Head of Retail Banking, Meridian Trust Bank · Opened the Bend branch with a folding table in 2009
Bend · Meridian Trust Bank · 911+ connections
I run Meridian Trust's three branches and know most of the regulars by name. I started as a customer-service rep in Salem in 2002, became a branch manager at twenty-nine, and in 2009 was asked to open the bank's first branch in Bend. We opened on schedule in a leased storefront with four new hires and a folding table for the first teller station. The table is in the Bend break room now, with a plaque.
The work I am proudest of is Second Chance Checking, which we built in 2018 for people other banks had turned away because of past overdrafts. More than 900 people have opened accounts through it; they default less often than our standard customers. Three other Oregon banks have copied the program. Good.
People remember whether you were kind to them long after they forget the interest rate. I learned that selling pears at a roadside stand in Hood River.
Second Chance Checking passed 900 accounts this week. Eight years ago people told me a product for customers other banks had rejected would be a charity. Default rate: lower than our standard checking. Charity would have been fine too. It turned out to be good banking.
Opening a bank branch with four employees and a folding table, 2009 edition: the table was $34 at the hardware store on Greenwood Avenue. It is now in the break room with a brass plaque. Every new Bend hire sits at it on their first day. The lesson is not about furniture.
The table has a lower cost-per-transaction than any teller station we've bought since.
Pear harvest weekend at my parents' orchard in Hood River. Thirty-one years of August Saturdays selling Comice at the roadside stand. Everything I know about customers came from that stand: they remember kindness much longer than they remember the price.
All three branches, 190 staff, retail products and the branch customer-experience programme. Designed Second Chance Checking (2018).
Opened the Bend branch from an empty storefront; grew it to 2,900 households and 38 staff.
Salem branch. Trained by Dolores Ruiz, who made everyone count the drawer twice.
B.A. Communications, University of Oregon, 2001
Northwest Banking School, 2011
The Fed data has said this for a decade: access is not the same as risk. You proved it with a product. Sending the numbers to a colleague at the SF Fed.
Three banks copied it. I'd like it to be ten.