Peter Liu: ‘Right time, right place’

You won’t find New Resource Bank’s headquarters in the heart of San Francisco’s old Financial District. But it’s close.

A few blocks south of Market, in a high-performance building with large street-level windows and an open ceiling, the bank’s lobby signals its expertise to visitors long before they find their way to the low-flow toilets. Across recyclable Interface (Nasdaq: IFSIA) carpet and adjacent to a promotional display for the bank’s bright-shining client SunPower (Nasdaq: SPWR), Peter Liu sits at a bamboo conference table ready to talk about the new economy.

A former senior vice president at Credit Suisse First Boston and vice president at Chase Manhattan Bank, Liu currently serves on the Clean Technology Investment Advisory Boards of California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), respectively the largest and third-largest pension funds in the United States. He is also co-founder and vice chair of the China-U.S. Energy Efficiency Alliance.

In September 2006, Liu and a deep roster of influential Bay Area shareholders founded New Resource Bank. Among the bank’s offerings are solar power financing packages for homeowners and financial incentives for green building developers, including a 1/8 percent discount on loans and a higher loan-to-value ratio. In addition to grabbing a whole lot of media attention, Liu says New Resource Bank has already grown its assets to $50 million, a doubling of the bank’s assets since its opening.

SIJ: Would the launch of New Resource Bank have worked five years ago?

Liu: No. There is a right time and a right place. Today there is strong, growing consumer demand for green options and a commensurate response from the capital chain in terms of venture and private equity capital. We’re in a good time and place to service the needs of the community.

SIJ: How did you get involved in sustainable industries?

Liu: The major driving force was that the community demanded it. I was asked by the state treasurer and CalPERS and CalSTRS to look at green investing. We looked high and low and broadly at the viability of an investment thesis for the sector, to invest in green. Green businesses and developers thought the private equity capital focus of CalPERS and CalSTRS was important; however, many spoke up about how banking that reflects a better understanding of their business is valuable now. We’ve responded to it.

SIJ: What unique services do you offer?

Liu: The bank doesn’t offer patentable products — just banking. But we have a customtailored approach to help customers go green, and to actively look for ways to provide green companies more money at a lower cost.

SIJ: How do you feel about the fact that the big banks are all of a sudden focusing on sustainable industries?

Liu: The more the merrier. We want to see this happen in all of our communities. It’s an $18 trillion market; in terms of FDIC-insured [Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.] deposits at banks, there is plenty for everyone. A lot of banks have been pressured to be less bad. Our focus is on more good. This is not just a few percent of our assets. We were started by successful entrepreneurs with a core focus to work with entrepreneurs with new ideas for healthier, cleaner and more efficient resources.

SIJ: Are you concerned about New Resource Bank being mimicked?

Liu: There’s a high barrier of entry to starting a new bank. However, it won’t stop any other bank, big or small, from creating a similar focus. What we have is value-added human capital. Look at our founding shareholders. We have the community leaders from our targeted community: leading entrepreneurs, green business pioneers and experienced sector investors. When we serve a client, they get the benefit of that New Resource community, which is active and wants to be helpful.

SIJ: There’s a lot of focus in the Bay Area right now on energy-efficient technological solutions to environmental problems. But a recent New Yorker profile of energy visionary Amory Lovins pointed to the concern that the benefits of cleaner, efficient technologies will be cancelled out by resulting increases in consumption. What do you think about that?

Liu: Let’s just focus on California, where economic and new gadget growth leads the nation. We’ve been very growth-oriented over the past few decades, and yet energy-efficiency advances during that time have kept per-capita energy use steady. A lot of this has been inspired by the work of policy leaders such as Art Rosenfeld [commissioner of the California Energy Commission], who helped bring innovation and public awareness together. Utilities here can make just as much money selling efficiency as they do electrons. I’ve been told that if all U.S. states would have done the same as California in the past 30 years, we’d already be complying with the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.