGrath,
Chairman and CEO
March 1, 2007
better serve large customer relationships in major markets,
and our Agribusiness and Real Estate Industries bankers are
also extending their presence with new office locations.
The past year was also devoted to making newly acquired
product lines readily accessible across our entire network,
and to rolling Bank of the West products out in new territory.
Bank of the West’s strategy for the insurance business,
for example, is to build market-by-market capacity by
acquiring independent agencies to distribute products from
our Fargo-based BW Insurance Agency. We now have 60
formerly independent agencies under the BWIA brand. We
will continue to acquire insurance agencies and offer
insurance products to both our consumer and commercial
banking customers across our franchise.
Building upon the Commercial Federal Bank acquisition,
we expanded our mortgage business with a 75% increase
in mortgage consultants. We made mortgage application
and loan processing more efficient with technology im-
provements. Despite a soft residential real estate market,
the Omaha-based division experienced a 56% increase in
loan application volume in 2006, resulting in a year-end
mortgage portfolio that exceeds $10 billion.
We also advanced our infill strategy in 2006, with the
opening of new branches in Idaho, New Mexico, Oregon
and Minnesota. In Omaha, we completed construction of
the Bank of the West Business Park by mid-year to
accommodate our growing administrative and back office
support units.
C O M M U N I T Y S U P P O R T
The bank’s community affairs function helps stimulate
economic health in the communities we serve; our B.E.A.R.
Plan improves our ability to accomplish this by extending
more authority to the local community level. A $6 million
charitable grant-making and community events program
ensures that we support human service, educational and
economic development nonprofits. Community affairs also
works to ensure that our products, from mortgages to
microcredit, from church loans to small farm and business
loans, are made available to lower-income communities,
organizations and individuals throughout our footprint.
M A N A G E M E N T T R A N S I T I O N
Two key, long-term vice chairmen of the bank retired
in 2006. Doug Grigsby, Vice Chairman/Finance for Bank
of the West and Chief Financial Officer of BancWest
Corporation, left after nearly three decades of commitment
to the growth of the bank. Thibault Fulconis, a veteran
of our shareholder BNP Paribas, joined us in December to
assume these positions.
Vice Chairman Steve Glenn, for many years our Chief
Administrative Officer, retired in the spring. Both Doug
and Steve contributed immeasurably to the success of
the bank.
To ensure concentrated focus on implementation of the
B.E.A.R. Plan, we created a new role, elevating J. Michael
Shepherd, our former General Counsel and head of risk
management, to President and Chief Operating Officer.
He manages all activities of our customer-facing business
lines.
To sustain Bank of the West as a high performance
institution requires a tremendous amount of commitment
and effort from nearly 11,000 hard working employees,
and they deserve my heartfelt thanks and appreciation.
We also continue to owe our success to the strong support
of our shareholder, BNP Paribas.
A strong business model, sharpened focus and our
expanded geographical franchise all point to a promising
future. Our B.E.A.R. plan, when fully realized, will ensure
that we continue to provide high-touch, personalized
service on a much larger scale, fulfilling our brand promise
and differentiating Bank of the West as the bank that “gets
bigger by acting smaller.”