STUART, Fla., July 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Seacoast Banking Corporation of Florida , a bank holding company whose principal subsidiary is Seacoast National Bank, announced today its inclusion in the prestigious Sandler O'Neill's Bank and Thrift Sm-All Stars' Class of 2006. Sandler O'Neill, an investment banking firm headquartered in New York that specializes in financial institutions, selected 34 publicly traded banks and thrifts with a market cap of less than $2 billion which the firm believes to be the top performing in the nation.
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"We are honored to be selected into Sandler O'Neill's Sm-All Stars' Class of 2006," stated Dennis S. Hudson, III, Chairman and CEO of Seacoast. "This recognition reflects the success of our relationship based business strategy, our focused expansion into high growth markets, our continued growth in loans and our low cost deposit funding."
Sandler O'Neill's evaluation of the 573 small-cap institutions measured absolute performance based on eight financial variables: EPS growth, loan and deposit growth, ROAE, nonperforming assets to loans plus OREO ratio, net charge-off ratio, reserve to nonperforming assets ratio, and Tier 1 risk-based capital ratio. The 34 companies named are those that Sandler O'Neill believes could potentially be among the next crop of leading mid-cap banks and thrifts, uncovered before they are widely followed by Wall Street.
Headquartered in Stuart, Florida, Seacoast has approximately $2.5 billion in assets and ranks among the largest publicly traded community banks in the state of Florida. With 41 offices from Orlando to Palm Beach, its markets include some of the wealthiest and fastest growing areas of the nation.
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