Oklahoma is ‘great place' for top loan advisory firm
Oklahoma is ‘great place' for top loan advisory firm

By Don Mecoy Comments 0
Published: September 14, 2008

First Financial Network, which touts itself as the nation's top loan sale advisory firm, is based in Oklahoma City for one simple reason — Penn Square Bank.

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John Morris, First Financial Network chief operating officer, and Bliss Morris, First Financial Network president/chief executive, sit Friday in the First Financial Network boardroom in Oklahoma City. BY PAUL B. SOUTHERLAND, THE OKLAHOMAN

First Financial to market loans

First Financial Network Inc. will market more than $360 million in performing commercial real estate loans on behalf of Indymac Commercial Lending Corp. a former subsidiary of the failed IndyMac Bank, the company announced Friday.

The Office of Thrift Supervision closed the Pasadena, Calif., bank July 11, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was named conservator.

The company expects to handle sales of more than $1.3 billion over the next two quarters.

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The collapse of Penn Square Bank in 1982 triggered a banking meltdown and brought an army of federal bank officials to Oklahoma.

FDIC loan sales specialist Bliss Morris stayed to found First Financial in 1989.

Adding employees

First Financial prospered through the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s and continued to grow after that business waned by evaluating and marketing the loan portfolios of healthy banks.

The recent difficulties of the financial sector have boosted the fortunes of First Financial, which last year signed a five-year contract with the FDIC to evaluate, market and sell assets of failed banks.

The company has added nine full-time employees in recent months to bring its full-time staff to 25, Morris said.

"I've never laid off an employee in 19 years,” Morris said. "I'm proud of that.”

Why is Oklahoma the ideal location?

That staff occasionally is bolstered with contract employees, she said.

Only a handful of companies nationwide are true competitors to First Financial, Morris said.

Chief Operating Officer John Morris, who is married to Bliss Morris, said Oklahoma is an ideal location for the company. He said that customers sometimes are surprised to learn where First Financial is headquartered.

At a debt conference in Germany, John Morris said European bankers assumed he was from New York. When he told them he worked in Oklahoma City "they said, ‘Where's that?'”

"I explained to them about Penn Square Bank, it's kind of the ground zero of this whole business,” John Morris said. "It's a great place to do business. It's cheaper. It's centrally located. We give clients on the sale side that Oklahoma friendly.”

‘It's a big process'

Bliss Morris said that the company simply understands the business in a way that would be difficult for even the largest financial firms to try toduplicate.

"When you're selling 4,000 loans at a time and you've got 90 days to do it cradle-to-grave from the time you know you're going to do it, you start getting credit files shipped in and you begin to process all those loans, valuing them,” she said. "We actually handle all the funding, we do all the accounting on that and ship all those out to the buyers.

"It's a big process.”