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

Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd is president and co-founder of Panacea Financial. Here he continues his discussion of his own financial circumstances as a young who could be trusted to treat critically ill patients, but not to responsibly handle a $5,000 consumer loan.

Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd: 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 to other co-residents and folks from med school, my colleagues from med school, this was repeated over and over. Every, I mean, there was probably every third or fourth person I talked to had a similar story without a clear solution. So a co-resident 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 co-founder came on board, which was Tyler Stafford, who 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, who 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 doctor in Tennessee we helped with a personal loan. And then fast forward, 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.