Pioneer Bancorp Chooses CPA as Its Chief Executive : Banking: Outgoing president moves to a newly created post. He concedes pressure from regulators influenced move.

Pioneer Bancorp, which has long been squabbling with regulators over its commercial real estate loan portfolio, said Thursday that it has hired Thomas R. Timmons as president and chief executive of the company and its subsidiary, Pioneer Bank.

Timmons replaces Richard Boyle, who moved up to the newly created position of vice chairman.

Boyle, the company’s third-largest shareholder, said directors had been planning for some time to find a day-to-day operator for the Fullerton bank so that he could spend more time on marketing, business development and public relations.

“I found myself losing contact with customers, and most of them are ones I brought in,” he said.

But Boyle acknowledged that pressure from regulators, who are critical of the bank’s commercial real estate lending, hastened Pioneer’s decision to hire a new executive officer.

The appointment of Timmons, a certified public accountant, also follows a recent trend at community banks of moving accountants into the top operating slots. Regulators, as well as many shareholders, like to have executives with strong financial management credentials take charge of banks that are experiencing problems.

That’s especially true of banks that need to shore up capital, their final cushion against losses. Usually, such banks reduce their size to comply with rules requiring capital equal to at least 6% of assets.

Pioneer, which had grown to nearly $220 million in assets, dropped to $200 million in assets at the end of the year and the downsizing gave it a strong capital ratio of 8%. The bank’s bad loans stood at 7.4% of all loans--more than double the 3% level that draws criticism from regulators--and caused most of the bank’s $1.2-million annual loss.

Timmons viewed his immediate job as partly working out problem loans and partly reviving the bank’s growth in a depressed economy.

“We haven’t shut down (commercial real estate) lending, but we’re certainly very discriminating in a market like this,” Timmons said. “There are no quick solutions, unless we want to dump the bad assets, and that’s not our plan.

“Banks go through the same things that growing companies do,” he said. “They go from entrepreneurial at the start and then hit a growth curve where they need a more rounded management team. The work at Pioneer got beyond the point of what one person could do.”

Since graduating in 1972 from Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., Timmons has worked mostly in the banking industry, first as an outside accountant for banks and then as an executive at banks in Illinois, Utah and California.

He spent three years as president of Bank of Utah and helped to turn around the Salt Lake City bank’s fortunes. He also was president of Marine National Bank in Santa Ana from mid-1986 to mid-1987.