Chief Financial Officer, Meridian Trust Bank · CPA · Former Deloitte bank auditor
Portland · Meridian Trust Bank · 911+ connections
I audited Meridian Trust for three years before I joined it. By the third audit I kept thinking the finance team was leaving opportunities on the table, so in 2014 I called the CEO and told him. He hired me four months later.
My job is to make sure a $1.4 billion balance sheet is strong, liquid and — this is the part I care about most — explainable. Every quarter I publish a one-page, plain-English description of the bank's balance sheet. It has been one page since March 2023, when two large banks failed in a week and customers lined up outside our Bend branch. The line was gone by Thursday. I intend to keep it at one page.
Q3 balance-sheet one-pager is up. Loans-to-deposits 81%, uninsured deposits 19%, cash and securities covering 2.3× anything that could leave in a week. It is one page because a customer should be able to read it standing at the counter. If you can't explain your balance sheet in a page, the problem is the balance sheet.
Three years ago I built a liquidity model that assumed two big banks would fail in the same week and customers would panic. People said it was dramatic. In March 2023 it was Tuesday. Build the model for the day you hope never comes. Then publish the answer where customers can read it.
Assigning this to my money-and-banking seminar next week, with the one-pager.
Our monthly close used to take 22 days. It takes six. The difference was not software; it was asking, for each of the 140 steps, 'who is waiting on this and why?' Thomas Achebe taught me that trick with his forty-one-step account-opening diagram. Operations people and finance people should swap desks more often.
Nothing waiting, nothing wasted. Finance is a supply chain for numbers.
Finance, treasury, liquidity and investor relations for a $1.4B community bank. Author of the quarterly one-page balance-sheet letter.
Rebuilt the finance function: monthly close from 22 days to 6, first formal liquidity stress model (2018).
Led audits of regional and community banks across the western United States, including Meridian Trust (2011–2013).
B.S. Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley (Haas), 2003
CPA, State of California, 2005
Still one page. Still the most honest thing a bank can publish.
Red Folder cross-references it. Two documents, twelve pages between them, whole bank covered.