Boston Safe Deposit Expands in State With Newport Beach as Headquarters : BANKING/FINANCE
The Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Co., a name long associated with blueblood banking services, has launched an aggressive nationwide growth plan with a four-office California operation headquartered in Newport Beach.
The 113-year-old private banking concern, a subsidiary of the Boston Co., also has opened branches in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Palo Alto.
So far, Boston Safe has 113 employees in California, including 33 in Newport Beach. By 1990, it expects to have 407 California employees, including 268 at its West Coast headquarters.
The headquarters also will include a data-processing center that will duplicate records kept at the company’s two Boston computer centers, said Thomas J. Lucey, a Boston Co. executive vice president who heads the firm’s institutional markets group.
The Newport Beach headquarters is Boston Safe’s first major expansion of administrative and operational functions outside of Massachusetts.
Its private banking services previously were confined to Massachusetts. But its mutual funds activities and its institutional management group have had satellite offices elsewhere, including a small Los Angeles office that manages institutional funds.
Although it must adhere to federal banking regulations, Boston Safe is not a full-service commercial bank. It caters to the wealthy by taking deposits, managing funds and making private loans, usually for more than $1 million.
Boston Safe has $16.2 billion in assets, $31 billion in funds under management and $136.1 billion in funds under custody. The custodial function involves carrying out the orders of money managers and accounting for all funds and pension benefits.
The company’s institutional management business increased sharply in California in the last year or two as it became custodian for a host of California municipal and county pension funds and the $42-billion state Public Employee Retirement System fund, the largest pension fund in the world, according to Lucey.
The Boston Co. has been growing rapidly since it was bought in 1981 by what is now Shearson Lehman Hutton in New York. In addition to the California offices, the company plans to open 13 more private banking and institutional fund-management offices throughout the United States--typically in affluent areas.
