MIDWEST
First Financial Bancorp, a $3.9 billion-asset multibank holding company in Hamilton, Ohio, has hired Claude E. Davis as its president and chief executive officer.
Mr. Davis is a senior vice president at the $5.1 billion-asset Irwin Financial Corp. of Columbus, Ind., and the chairman of its Irwin Union Bank and Trust.
He will join First Financial on Oct. 1 and will succeed Bruce E. Leep, who had led the company since Stanley Pontius retired in October 2003. Mr. Leep will remain the chairman.
Mr. Davis had been the president of Irwin Union Bank from 1996 until 2003, when he was named the chairman.
Enterprise Bank and Trust of Clayton, Mo., has hired William R. Bruce as the director of mortgage lending and a vice president in its mortgage division.Mr. Bruce was the vice president of residential production at Town and Country Mortgage Co. He has 25 years of mortgage lending experience.
Enterprise Bank is a $1 billion-asset unit of Enterprise Financial Services Corp.
SOUTHWEST
Bank of the Ozarks of Little Rock has made Jean Arehart its senior lending officer and its loan committee chairman.
For the last seven years Ms. Arehart had led the bank's mortgage division as its president. Gene Holman has been hired to succeed her in that job.
Mr. Holman was a senior vice president and a regional sales manager for Arkansas, Texas, and Memphis at Regions Bank. He joined it in 1998 when Regions Financial Corp. bought First Commercial Corp. Before the purchase, he had worked at First Commercial Mortgage Co.
Earlier he had been the president and chief operating officer of Charter Mortgage and Investments Inc. of North Little Rock. (First Commercial Corp. of Little Rock bought Charter's parent, First Charter Bancshares Inc., in 1997.)
SOUTHEASTFNB Corp. of Christiansburg, Va., said that Litz H. Van Dyke has resigned as its chief operating officer and the president and chief executive officer of its main banking unit, First National Bank.
Virginia Financial Group Inc., a Culpeper holding company with three banking units, announced it had hired Mr. Van Dyke as its chief operating officer.
FNB has yet to name a new chief operating officer but has named R. Bruce Munro to run First National Bank on an interim basis.
He had been FNB's chief risk officer; that job was passed to Keith J. Houghton, who remains the chief lending officer.
