$70 Million O.C. Bank’s Goal in IPO

One of Orange County’s budding business banks is hoping to raise nearly $70 million in a stock offering later this year.

Pacific Community Banking Group, a Laguna Hills-based bank holding company, filed an initial public offering to sell 4.3 million shares of common stock for between $15 and $16 a share, according to documents filed Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Most of the money will be used to complete Pacific’s previously announced acquisitions of two Riverside County banks, Bank of Hemet and Valley Bank.

The two banks would operate as subsidiaries of Pacific Community, which was founded about 18 months ago and has no branches of its own.

Pacific Community would receive only about $3.3 million of the total offering. Most of the rest would go to shareholders from the two Riverside banks, according to the filing. Sutro & Co. is the underwriter.

E. Lynn Caswell, chairman of Pacific Community and a board director of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, is not selling any stock in the offering, the filing shows. Caswell could not be reach for comment Friday.

Bank analysts said Pacific Community’s goal of raising nearly $70 million is ambitious for a small bank in Orange County, where the average initial public offering raises much less.

“It’s a large number, but, then again, the money is going (to pay for) the acquisitions,” said Gary Findlay of Anaheim-based Findlay Cos., a bank consulting firm.

Pacific Community plans to merge the two subsidiaries, which have a total of 11 branches and about $340 million in assets, into a single company under the name Bank of Hemet.

The holding company then will use the Valley Bank name as a springboard to open new branches in Orange County.

Pacific Community was founded in 1997 to focus on bank services for small- and midsize businesses.