What's Our Mission?

Back in September I came across an opportunity to participate in a fantastic educational program at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. The program, which spanned roughly 90 hours over the course of 10 days, started with an in depth discussion on the mission of companies.

When I returned to the office I immediately began to explore our mission. According to Professor John M. De Figueiredo, mission is a broad statement of what the organization ultimately wants to become. Based on that definition, I sat down and began a formal exercise to define our formal mission statement.



The factors that I and my team evaluated in creating the mission statement included:

• What is the vision of the Bank?


• What will the Bank's business performance look like in the next three to five years if all we do is the same things, ONLY BETTER?


• Where does the Bank need to head in the next five to ten years to be a strong performer?

After many revisions and discussions with staff and the Bank's Board of Directors, the following Mission Statement of Pan American Bank emerged:

"To transform and empower Latino communities through banking relationships built on trust, service, respect, communication, and guidance."

At the end of the process everyone was proud of our success and of our new mission statement.