East West Bank Brand Guidelines: A 1973 Los Angeles Thrift That Built a Pacific Bridge

Los Angeles, 1973.

East West Bank opened in Los Angeles in 1973 as East West Federal Bank, a federal savings and loan association set up to serve the Chinese American community of Southern California, according to English Wikipedia. The Los Angeles Business Journal described it in July 2010 as the nation’s first federally chartered thrift serving the Chinese-American community, and the Los Angeles Times, carrying a Bloomberg report in August 2023, called it a small thrift that began by catering to Chinese immigrants.

That starting point still shapes how the bank talks about itself. In an interview published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in July 2024, chairman and chief executive Dominic Ng described its mission as “serving as a financial and cultural bridge” and said the bank had seen itself as the bridge between East and West since its foundation. When the bank marked its 50th anniversary in May 2023 with an evening at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, the events trade magazine BizBash reported that the event team framed its story around a time when Chinese Americans were turned away by mainstream banks.

For its first two decades the thrift stayed small. During the savings and loan crisis it acquired Pacific Coast Savings in 1991, which took it to San Francisco, Wikipedia says. In 1992 the board brought in Ng, an accountant who had set up a China business division at Deloitte & Touche, the Los Angeles Business Journal reported; under him the institution became a state-chartered commercial bank in July 1995, so that it could lend more readily to businesses.

Acquisitions, then two shores.

From the late 1990s East West grew mostly by buying other Southern California lenders, several of them also Chinese American banks. Wikipedia lists First Central Bank in 1999, Trust Bank of Monterey Park in 2004, United National Bank of San Marino in 2005 and Standard Bank of Monterey Park in 2006. In 2007 it bought Desert Community Bank in the Victor Valley, which kept its own name rather than switching to East West; the bank agreed to sell it to Flagstar Bank in November 2017, and that sale completed in March 2018.

The larger step came during the financial crisis. In November 2009 East West took over the failed United Commercial Bank of San Francisco in a transaction arranged by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, adding branches in Houston, Boston and Atlanta and offices in Hong Kong and mainland China, Wikipedia says. In June 2010 it took over Washington First International Bank of Seattle in a second FDIC-arranged deal, which the Los Angeles Business Journal called its first acquisition outside California. Ng told the paper that the bank had “always been California driven,” but now had branches in Seattle, Boston, New York, Atlanta and Houston. In 2014 East West bought MetroCorp Bancshares of Houston, which traded as MetroBank.

The Bloomberg report carried by the Los Angeles Times in 2023 described the result as a conduit for commerce between the United States and China. In 2023, after the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank, East West was the largest bank still chartered by the state of California, that report said. The bank’s own August 2025 press release lists its US markets as California, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, New York, Texas and Washington, with further locations in Asia; the holding company, East West Bancorp, is based in Pasadena and listed on Nasdaq.

How regional banks present themselves.

US regional banks tend to present themselves through place. Many carry a state, a city or a region in their names, or keep the name of the town where they were founded long after they have spread across several states. Their identities usually rest on a short wordmark in blue, green or red, set beside photographs of local streets, branch staff, small-business owners and families buying homes. Founding years matter too: several of the banks in this guide trace their roots to the nineteenth century, and their histories are told through the names they have carried since.

Their websites follow a familiar pattern. Pages for checking and savings accounts, mortgages and personal loans sit alongside sections for commercial lending, treasury services and wealth management, so that one brand speaks both to households and to companies. Several of the banks in this guide also run more than one name: local brands kept after a merger, or a single brand carried into new states.

Visibility outside the branch often comes through sponsorship. Ballparks, arenas, theatres and arts seasons have carried bank names, and those names change when banks merge. Annual reports, community reports and investor presentations form a second public record, setting out where a bank operates, which brands it uses and how it describes its history.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — when and where it was founded, which mergers shaped it, and what has happened to its name — and keeps the bank’s own claims separate from what dated sources report. The palettes and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations, not the banks’ own.

Reach Further.

The bank’s public line today is “Reach Further.” Its website’s company page speaks of “building bridges of opportunity” for more than 50 years, and its press releases describe services that help customers “reach further and connect to new opportunities.” Those are the bank’s own words, and they carry the same bridge idea that Ng returns to in interviews.

Much of the brand’s visibility comes from culture rather than advertising. Wikipedia notes that the bank has helped finance films and television series including Everything Everywhere All at Once and Yellowstone. In 2005 it signed the figure skater Michelle Kwan as a spokesperson and bought the naming rights to the East West Ice Palace, a rink in Artesia, California; in 2023 it signed the golfer Rose Zhang. LACMA said in July 2024 that a new multi-year partnership would support exhibitions and education at the museum and include a gift to its building campaign, extending earlier sponsorship of the exhibitions The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China in 2019 and Legacies of Exchange in 2021–22. The bank also keeps the East West Bank Collection, which LACMA describes as bringing together contemporary Chinese artists with artists from other backgrounds.

Its anniversary followed the same pattern. BizBash reported in June 2023 that the 50th-anniversary evening ran across five spaces of the Academy Museum, with a gold carpet, a large “50” display and a preview of a documentary commissioned by the East West Bank Foundation from the filmmaker Evan Jackson Leong about the bank and the Asian American experience.

For a design guide, East West Bank shows how a single founding idea — a bridge between communities and across the Pacific — can carry a bank’s name, its tagline and its sponsorships at once. Compare First Citizens Bank, which bought Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, and Wells Fargo, another bank with deep California roots. For this guide we use a lantern red, a deep slate and a pale gold on rice paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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