Security’s chief defended the banking industry.

Richard J. Flamson III, chairman of Los Angeles-based Security Pacific Corp., said banking’s image is “the most important basic problem facing the banking industry today.” Speaking before a conference of the American Bankers Assn., Flamson urged bankers to become “missionaries” for the industry to counteract recent bad publicity. He also said overall banking profits outpaced those of other industries and attacked critics of bank deregulation as “special interests which want to maintain the status quo for their own benefit.”