Security Pacific Plans Facility in Costa Mesa

Security Pacific Corp., acknowledging Orange County as one of the state’s premier business and residential centers, said Thursday that it intends to establish a regional headquarters facility in Costa Mesa.

The $40-million, 12-story facility, to be built in the South Coast Metro center near the intersection of the San Diego and Costa Mesa freeways, will house about 1,000 employees and will be “our nerve center for the southern half of the state,” said Robert Schack, a senior vice president with Security Pacific National Bank’s commercial division.

The new regional headquarters “underscores the growing importance of Orange County as one of the nation’s business and economic centers,” said Richard J. Flamson III, chairman and chief executive of Security Pacific Corp. and a resident of Corona del Mar.

Security Pacific Corp., holding company for the bank and a number of other financial services units, has only one other regional headquarters, located in San Francisco to serve Northern California.

In the past, the Southern California operations have been run from Security Pacific’s headquarters in Los Angeles.

“But we began looking around, and looking at our strengths, and decided to go where we are strongest. And that’s Orange County,” Schack said.

Security Pacific’s Los Angeles headquarters is still “galactic center” for the financial services corporation, which has $62 billion in assets, Schack said.

But, he added, executives from throughout the company rushed to put in for assignment to the new Costa Mesa regional offices when the decision to build the new center was announced internally.

Security Pacific National Bank, Schack said, has a banking relationship of some sort--including loans and credit cards--”with about one of every three households in the county.” That 33% share, he said, “is equal to or a little better than” the bank’s penetration in Los Angeles County.

Also, one of every five Orange County households considers Security Pacific its primary bank, a spokeswoman said.

Schack said Security Pacific National Bank has 66 branches in the county, with eight more planned to open in the next three years.

In addition, Security Pacific Corp.’s national venture capital operation is headquartered in Newport Beach, and the company’s worldwide data processing, telecommunications and systems processing center, built at a cost of more than $100 million, is in Brea.

And Security Pacific State Bank, a small, one-branch operation acquired three years ago to give Security Pacific Corp. a state banking charter to go with its national charter, is in Irvine.

Although the state-chartered bank has been relatively sleepy in the past, Schack said Security Pacific Corp. intends to use the more liberal provisions of a state charter to enter the fields of bank-marketed insurance and brokerage services.

In all, 3,000 of Security Pacific Corp.’s 20,000 employees in California work in Orange County.