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

Company: Mechanics Bancorp
Filing Date: 2025-05-09
Form: 425
Chunk 25
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. Mark Mason

Right. Great. Residential construction, you mentioned it earlier in your comments. What are your plans for that lending group? C.J. Johnson Our plans are to keep doing what you're doing. Basically, we think it's run pretty well. We'll always take a hard look at it, get smarter on it, but I think it's well run by Don and we'd like to be in that business, It's the right size, $300, $400 million in a $23 billion bank I think is appropriate, given it is riskier, but we like that business. We like the granularity of the lending. I think it's very long tenured relationships that do come with some good core deposits which fits our philosophy and it provides us diversification of product, different interest rate profile with floating rate that we like, short duration loans. So it's something we'll continue and we're excited to add. Mark Mason We have a Bank at Work/Affinity program that started in the mortgage group many years ago, where we offer our affinity partners who want a full suite of bank at work products. But also – the starship product of the program is a discount for their employees on mortgages of half the normal origination fee or 50 basis points. We also offer that to our employees as an employee benefit. It's enabled us to bank more people. We can't give them a free benefit for their employees and, to grow deposits and so on. What are your thoughts, maybe you don't have them yet on continuing those programs? The largest program right now also is with Kaiser. We mentioned them earlier in the context of your benefit programs, that's great. We have a long term alliance with them. Talk about the history there. What are your thoughts? C.J. Johnson I might let Daniel do most of the talking here, but we do today do discounts for our employees on mortgages. We've studied it a bit -- the affinity business that you have -- and it makes sense as a vertical to try help grow the bank. Offering affinity programs, whether it's on deposit products or mortgages or et cetera, to try to get solid business from larger commercial customers that can then offer it to their employees. So absolutely something we're looking at and we do a little bit of it today and I'll let Daniel build out. Daniel Watt Definitely interested in that business. It was something we were already working on, not just from a mortgage and consumer learning perspective, but bank wide. So absolutely