Meet Our Executive Team

Rick Soukoulis, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

As Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Rick Soukoulis is the primary steward of Western Bancorp’s vision for the retail and wholesale direct mortgage lending bank. It is Soukoulis’s seasoned entrepreneurial spirit and savvy business know-how that is the driving force behind Western Bancorp and many past revolutionary and evolutionary financial companies in Silicon Valley.

For nearly 30 years, Soukoulis has been a trendsetting innovator in real estate finance. Starting out as a loan officer in Silicon Valley, he later formed his own mortgage brokerage company called America's Funding Source ("AFS") in 1987. Realizing that mortgage professionals could be more efficient and provide better service if supported by technology, he set out to create the first high speed electronic muliti-lender loan search engine, known as the “Electronic Clearing House” and soon licensed the technology to mortgage brokerage companies. The financial media took notice and in 1995, he was contacted by The Charles Schwab Corporation, which entered into a joint partnership with Soukoulis to create Schwab's Personal Mortgage Broker. In early 1999, AFS changed to LoanCity and set forth to provide mortgage professionals in 48 states with an award-winning technology, AU 2.0 Automated Underwriting product. AU 2.0 earned Mortgage Technology's top honors in 2006. LoanCity funded 8.5 billion in mortgages yearly. It was Soukoulis forward vision and drive that built LoanCity to reach the company’s 2005 ranking in the top 25 of all nationwide wholesale lending in the United States. Sensing the need to provide a better loan source for Californians, Western Bancorp was soon born. As a mortgage bank, Western Bancorp focuses on creating hundreds of unparalleled loan products to specifically fit the needs of California borrowers.