Fife bank continues to prosper

By Meghan Erkkinen

Fife Free Press
merkkinen@tacomaweekly.com
Published on: October 09, 2008

Even as banks across the nation struggle to keep alive, many local institutions continue to thrive.

Fife Commercial Bank is one such institution. In a quarterly report for the period ending June 30 of this year, the bank ranked at the top among all institutions based in Washington state. Top-ranked Fife Commercial Bank and City Bank in Lynwood both received a 16.4 percent return on equity (ROE) – one of the strongest measures used to show a bank’s performance.

“We do well because our clients do well and our clients continually bring us business,” said Jim Davis, president and CEO of Fife Commercial Bank. “We prosper with our clients.”

Fife Commercial Bank serves businesses from

Mt. Vernon to Olympia. It is a small bank in comparison to others – it has around $90 million in assets. In comparison, the recently bought out Washington Mutual Savings Bank had more than $300 billion in assets.

Fife Commercial Bank is not unfamiliar with high marks, according to Davis. It usually ranks among the top three or four in the state. He predicts the institution will continue to do well, in spite of the economic downturn.

“I think our client base is very strong, very mature. They’ve been in business a long time and I think they’ll do fine through this downturn we’re seeing,” he said. “They’ll survive and they’ll do well but maybe they won’t hit the highs they’ve made in the last four or five years. (In turn,) our profitability won’t probably be quite as strong.”

In a way, smaller banks are shielded from some of the issues bigger financial institutions are facing right now, Davis added.

“I think we’re smaller and we didn’t get involved in some of the bigger concentrations that the bigger banks got involved in,” he said. “We didn’t get into subprime mortgages. We didn’t take on some of the big developers. We’re smaller so we couldn’t take on some of the larger projects.”

Of the more than 80 banks on the list, Fife Commercial Bank is one of only three that has seen above a 15 percent ROE. More than half of the banks on the list received a less than 10 percent ROE and more than a dozen saw negative returns.

Overall, though, Davis said he thought community banks were a good place to put money.

“We are still out doing the same kind of business we did 12 months ago. We still have money to loan and we’re still lending it,” he said. “The community banks in our area and Fife Commercial Bank are a pretty safe haven right now to keep your money. I think we’ve dodged some of the bullets of the bigger guys.”

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