Tamara Gurney is the chief executive and founding president of Mission Valley Bank, a Sun Valley-based community bank that opened in 2001. She sat down with the Business Journal at the Runway at Hilton Woodland Hills/Los Angeles for a power lunch to discuss her career.
Tell me about accounts receivable, which has become a huge product line for the bank. The accounts receivable product is a product to bridge cash flow gaps. A business owner has to make payroll, has to pay rent, has to do all these things while they’re selling their product, and they may not get paid on that product for 60 to 90 days…Accounts receivable will essentially purchase those invoices and advances them the money, and we collect on it when the buyer actually pays that invoice, and then everything settles up. That program has grown 200% in 18 months. Are there any upcoming regulation changes on your radar? There’s always regulation in our industry, and it just seems to continue to be more and more onerous, in particular, for small businesses like ours. Regulations start… with the behemoths, the 16 largest banks in the country. Unfortunately, once they’re implemented, they trickle down to smaller banks, and I keep trying to tell regulators that…when you look at Wells Fargo Bank, Bank of America and Mission Valley Bank, the only similarity between us and any of them is the word ‘bank.’ Our business models are completely different, and we need to be regulated differently. In the last year and a half, we’ve seen some big banks close and others merge. How has that affected Mission Valley Bank? We’ve had access to a number of prospective employees that are displaced… and clients as well, because they’re unsettled when their bank has failed or merged into another bank… Unfortunately, people don’t seem to rationalize the fact that Silicon Valley Bank was the 16th largest bank in the country… They categorized it as a smaller bank and seemed to migrate away from smaller, regional banks. So a lot of the deposits, a lot of the liquidity, went to the ‘too big to fail banks,’ and community banks like ours have struggled to maintain liquidity to keep the lending doors open. Looking forward, are you looking to grow organically or acquire other banks? In order to continue to grow deposits, we know we have to expand geographically. So we’re looking at where our clients come from outside of San Fernando Valley, which is our core market… We are evaluating the San Gabriel Valley and the South Bay area… If it made sense, we would look at an acquisition, but our growth right now has been organic.