Marc Langland, Arnold Espe.

• Author: KANE, ROGER
• Position: Northrim Bank - Brief Article

When Marc Langland moved to Sitka in 1965 for a job with National Bank of Alaska, one of the first people he met was Arnold Espe. Soon after their first meeting, the two men became friends and cultivated a relationship that would last for more than 30 years, until Espe's death Nov. 9, 1997.

"We always thought pretty well together and complemented each other in the way we did things," Langland said.

In the three decades their relationship spanned, Espe and Langland fished and hunted together, worked together, and as it turned out, helped shape the economic landscape of Alaska. Among their achievements, they will be remembered for establishing a successful commercial bank where others had failed.

With the landscape of 1980s-Alaska littered with dead and dying banks and savings and loan associations, most financial analysts looked at Alaska and saw a depressed financial landscape. Espe and Langland, however, saw a wide-open market. They also saw economic upturn on the horizon and worked diligently to fill the hole left by 13 failed financial institutions.

After two years of planning, the two innovative bankers made a public stock offering and secured the funding to finance Northrim Bank. They opened the state-chartered bank on Dec. 4, 1990.

By early 1998, the bank had grown into three financial centers and posted more than $300 million in assets. Later that same year, Bank of America executives announced their intention to cease operations in Alaska. Espe and Langland seized the opportunity to expand and purchased Bank of America's eight branches. They funded the buyout with a secondary public offering in May of 1999 that netted Northrim $19.6 million. Half of the stock-sale proceeds were used to pay for the branches. The other half kept the bank's capital ratios within federal guidelines for well-capitalized institutions.

That purchase gave Northrim a retail customer base that enhanced its already stable commercial foundation and exposed the bank to a broader segment of Alaska's population.

Today, Northrim boasts more than $500 million in assets and has eight branches in Anchorage and one each in Eagle River, Fairbanks and Wasilla.

Remarkably, Northrim was not the first bank Espe and Langland founded and made successful.

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