A yen for Florida banking

By JEFF HARRINGTON

© St. Petersburg Times, published September 18, 2000

Maybe something got lost in the translation.

When bankers from Yamagata Shiawase Bank journeyed from Japan to Florida earlier this month, they asked the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce to steer them to a similar community bank so that they could compare procedures and policies.

They wound up having a 21/2-hour chat with the leaders of First Commercial Bank of Tampa.

Talk about comparing apples and yen.

First Commercial, with a lone branch on Kennedy Boulevard, has $71-million in assets and $62-million in deposits.

Its Japanese counterpart has 68 branches, $5.6-billion in assets and $5.1-billion in deposits.

Yamagata sent more senior executives on the junket to Florida (26) than First Commercial has employees (23).

"When they gave us their (deposit breakdown), we saw $5.1-million and then realized it said billion," said Grant Vreeland, assistant vice president at First Commercial. "We kind of wondered why they wanted to find out how we're doing things when we're so much smaller."

Turns out that the two banks do have some common culture, he said. Both banks send their managers out to companies in the community to learn first-hand how their customers do business. "I guess they're still classifying themselves as a community bank," Vreeland said.

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