Bank Awaiting Regulatory Orders : FDIC: CommerceBank will be told to reduce bad loans, shore up capital. The Newport Beach institution is confident it can meet regulators’ conditions.

CommerceBank, awash in red ink last year, said Friday that it will be slapped by regulators with an order requiring it to reduce its bad loans and maintain certain levels of capital.

The order, to which the bank is consenting, also requires the institution to hire qualified management. While no officers are expected to quit, the bank said, it will look for a new chief executive to fill the spot vacated by the departure in January of Clyde H. Gossert.

The order has not yet been signed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., but the bank has cleared the contents of the order with the agency for public release, said Raymond C. Dellerba, the bank’s president.

Dellerba said he wanted to get the information out because he is postponing the annual shareholders meeting, scheduled Thursday, until Aug. 20 so that the bank can rewrite its proxy statement to include details of the FDIC order.

The bank can comply with all of the terms and conditions of the order, Dellerba said. Its ratio of capital to assets, for instance, is 6.69%, which exceeds the 6.5% ratio required by the order. And its ratio of bad loans to total loans stood at 2.9% at the end of March, an improvement over the 3.3% ratio at the end of December.

Dellerba pointed out that the order is based on the FDIC’s financial examination of the bank last fall. Both real estate loans and commercial loans soured last year during the recession, causing the bank to post an annual loss of $3 million.

Since then, he said, the bank and its holding company, with total assets of $329 million at the end of March, have returned to profitability, posting first-quarter net income of $231,741.

“The FDIC has been very fair, and this was a fair order to commit to,” he said.

The order is expected to become final soon, he said.