Dominic Ng has served as chief executive of East West Bank for more than three decades, overseeing the bank’s transition to a public company 25 years ago, growing its assets substantially and working to maintain the bank’s founding mission of providing services to underserved communities.

The Pasadena-based bank is the second largest bank, and largest independently owned bank based in Southern California by assets, sitting at $74.5 billion as of the third quarter, but when Ng first joined the institution, he recalled it being ranked in the thousands nationally. At that time, the bank had about $600 million in assets. 

Even Ng said he is astonished by the institution’s transformation, saying he never anticipated East West to attain such heights.

A few acquisitions in the 1990s first jumpstarted this climb to the top for East West, allowing the bank to expand its operations beyond the confounds of Los Angeles.

Around the same time, the bank began doing international trade finance, particularly in Asia – even before becoming a commercial bank in 1995 – in a move that Ng called “a monumental pivot” for the institution.

The bank still has deep roots in Asian communities, most recently illustrated by its role in launching Filipino grocery chain Seafood City’s digital marketplace, which officially kicked off last month. Ng said he is excited to further grow the bank’s foothold in the Philippines through the partnership.

Another big step for the bank was becoming publicly traded in 1999.

As a part of the bank’s transition to a public company, Ng started the Spirit of Ownership program where every East West employee – full time or part time and regardless of job title – receives the same amount of stock in the company every year. Currently, that translates to $2,000 in stock annually.

“What is very important for me is that every single person gets stock, and every single person gets exactly the same amount,” Ng said. “That’s the whole idea about the Spirit of Ownership is that we all are shareholders of East West Bank. I, as CEO, work for every one of my employees because every one of them is a shareholder at East West Bank.”

Ng attributes the bank’s sustainable growth in part to this program as he believes it empowers employees to perform their best as the bank’s success is their success. For employees who began accumulating stock at the start of this program when a share cost around $5, the impact of this program can be vast as East West stock sat at $101.69 as of Thursday.

Recent strides

East West came out favorably in its earnings report for the third quarter, which was released Oct. 22, reporting increases in loans, deposits and net interest income, as well as a $2 billion increase in assets from last quarter.

“We didn’t really miss any numbers. And in fact, (in some areas) we did better than what we originally anticipated,” Ng said.

Just before releasing its third quarter earnings, the bank also celebrated the launch of Seafood City’s digital marketplace app, an intiative the bank partnered with the brand on.

Seafood City, headquartered in Pomona, is the nation’s largest Filipino-founded grocery chain with 16 locations in Southern California, plus storefronts in Chicago, Hawaii, Northern California, Nevada, Seattle and Texas.

Through the new app, users based in the Philippines can send U.S.-based loved ones products from Seafood City. The grocery chain also partnered with local brands in the Philippines so U.S. customers can purchase products from Filipino brands to send to folks living in the Philippines.

With this marketplace also comes an expansive rewards points system where users can earn credit to apply toward other Seafood City partners including Philippine Airlines.

The app also includes banking services with East West, allowing users to pay bills, wire money and more.

Ng explained that a more affordable system to wire money between the U.S. and the Philippines is much needed, as many Filipino Americans still financially support their families overseas.

Recent research from Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the central bank of the Philippines, backs up this sentiment. It found that overseas remittances in 2023, which added up to $37.2 billion, made up about 8.5% of the Philippines’ GDP last year, with 40.9% of that coming from the U.S.

“Wire transfer is a key element of their day-to-day activities,” Ng said. “And so now Seafood City came up with this app to wire the money without paying a fee and East West Bank is part of that whole process.”

‘Financial bridge between the East and the West’

Investing in the AAPI community has been top of mind for East West since its founding in 1973, at a time when Chinese immigrants were struggling to receive loans and critical banking services.

Over the next couple of decades, as the bank mitigated the gap in services this community was experiencing and as decreasing racial tensions led mainstream banks to no longer drastically turn Chinese Americans away, Ng wanted to evolve and adapt the bank’s mission.

“I felt like I had a bigger vision: that we, East West Bank, are going to be the financial bridge between the East and the West, and we’re going to help our new immigrant customers to reach further,” Ng said.

Identifying Los Angeles as “a natural seaport” and “dominant force” in the import and export business, Ng said tapping into international trade finance was a “natural transition” for East West, given its L.A. presence and large AAPI customer base.

This includes import/export financing, assisting customers with overseas investments, helping companies based in Asia in connecting with U.S. opportunities and vice versa. 

“U.S. businesses who want to explore opportunities in Asia want to have a bank that understands the landscape in Asia,” Ng said.

Without much competition in this arena, Ng said East West is the “go-to” bank when it comes to Asian markets. He also identified this as a key factor in how the bank was able to double its assets in the last decade without any M&A activity.

In light of former President Donald Trump being again elected to the White House this month, Gerard Hoberg, a professor of finance and business economics at USC Marshall, said East West’s operations could be affected in a few ways. Trump has recently proposed a 10% tariff on all American imports and a 60% tariff on products made in China. 

“The most direct and perhaps largest impact would be reduced banking needs across international borders, an area that might be core to East West,” Hoberg said, adding that this could result in less business.

On the other hand, the demand for more complex services may go up, he said, referring to companies needing to “redesign supply chains and trade flows” which may trigger changes to the currency used and the locations in which trade takes place.

“Helping companies navigate change could create more income on complex services but this would likely be a short term boost and might not generate long term continued revenue as the supply chains will settle down,” Hoberg said.

Based on these proposed tariffs, another potential source of income Hoberg identified for East West is assisting companies who want to move their operations across borders with selling certain assets or properties.

Diversifying its customer base

Along with its service to AAPI groups, Ng said he also wanted to see East West prioritize other historically underserved demographic groups including Latinos, Black Angelenos and women entrepreneurs, to name a few. With the bank’s reputation for focusing on the AAPI community, Ng said this push required diligence.

“We work really hard to develop our capability to do what I call ‘very strategically targeted outreach’ to all the different ethnicities and to promote East West Bank as a champion of diversity,” Ng said.

In addition to outreach, opening up the bank’s customer base involved showing rather just telling. One way the bank acts on this is through financing construction loans and providing credit enhancement for bonds to assist the completion of affordable housing projects in the city.

“We’re able to (help house) Latino families, African American families and some of the other ethnicities that actually move into these affordable housing projects,” Ng said. “Then when they see the construction loan was financed by East West Bank, now they have a good impression about who we are.”

Along with diversifying its customer base on the personal banking side of things, East West strives to work across commercial industries including entertainment, clean tech, biotech, private equity, health care and sustainability financing.

While East West expanded across California in San Diego, the Silicon Valley and San Francisco, as well as in Seattle, Boston, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Las Vegas, Ng said Los Angeles will always be a priority.

“This is our home turf,” Ng said. “And we make all the decisions here in L.A.”