Company: MCHB
Filing Date: 2025-05-09
Form Type: 425
Source: 0001518715-25-000085
Chunk: 4

Company: Mechanics Bancorp
Filing Date: 2025-05-09
Form: 425
Chunk 4
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 my wife's a 7th grade teacher in Texas. I've got an eight year old, a five year old, and a two year old little boy, the older kids are little girls, and the boy is a handful, but a lot of fun. And so we've been investing this capital. We've got $1.8 billion all invested in Mechanics Bank, and we continue to pick up talent along the way through many acquisitions. We've now done four acquisitions in this platform, and in each acquisition we've really added a lot of talent to every area at the senior management level, and throughout the bank. I was an Economics major, in college, that's my only degree. My wife reminds me that she's got more degrees than I do, frequently. (laugh from the audience). That's a bit about me. Mark Mason Thank you. Now let's get down to business. Let's talk a little bit about the merger and why Mechanics Bank chose HomeStreet.

C.J. Johnson Sure. We've obviously been around it for awhile. We were very interested the first time around, but why HomeStreet? We see a tremendous franchise here. I think it's something where we thought the branch network, the 56 branches, was extremely complementary to our branch network. We have a 112 branches in California, $14 billion of deposits, but we don't have very many branches in San Diego or L.A. So HomeStreet has a really nice branch footprint there that complements us quite nicely. And then we are very excited to enter the Seattle, Portland, Hawaii markets, markets that are high growth and we could see very clearly from our review and due diligence that while there was some higher cost funding and obviously, you know, struggles with the interest rate environment shifting at the very wrong time, there was a tremendous amount of value in the deposit base, in the retail branches, the commercial bank, the mortgage bank, great multifamily lending businesses, great residential construction business and just generally very similar model to what we do. We have retail bank lending, it's just very similar, and so we thought that would, you know, it's not like we're at a buying a bank that does a totally different niche blending or otherwise it was just a very similar business model and highly complementary markets, and so that was the main reason. Mark Mason Culture is really important to us here at HomeStreet. One of the first things I had to do when coming here was take my own Hippocratic oath and not