Building a bank for doctors: Panacea Financial origins, part 2

Michael Jerkins, M.D., M.Ed., is president and cofounder of Panacea Financial. Here, he continues the discussion of his own financial circumstances as a young man who could be trusted to treat critically ill patients, but not to responsibly handle a $5,000 consumer loan.

Michael Jerkins, M.D., M.Ed.: And it's interesting, right? So if you zoom out, I'm entrusted with someone's life on one hand in part of the day, but the other part of the day, I'm not trusted with $5,000, which doesn't make cognitive sense there. Also keep in mind, I'm about a year away from finishing residency and being able to work, have a job and make about as much money as I wanted to, within reason, for the rest of my life. And when I talked about this [with] other coresidents and folks from med school, my colleagues from med school, this was repeated over and over. Every, I mean,...probably every third or fourth person I talked to had a similar story without a clear solution.

So a coresident named Ned Palmer and I both kind of bonded over our financial woes and set out to come up with a solution for doctors and doctors in training. Frankly, we tried for years and were not successful. We failed. It turns out, when you work 80 hours a week and have no financial services delivery experience, it's really hard to start a fintech in residency. So we were not successful initially, and then not until our third cofounder came on board, [who] was Tyler Stafford, whom I have known since the ninth grade. We were college roommates. He went the investment banking route. I went the doctor route, and pitched him on this idea of banking for doctors. And through that, we were able to partner with a publicly traded bank called Primis Bank, [which] was our original partner bank and investor, and were able to really launch. November of 2020 was our first customer, so we really started working on it. February of 2020, first customer; November of 2020, it was an ER [emergency room] doctor in Tennessee, [whom] we helped with a personal loan.

And then fast forward [to] now, we're close to a billion dollars in originations to doctors and their practices. We have thousands of doctor customers across all 50 states and have been able to, fortunately, help support doctors and their practices.