BANKING/FINANCE : Thrift Veteran’s Consulting Company Aims to Capitalize on S&L; Experience

Veteran thrift executive Harvey A. Lynch hopes to capitalize on his savings and loan experience and his largely successful efforts at restructuring the failed Pacific Savings Bank in Costa Mesa.

Lynch and three former Pacific Savings executives have formed Consolidated Pacific Group Inc. in Tustin to help companies reorganize operations and develop and implement strategic business plans.

The consulting firm, steeped as it is in thrift experience, plans to work primarily with both healthy and failed S&Ls.; It seeks approval from federal regulators as an approved vendor, which would allow failed institutions to hire the group for a variety of projects.

“What should set us apart is the fact that this group of individuals has performed successfully under the most adverse conditions,” Lynch said. “We have been there; we have dealt with the regulators and the results were good.”

Lynch was an executive at Glendale Federal Savings & Loan in spring 1987, when he was loaned to federal regulators to take over Pacific Savings, which was wallowing in red ink from bad investments.

Under Lynch, the S&L;’s moribund branch network and lending operations were rejuvenated and new products were introduced. Typically, regulators prohibit failed or insolvent institutions from making loans or engaging in new business ventures, but Lynch’s strategy kept Pacific Savings viable until October when Royal Trustco Ltd. in Toronto bought it. It is now part of an operation that the Canadian firm acquired later: the Pacific First Bank system in the Pacific Northwest.

Joining Lynch in the consulting business are former Pacific Savings executives Edward Gotschall, Paul Tuan and Robert Brown. Gotschall was the Pacific Savings’ chief financial officer, Tuan was executive vice president for administration and Brown was asset manager in charge of selling or liquidating unprofitable operations.