In spring 2008, Dominic Ng was forced to confront some frightening scenarios.

The country’s then-unfolding real estate bust suddenly highlighted two potentially dangerous mistakes by the chairman and chief executive of East West Bancorp Inc. Not only had Ng led his bank company headlong into the construction loan bubble, but he had also compounded the risk by shifting his attention away from operations and toward a search for his successor.

“It was a combination of mistake and timing,” he said. “I stopped attending a lot of day-to-day operation and committee meetings, trying to do the best I could to act like a visionary CEO and just look at big-picture stuff. But just by taking my eyes off the details a little bit in 2006, we were having some challenges in 2008.”

The Pasadena holding company was going to have to take some heavy losses. But Ng moved quickly. Well before his peers began getting a grip on the impending crisis, East West wrote down tens of millions in loans, raised hundreds of millions in capital, performed stress tests, and reappraised its construction and development loan portfolios.

The bank reported a $59 million loss in 2008, its first unprofitable year and a low point in Ng’s career. Because most other banks weren’t taking such painful action at the time, his moves made the bank appear troubled at first. It became a target for short sellers on Wall Street.

But the swift early reaction strengthened the company’s balance sheet through the rest of the crisis. While other banks were swooning in 2009, struggling to assess and write down bad loans – and going into a stressed market to raise money – Ng’s bank was already recovering and had returned to profitability by that year’s end.

The early corrective measures also put the bank on solid footing with investors a year later, making possible Ng’s boldest stroke. In 2009, he raised $500 million in capital and orchestrated the bank’s acquisition of its closest competitor, San Francisco’s failed United Commercial Bank, doubling the size of East West overnight.

“It was undoubtedly one of the best deals to come out of the financial crisis, if not the best,” said Aaron Deer, an analyst at Sandler O’Neill’s San Francisco office.

Today, East West is the country’s largest Asian-American bank with more than $22 billion in assets, unrecognizable from the small savings and loan that Ng took over as a 32-year-old hired gun in 1991. Measured by assets, East West has ballooned to become the second largest bank company in Los Angeles; City National Corp., with assets of more than $23 billion, is first. But if measured by market capitalization, East West is biggest, with $3.5 billion compared with City National’s $2.9 billion.

For those reasons, the Business Journal has chosen Ng as its Business Person of the Year. He will join the newspaper’s Business Hall of Fame at a lunch March 29.

Ng, 53, has built the bank into what it is today by marketing it as a financial bridge between Asia and the United States, its growth driven by commercial lending to U.S. businesses interested in attracting Asian investors or expanding in Asia.

In many ways, Ng’s personal story is one of bridging East and West. He came to the United States from Hong Kong three decades ago to study, with limited English skills but a genuine curiosity about American culture, and never left. Today, he is involved in civic and philanthropic causes dedicated to improving U.S.-China relations. As he takes steps now to find a successor at East West, he figures in the future he’ll continue working to forge those relations. It’s a task, he said, that has become his calling.

“It’s a natural progression. Not only do I think of L.A. as my home, I’ve lived in L.A. longer than any other place,” he said. “But being an Asian bank or being an Asian executive, the challenge is there’s always the perpetual foreigner issue.”

Banker’s persona

Up close, Ng seems every bit the banker. He keeps his slim figure attired in well-fitted suits and his slicked-back hair is so impeccably coiffed it could make Mitt Romney jealous. Ever friendly, he is warm without being effusive, breaking frequently into an easy and quiet laugh. He is cautious about his public persona, often asking for clarifications of seemingly simple questions during an interview.

Ng runs a tight, disciplined ship, too. His brightly lit office overlooking Euclid Avenue in Pasadena is kept scrupulously clean. During his interview with the Business Journal, there were no interruptions by staff, save for two warnings that the meeting was threatening to run over into another appointment. His desk and cell phones didn’t ring in more than two hours.

He has a sharp and analytical mind, but would have you believe he doesn’t often turn it on himself. When asked what his best quality as an executive is, he took a long pause, explaining, “No one’s ever asked me about that before.”

He added: “I don’t ever spend time to think about, ‘Do I like to do this or that? What’s my personal profile? Introvert or extrovert?’ I don’t think about this kind of stuff. I do what is needed.”

Nor is he very forthcoming about his personal life. He did not make available his wife, brother or other family members for interviews.

“My wife doesn’t want to have anything to do with business,” he said. “She has a very strong principle that family is outside of business.”

But the buttoned-down banker image belies a capacity for reflection, someone who’s thought about the challenges, mistakes, and highs and lows of his life. As the interview lengthened, Ng’s answers grew longer and more frank. He discussed a host of personal and professional challenges, beginning with his working-class childhood in Hong Kong and his assimilation into America. He also spoke about the struggles to guide East West from an ethnic bank into a more mainstream institution, including his fights against racially tinged community opposition and criticism that the bank does not do enough for other minorities.

In many ways, Ng’s story follows the classic rags-to-riches narrative.

He grew up as the youngest of six children in Hong Kong. His parents were among the 1 million people who fled there from communist China in 1949 and were forced to remake themselves. Ng’s mother, who came from a wealthy family in Shanghai, suddenly found herself penniless. His father drove a school bus; his mother sewed school uniforms. The first apartment Ng can remember was no bigger than a few hundred square feet.

But the family’s fortunes improved. Both of his parent’s enterprises became small businesses, and his father eventually owned a small fleet of buses. Ng helped out, too. A good student, he worked as a tutor in several different subjects, while his older siblings got jobs at local factories during Hong Kong’s manufacturing boom. He credits the work ethic in his household for some of his business views.

“A lot of the American executives who are very successful have this sort of exuberant attitude that ‘Trust me, things are going to get better,’ ” he said. “I don’t. I only believe one thing: You work really, really hard and you ensure there is so much cushion and reserve that, chances are, there is no chance you will fall. That has a lot to do with how I grew up.”

But he wasn’t resistant to Western influences. He was exposed early to rock music, sparking a lifetime passion of playing and collecting guitars. He played in bands with his friends, listening to Beatles and Elvis Presley records over and over as he learned the notes.

When it came time to go to college, Ng only applied to one: the University of Houston, from where his oldest brother, John, had graduated. He became part of a wave of Hong Kong students who came to the United States in the 1970s, the first generation born of displaced Chinese nationals.

In college, most of his friends were Chinese, but he began to integrate into American culture, taking a tutor job teaching math to football players, playing bass in the church choir and switching his major to communications from chemical engineering.

“It was a shocking revelation to my friends and my brother because not a single person they knew of had ever majored in communications,” he said, noting that most of them studied engineering, pharmacy and accounting.

He was fascinated by why American audiences liked certain TV shows, realizing that some shows responded faster to cultural changes in the audience. He sees a parallel in his marketing of East West as a bank that prioritized the growing significance of U.S.-China trade and investment.

“The ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show’ and ‘All in the Family’ were fresh and differentiated themselves clearly from the competition at that time,” he said. In much the same way, East West was striving to be fresh for its audience. “You’re trying to have business development for the era.”

Starting in business

But before long, his brother convinced him to switch his major again to accounting, which would offer the best chance to get a job and stay in the country. Dominic didn’t care much for it, but it did help him get a job. He was heavily recruited out of college, and accepted an offer to work as an accountant for Touche Ross & Co. because the company agreed to sponsor him through the H1 work visa program and later helped him get a green card.

It wasn’t long before he was recruited out to its L.A. office, where he headed its China business practice. Rich Thomas, a partner who was Ng’s supervisor in Los Angeles, remembers Ng as a relentless networker.

“A lot of people get lunch together every day and they develop little niche groups. Dominic was always a guy that would go out and try to meet new people,” he said, recalling how Ng approached one of his clients, the president of a local bank.

“Dominic would go to him and say, ‘I’m just a poor little Chinese guy in Los Angeles who’s trying to be successful. Would you invite me to one of your events and introduce me to some of your crowd?’” said Thomas, now the chief financial officer of Citizens Business Bank. “Then he would take the first six contacts and have them introduce him to more and more contacts.”

But Ng had a fun side, too, Thomas recalled. He was known among co-workers for his prowess at karaoke nights, singing Beatles songs and playing guitar after they worked on long audits together.

It was through client referrals that Ng began working with the Nursalim family, the wealthy owners of Indonesian tire company Gajah Tunggal. The family was looking to buy banks in the United States. He never met them personally for the first year and a half, staying in contact mostly via their staff in Singapore.

He first helped the family buy United Pacific Bank in Los Angeles. His work impressed them enough that they recruited him to head up their U.S. investment arm, Seyen Investment Inc. He resisted at first, but eventually was convinced to take the job in 1990. In 1991, he helped engineer the purchase of East West, and then, at only 32, became its chief executive.

Despite his youth and inexperience in banking, and an emphasis on seniority in Asian culture, he characterized the transition as a relatively smooth one.

“A 32-year-old going into a bank as a professional hired gun gives the employees a very different impression than if my parents owned the bank,” Ng said. “As much as they might have had skepticism, I was the boss and I was in charge of making strategic decisions. So the people who were supposed to follow, at the end of the day, had to follow as part of their job requirement. I wouldn’t call it difficult at all.”

Pivotal times

When the bank was bought by his former bosses for $40 million, it had $600 million in assets and roughly 200 employees, a fraction of its size today. Early on, Ng envisioned a switch from a Chinese-American savings and loan to a commercial bank that could tap into mainstream business.

But the company couldn’t compete directly against the Wells Fargos of the world. It had only one real advantage – familiarity with Asian clients and business players. So it began targeting U.S. clients interested in Asian investors or Asian business clientele.

“When I first started to set the vision to make East West the bridge between East and West, I think a lot of people thought I was smoking too much of the wrong stuff,” he said. “We had done a decent job in the established community in the Chinese-American region, so why jump to the other side?”

But he had early success. In 1994, Beverly Hills real estate firm Kennedy Wilson moved its banking relationships from Bank of America to East West.

“It was a pivotal time for him,” said William McMorrow, Kennedy Wilson’s chairman. “He was trying to demonstrate to the greater L.A. business population that they weren’t just a Chinese bank.”

In 1998, the Asian economic crisis hit the Nursalims hard and they began looking to sell their U.S. assets. Ng seized the opportunity to lead a group of institutional investors in buying East West for $238 million, throwing in about $1 million of his money. Within six months, the bank company went public and was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

The holding company kept growing, averaging about an acquisition a year after that. In 2001, the bank company bought Prime Bank of Los Angeles for $14.5 million, taking over an institution that mainly catered to non-Asian businesses and had more than $100 million in assets. Two years later, it picked up Pacific Business Bank of Santa Fe Springs.

East West produced record profits year after year, though it only had two branches outside of California, including one in Hong Kong.

Then came the 2009 acquisition of United Commercial, which doubled East West’s assets and gave the bank a presence in New York, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle and mainland China. Today, the publicly traded company has 2,300 employees in 127 branches.

Eye for detail

Though it took a good deal of fortune and timing, Ng’s success is not a fluke. Whether he’s handling client relationships or managing employees, he’s known for meticulous attention to detail. It’s a trait that clients and analysts say he has instilled in the bank’s culture.

Take his loan agreement with Sam Nazarian’s SBE Entertainment Group, an L.A. owner and operator of hotels, nightclubs and restaurants. In 2009, Nazarian was forced to scale back plans to transition from being a nightclub operator to a full-fledged hospitality company due to the downturn and credit crunch. He had trouble finding lending but was able to secure financing with East West – after much in-person due diligence by Ng.

“He took a bet on me,” Nazarian said. “But he took the time to meet with our executives and understood our business. He understood our product and its relevancy and scalability. No other bank chairman would be going on specific property tours and sitting in on organizational meetings and investor committee meetings.”

Since then, Nazarian’s loan business with East West has quadrupled. What was a mostly local company with 14 properties now has 39 in five states, and is developing hotels in Miami and Las Vegas under his SLS brand. As Nazarian has begun planning for international expansion, he has tapped Ng’s connections in Asia. And he said Ng still follows up with feedback on his products, such as the Umami Burger chain in which SBE owns a stake.

“He makes time to go to Studio City Umami and grab burgers and let me know the good and the bad,” he said.

Ng also goes beyond the call, forging close personal relationships with clients such as Ming Shin Kou, chief operating officer of seafood importer Red Chamber Group, one of the largest private companies in Los Angeles. The two talk business and family, and Kou recalled how Ng called to console him after an employee issue several years ago.

“I was feeling betrayed,” he said. “He called to comfort me and share his thoughts and his experiences. Things like that you really appreciate and you remember for a long time.”

Although, he admits to taking his eye off the ball in the run-up to the financial crisis, Ng typically is a micromanager.

“I’m very hands-on,” he said. “I expect a lot from our staff, so I would say, in general, they may think I’m pretty tough.”

Emily Wang, East West’s head of marketing, said Ng is particularly hands-on with the bank’s marketing, keeping an eye on the budget and outlining strategy such as staying away from media advertising to instead emphasize events.

“I got trained to be very cost-conscious and also very bottom line driven,” she said. “It’s very challenging working for him. It’s not easy.”

Gordon de Lang, head of Southern California commercial banking for East West, said the bank’s culture is highly demanding.

“Dominic sets an extremely challenging environment,” said de Lang, who came over from American Express six years ago. “He’s relentless about wanting people to achieve.”

Missteps and misunderstandings

But there have been growing pains as well. The year that it went public, the bank entered into an agreement with First Union Securities in which First Union agreed to begin analyst coverage of East West in exchange for $10 million in investment banking business. That coverage was never initiated, resulting in a lawsuit that was ultimately settled.

Ng said the dispute and the experience of taking the bank public made him wary of Wall Street.

“We learned our lesson, that these people cannot be trusted,” he said.

His efforts to grow the bank beyond its Chinese-American roots haven’t always been welcomed either. In 2007, as the bank was preparing to buy Victorville-based Desert Community Bank, it ran into community opposition in the mostly Latino area to “Asian” banks as well as criticism for not doing enough for other minority groups.

One local radio host protested the action as “a dirty little trick,” complaining that “we are going to see more Chinese faces in the bank than ever before.”

Berkeley advocacy group the Greenlining Institute protested the acquisition, saying East West did not make enough loans to non-Asian businesses, and convinced Congressman Joe Baca to send a letter to the Federal Reserve requesting hearings.

“It didn’t have the staffing or expertise or the culture to serve a mostly Latino community,” said Robert Gnaizda, then the general counsel for Greenlining.

Eventually, the deal went through after East West pledged to commit a certain amount of money to community redevelopment. Once the merger happened, Desert Community Bank’s president quit and left the state, saying he could “no longer face the many people in the community who feel I stabbed them in the back and sold out.”

Ng dismissed the radio comments as simple prejudice, but it’s clear the criticism from Greenlining still stings.

“You would have thought they would have done more research,” he said. “No bank in L.A. as a percentage has done more community redevelopment programs than we do.”

As it turned out, the Victorville acquisition itself ended up being a costly one due to its heavy real estate exposure, contributing to the bank’s 2008 financial troubles.

“It went awfully,” said Julianna Balicka, an analyst at Keefe Bruyette & Woods’ San Francisco office. “It was one of the biggest drivers of their real estate problems.”

Exit strategy

So, at 53, Ng has taken his lumps, and has handled the worst of the financial crisis and more than survived. Though he’s still young for a financial executive, finding someone to succeed him as chief executive has been on his mind since 2005.

“After spending about 14 years at the bank I felt that maybe it was the right time,” he said. “You don’t want to have the same person run the bank for all these years.”

For one thing, he has said that his job hasn’t left much time for his family. He lives in Pasadena with his wife, Ellen, whom he met in college, and two teenage children.

“Usually on the weekends when I’m in town and I’m not traveling, I’m home spending time with my family,” he said. “There’s not a whole lot of time.”

His 16-year-old daughter is an accomplished equestrian, having competed last year in the World Championships for Icelandic Horseriding in Europe. He rides horses with her and drives her on weekends to Santa Ynez for training. He plays golf with his son.

Rich Thomas, who’s known Ng since he first moved out to Los Angeles, said he believes that Ng regrets the time he’s lost with his family.

“His children are teenagers and these kind of continue to be formative years for adulthood,” Thomas said. “He spends a lot of time at work and I think he looks at it and says, ‘I wish I had been able to spend more time with my children.’ ”

Last year, with the economy improving, Ng started looking at succession planning again. The idea is for him to move into a nonexecutive chairman position. With the exponentially growing importance of China as a trade and investment partner with the United States, Ng wants to ensure that the bank remains true to its role as a conduit between the two countries – and not just financially.

In 2007, East West entered into a partnership in which it bought $2 million in Chinese art, but made it available for exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. East West is also sponsoring a solo exhibition of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang scheduled to open at MOCA in April.

“I see East West as a long-term, sustainable, meaningful organization,” he said. “Because of that I really don’t want to see it end because I have to end.”

He’s certainly in a comfortable position financially. He is East West’s biggest individual shareholder, with stock worth $13 million. His compensation in 2010 was $5 million, most of that in stock. So what might his life look like after stepping back?

Some have floated the idea of Ng getting involved in politics.

“I hope he runs for political office,” Nazarian said. “I think having the visibility of running a bank the size of East West gives a real good level of controlled visibility and skill sets.”

But Ng dismissed that possibility. He has been active in philanthropy and other civic causes, often with an emphasis on U.S.-China relations, and said he is likely to continue after his banking career is over.

He speaks with pride about his tenure as the first Asian-American campaign chair of the United Way of Greater Los Angeles. He’s currently the chair of the Committee of 100, a group dedicated to U.S.-China relations and other Chinese-American issues. In that capacity, he co-hosted a welcome luncheon in Los Angeles in February for Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, slated to be the next leader of China.

He also meets about once a month with a private club of about 30 Chinese-American businessmen, said Red Chamber’s Kou.

Ng said if he determined that he’s no longer needed at the bank, he would likely continue along those lines.

“I am 100 percent sure there are plenty of opportunities for me to get involved, both in civic involvement or helping the U.S.-China relationship,” he said. “I like the idea of whatever civic and philanthropic duties, I would try to also play the bridge between the East and the West.”