CRAIN'S: ShoreBank’s new managers outline plans under Urban Partnership Bank

Click pic for bank's website

Well ShoreBank has been dead since August and their successors at Urban Partnership Bank is making even more plans for the future of that institution. More from Crain's:

The two former First Chicago Corp. executives running the successor to failed ShoreBank have more modest aims than the bank’s co-founders did. Rather than looking to construct a model of inner-city lending for other cities in the U.S. and abroad, the new managers simply want to create a profitable bank that makes its existing communities better and more vibrant.

In an interview Tuesday, Urban Partnership Bank Chairman David Vitale and CEO William Farrow outlined plans to transform the old ShoreBank from a real estate-focused institution into a more full-service, conventional bank providing modern deposit and payment services to consumers and loans to a wider array of businesses.

The two have no plans to increase the size of the bank, which used $140 million in capital from many of the largest financial firms in the country to purchase the assets and deposits of ShoreBank after regulators seized it last August. But that doesn’t mean the bank, with $1.4 billion in assets, can sit still, since a healthy percentage of those assets are bad loans that will need to be replaced by new loans.

In the meantime, they want to position Urban Partnership Bank as a lower-cost competitor to currency exchanges and other cash-checking outlets, providing transactional services like prepaid cards to the many South and West side consumers who don’t have bank relationships.

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This approach might be necessary especially in the Chatham neighborhood which while may not be home to many Currency Exchanges, from what I can tell, but could use more services for the businessowner/entrepreneur.