Downtown Visalia welcomes new bank with coffee shop inside

VISALIA, Calif. (KFSN) -- A new concept in downtown Visalia is turning some heads.

Suncrest bank and Tazz Coffee held an official grand opening today on West Main Street. The coffee shop is located in the front of the building, while the new bank takes up the back half.

Suncrest's CEO says this is the first of its kind bank in the Valley, and was designed to put 'community' back into community banking.

"When we were designing this, we went to San Francisco, we went to Silicon Valley, we looked at what a lot of the big banks had done with their branch of the future concepts," said Suncrest Bank CEO Ciaran McMullan. "And we tried to copy that and improve on it and do it somewhere where a big national bank (is) just not going to spend the money (and) not going to put the investment in."

Suncrest bank has five branches, including a new location in Fresno.