Meet & Greet

Shepherd Recognized

Michael Shepherd of Bank of the West gets honored in San Francisco this month by the Jewish humanitarian group B'nai B'rith, which chose the CEO of the $63 billion-asset bank for its 2013 Distinguished Achievement Award. The award, a tradition for more than four decades, recognizes leadership and community service.

Patton's Plentiful Public Service

At WestStar Bank in El Paso, Texas, it's a point of pride that employees serve on more than 65 boards and committees of civic groups and nonprofits. It's a brag-worthy statistic considering there are only 221 people on the payroll. President and CEO Larry L. Patton leads by example. He's on the board of the Dallas Fed's El Paso branch and the United Way of El Paso, an advisor to the El Paso Hispanic Chamber Educational Foundation and a member of the University of Texas at El Paso 2014 Centennial Commission. And just recently he was reappointed by Gov. Rick Perry to the Finance Commission of Texas. The 11-member commission, which includes two state bankers, oversees the state agencies that regulate banks, mortgage lenders and consumer credit grantors.

Turnaround Jobs: Limit Two

After trying and failing to rescue one institution in Washington state and making demonstrable progress fixing up another, Seattle banker Patrick Fahey doesn't see himself accepting any more turnaround jobs in the future.

"That's not in my plan," says Fahey, who has been in the industry for more than 40 years and came out of retirement to run First Sound Bank, which recently raised enough capital to exit the Troubled Asset Relief Program. "I have a boat here on Puget Sound, and I go down to see if it is still there every once in a while. I think I've had a good long career. It's generally been successful, and I'm excited that we've been able to fix this one."

His previous turnaround job ended in 2010 with the failure of Frontier Bank of Everett, Wash. Fahey had brokered a sale of the institution but regulators stopped the transaction-an episode Fahey chalks up to regulators being more reluctant at the time to approve deals involving private equity.

Fahey says he's committed to seeing First Sound's turnaround through, but "then I would ultimately like to stay involved in something that is a little less than 150 percent of my time."

Now Rose Knows

On a recent ask-me-anything live chat on Reddit, interviewer extraordinaire Charlie Rose fielded a question about whether he has ever had misconceptions about people that were "immediately cleared up upon interviewing them." The answer: yes. Exhibit A: Brian Moynihan. "What I know about him came from what I had read. He hadn't done much media," Rose says of the BofA CEO. "I found him to be engaged, candid, responsive, all those things. That's really what you look for in a guest." The wide-ranging, hour-long interview with Moynihan, which aired in late March, touched on everything from the challenge of refocusing BofA's culture away from acquisitions to the rocky circumstances leading to Moynihan's ascendency to CEO. ("I would have never have planned to be CEO the way it happened," the successor to Ken Lewis confesses.)

North Carolina Names in the News

RBC Bank USA's former CFO is back in a bank CFO job. Glenn McCoy, who joined Raleigh, N.C.-based First Citizens Bank in December as EVP of finance, was promoted to CFO on April 1. McCoy is a 31-year industry veteran; 28 of those years were with Wachovia, where he ran finance for various divisions, including capital markets, wealth management, and mortgage and retail credit. After Wachovia's collapse he went to RBC Bank in Raleigh, which was acquired last year by PNC. That led to a brief detour in insurance; before joining the $21 billion-asset First Citizens, he spent part of 2012 as CFO at an insurance agency called Carolina Condrey Group. McCoy replaces Ken Black, who retired March 31 as CFO after more than 25 years with First Citizens.