Privately held, family owned community bank with over $500 million in assets, with a substantial commercial real estate portfolio and a small commercial and industrial loan portfolio.

The Bank is headquartered and operated primarily in the suburbs of Chicago.

The Board had recently hired a new head of its lending group and was attempting to work through the troubled loans.

Due to a downturn in the economic cycle, the Bank experienced a steep decline in the realizable value of its loan portfolio and incurred significant loan losses.  Due to the loan losses, the Bank needed to raise additional capital to comply with federal banking regulatory requirements.

Fort Dearborn was engaged by the Bank’s owners to review the troubled loan portfolio and assess the loan loss reserve. 

Fort Dearborn took the following steps to review the Bank’s loan portfolio:

–Fort Dearborn met with senior management and discussed the troubled loan list to develop an understanding of each troubled loan and management’s actions to mitigate additional loan losses; 

–Performed an independent review of each troubled loan to assess loan valuation and estimated loan loss reserves;

–Developed an analysis to quantify the impact of additional loan losses on the Bank’s profitability and regulatory ratios; and 

–Conducted site visits on certain pieces of OREO to evaluate salability.

Fort Dearborn presented the findings to the owners and recommended that additional capital was needed to properly capitalize the bank.

Subsequent to our report, the owners infused additional equity capital into the Bank.

The Bank continues to operate independently.