Bank of Trade Opens Office Targeting Westminster Vietnamese Community : BANKING/FINANCE

The major centers for Pacific Rim business in California may be Los Angeles and San Francisco, but at least one bank engaged in import-export activities thinks that the Vietnamese community in Westminster also is a hot area.

The Bank of Trade, which opened 16 1/2 years ago in San Francisco’s Chinatown and added a branch in Los Angeles’ Chinatown in 1986, has opened an office in the Asian Garden mall in Westminster. “There’s a large Vietnamese community, and many of those people are importers,” said Gina White, assistant to bank President James T. Riady. “We just felt there was enough of a potential market to warrant a branch.”

The Bank of Trade caters to the import and export financing needs of the Chinese-American and Southeast Asian communities in California, White said.

With its Westminster office, the bank also hopes to improve its retail operations, such as checking and savings accounts, areas that had been a low priority, White said. The manager of the branch is John Chow, the bank’s executive director.

The bank is owned by the Riady family, which heads the Lippo Group, an Indonesian umbrella organization that operates a number of financial-services companies throughout Southeast Asia, California and New York.