Chief Risk Officer, Meridian Trust Bank · 20 years FDIC bank examiner
Salem · Meridian Trust Bank · 911+ connections
I spent twenty years as an FDIC examiner, including 2008, when I closed four banks. Those were the worst days of my career, and they are the reason I take this work seriously.
Since 2017 I have been Meridian Trust's first chief risk officer. Every quarter I write the Red Folder: twelve pages listing the five things most likely to hurt the bank in the next year and what we are doing about each. Every board member reads it. That is the entire theory of the job — imagine the bad day early, in writing, while there is still time to do something about it.
I grew up on a dairy farm that a local bank saved by restructuring instead of foreclosing. I have never forgotten which choice they made.
Q4 Red Folder went to the board this morning. Twelve pages, five risks, as always. This quarter's top item is not credit and it is not rates — it is a vendor. If you are a community bank and your core vendor's parent company just changed hands, that belongs on page one.
What a bank examiner actually looks for, in one sentence: whether the people running the bank know what could hurt it and can show you, on paper, what they did about it last quarter. Everything else is detail. I examined banks for twenty years. The good ones could always answer that question in under a minute.
Identical to a hospital accreditation visit. 'Show me the last time something went wrong and what you changed.'
Thirty-first foster dog placed this week. A twelve-year-old beagle named Clerk. Unrelated to risk management, except that senior dogs nobody else wants are the best possible return on a small investment, and I will defend that thesis to the audit committee.
Built the bank's risk function from scratch: the quarterly Red Folder, credit-risk review, the 2023 liquidity playbook with the CFO, vendor and cyber risk oversight.
Led safety-and-soundness examinations of community and regional banks across Alaska, Washington, Oregon and Nevada. Examiner-in-charge on four bank resolutions in 2008–2010.
B.S. Economics, Oregon State University, 1995
Graduate School of Banking, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2008
Read all twelve pages on the train. Page one has my full attention.
We have a 340-page runbook for exactly this scenario. Page 2 of the Folder references it, as it should.