Published December 2003

Coastal surges forth
2003 saw bank surpassing
$100 million in assets, naming new president

Snohomish County Business Journal/KIMBERLY HILDEN Coastal Community Bank chief executive Lee Pintar (left) and President Mark Duffy are both alums of Olympic Bank, which had its Everett headquarters in the Colby Avenue building now leased and occupied by Coastal. “I made a deal for this building because I knew the history of it,” Pintar said. “I’ve sort of made a full circle,” noted Duffy, who started as a teller at Olympic.

By Kimberly Hilden
SCBJ Assistant Editor

Lee Pintar was supposed to spend 1996 away from the banking industry.

Pintar, a longtime Everett banker, had just left Wells Fargo following its merger with First Interstate Bank. He was, as he put it, “going to take a year off.”

But he soon was approached by a group of community members interested in starting a bank of their own. Intrigued by the idea, he was back in the banking business within a month, “working on the bank” from his kitchen table.

“The bank” turned out to be Coastal Community Bank, which opened the following year in Everett with a little over $8 million in capital.

Less than seven years later, Coastal Community Bank has surpassed $100 million in assets, employs nearly 40 people in three banking offices and has established a bankwide charitable giving fund that provided grants to 13 Snohomish County nonprofit organizations this year.

This fall, the bank’s shareholders voted to create Coastal Financial Corp., a bank holding company. It’s a move designed to open doors to future opportunities, said Pintar, the bank’s chief executive officer and chairman of the board.

“We’re enhancing our capital to allow us to grow even further and ... evaluating the future,” Pintar said.

Part of that future involves Coastal’s next generation of leadership, with Mark Duffy having assumed the role of president from Pintar as well as that of chief operating officer earlier this year.

Duffy, formerly of EverTrust Bank, arrived at Coastal in July 2000 as the bank’s chief credit officer and senior vice president — with the opportunity for more leadership.

“So, over time, there have been more and more duties that I have taken over,” Duffy said, with the summer announcement of his presidency a formalization of that transition.

As Coastal’s chief credit officer, Duffy continues to oversee the bank’s lending operations, with a staff of lenders pounding the pavement, making calls and earning referrals.

According to reports filed with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Coastal increased its net loans by 45 percent between December 2001 and December 2002, from $50.3 million to $73 million. As of June 2003, net loans had reached $93.4 million.

The majority of Coastal’s lending business, 86 percent, is commercial, Duffy said, with 64 percent of that made up of commercial real estate loans.

What has helped Coastal grow its loan portfolio is its ability to “think outside the box,” Duffy said.

“I know it’s a phrase everybody uses, but a lot of times, with even other banks in town, if there is one thing that makes them reject (a loan) but it still is an overall good deal, we look beyond it. We look at the whole picture,” he said.

“And we’ve got a great staff, that’s been the big thing,” he said.

Staff is key not only in lending, but in expansion, said Pintar, pointing to Coastal’s two branch locations, which opened within eight months of each other in 2000-01.

“Our philosophy has been to find a banker and build him or her a branch, and that’s how we got into Sultan and Monroe,” Pintar said.

For Coastal’s Sky Valley branch in Sultan, it was finding branch manager Donna Marshall, a longtime resident of the area with more than two decades of banking experience.

And for Monroe, it was finding Nancy Breuer, who had been the local branch manager for Washington Mutual for 13 years and was considering a move, Duffy said.

As for future expansion, that will depend on Coastal’s profitability, Duffy said. “Should we achieve certain financial goals in 2004, we will open a branch toward the end of the year,” he said.

Along with bricks-and-mortar facilities, Coastal has tried to make banking convenient for customers with an online branch (www.coastalbank.com) and the use of KeyBank’s ATMs, for which Coastal pays a fee, Duffy said.

“We can offer any service that any bank can do. What we do, instead of forming a department, we do it through vendors,” Pintar noted. “We don’t have our own computer department, but we buy a service that allows us to offer the online branch.”

That same type of partnering enables Coastal and its employees to donate thousands of dollars annually to Snohomish County nonprofit organizations through the Coastal Community Bank Employee Giving Fund.

Administered by the Greater Everett Community Foundation, all of the fund’s administrative costs are paid for by the bank, with 100 percent of employee contributions going toward local causes, Duffy said. Employees, working through a committee of co-workers, help decide where the money will be used in the community.

During its first two years, all of Coastal’s employees have volunteered to contribute to the fund through payroll deductions, said Kaye Phinney, a fund organizer.

“When it’s 100 percent of our employees and they are giving from their heart, it’s a big thing for us,” Phinney said.

Nonprofit agencies receiving grants from the fund in 2003 include the Arts Council of Snohomish County, Catholic Community Services, the Children’s Museum in Snohomish County, Christmas House, Community Health Center of Snohomish County, EquiFriends, North Everett Little League, Providence Sexual Assault Center, Protect-A-Child Today, Senior Services, Snohomish County Center for Battered Women, Special Olympics and Sunshine Physically Handicapped Foundation.

“It’s been pretty exciting,” Phinney said of the fund’s impact on recipients. “For a couple of the (agencies) we have given to in the past ... it was almost like start-up money.”

The fund has been and continues to be an opportunity for Coastal to build a richer relationship with the community it serves, Duffy said.

“We want to be involved in the community as a bank on the financial side but also on the giving side,” he said.

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