Building a bank for doctors: A mission to improve financial lives of physicians

No one likes to be told no, but financial institutions may get applications from applicants who are not good candidates for loans. That still can be an opportunity to help physicians improve their credit ratings and gain the knowledge needed to improve their financial situations. Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd, president and co-founder of Panacea Financial, explains what happens when physicians aren’t quite ready to work with the bank.

Medical Economics: What do you do when you have to tell an applicant, “no”?

Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd: It depends on the thing they're applying for, but most commonly, the reasons we see people that have a lower credit score is because of mistakes in the past, even oversights, quite frankly. Think about things like forgetting to turn on auto pay and you moved and you forgot your cable or phone bill was sent somewhere else, and it's overdue, it's past due, and you're credit tanked. That's a very common scenario. So those things are very much like, hey, let's look at your credit report together. We can actually coach you on what we found. Give you some next steps on how to correct that, and then, let's keep in touch when we can help you, or, better yet, someone in our network that you can actually talk to, that can help on an advising perspective. We do that plenty of times because of all the folks in our network that aren't necessarily under the Panacea umbrella — I mean, just to step back, our mission is to make doctors' lives better, right? So that doesn't mean we're going to make every doctor a customer. Obviously, I would love that, that'd be great. But not every doctor is going to be our customer. So how you remain true to your mission is, even the folks who can't become customers finding a way to improve their life as kind of a connector of where we stand in the kind of economic system of the doctor. So that's one main reason. The other thing on the practice side is a lot of people that approach us about startups as an example, or buying a practice, they've never owned one, they just aren't sure where to start. So maybe when we look at their application, they don't have a business plan ready, they actually haven't done much market research, or maybe they don't have enough in liquidity. That's a great opportunity for our team to say, here's what you need to do. Let me put you in contact with someone who can help you with market research, with a business plan, with advising to help kind of lower your debt to income, increase liquidity. And these are the things we want to see, come back and talk to us once you've kind of made some of those improvements, we'd love to stay in touch and work with you. It's not a, hey, declined, have a nice day. That's not, that's not the route we take at all.