Lila Plake
August 13, 2007
Saints work on special teams errors
August 15, 2007
MidSouth Bancorp, Inc., the parent company of MidSouth Bank, has been named one of the country’s top performing small capitalization banks by the investment banking firm Sandler O’Neill + Partners, L.P.
MidSouth Bancorp is one of only 24 banks and thrifts to achieve the prestigious Sandler O’Neill All-Stars – Class of 2007 status. It is also the first time the Lafayette-based bank holding company has been recognized since the inaugural list was published four years ago, according to Alex Calicchia, the firm’s chief marketing officer.
Last year, 34 institutions made the cut. The 2007 list includes nine alumni from the 2006 class.
MidSouth was the only Louisiana bank to make the list.
Calicchia said in a news release MidSouth Bancorp was selected from a field of 610 publicly traded banks and thrifts with a market cap of less than $2 billion.
In compiling the list, Sandler O’Neill analyzed growth, profitability, credit quality and capital strength. That screening methodology eliminated 96 percent of the companies being evaluated, Calicchia noted.
The Class of 2007’s performance metrics are “outstanding,” according to Sandler O’Neill. The bottom-line results delivered by each of the firms are markedly better than the industry as a whole.
Specifically, in the last 12 months, the All-Stars team’s deposit growth and loan growth were 20.6 percent and 23.9 percent, respectively, compared to 7.5 percent and 9.9 percent for its peers, Calicchia explained.
“What Sandler O’Neill aims to do is get the jump on helping investors uncover the next generation of leading mid-cap banks and thrifts, in essence hinting at who they may be before they are discovered by Wall Street and the rest of the world,” said MidSouth Bancorp President and Chief Executive Officer C.R. “Rusty” Cloutier. “This is an exciting opportunity to have the respected firm shine the spotlight on us, a bank it has never before covered in its research reports.”
“It puts us in a new arena, and we plan to maintain the integrity of the list by continuing to outperform our peers in every way possible,” he added.
MidSouth Bank is a community-oriented operation that focuses primarily on offering commercial and consumer loan and deposit services to individuals and small and middle market businesses. It has one site each in St. Mary, Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes. A Cut Off location is slated to open this month.
