Ed Raice, a former president of EMC Mortgage Corp., the nonprime mortgage arm of Bear Stearns, has raised private equity money and is in the hunt for a bank, preferably one near his home in Connecticut.
Raice, in a brief interview with National Mortgage News, confirmed that he has an interest in buying First Bank of Greenwich, a $55 million asset FDIC-insured depository that has been in business for about three years.
He declined to identify his backers. His interest in returning to the banking sector comes at a time when several Congressional panels are closely scrutinizing Wall Street's role in the credit and subprime crisis. However, Raice left EMC and Bear back in 2002, long before subprime lenders began to think of loan underwriting as something they could avoid. EMC was headquartered in Texas.
