Building a bank for doctors: Recruiting staff, focusing on a niche market

In creating a bank that caters to physicians and other clinicians, recruiting staff was easy. And while it’s tempting to expand its professional customer base, Panacea Financial remains committed to its target audience, said Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd, president and co-founder of the online financial company.

Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd: It was actually easy to go and recruit because what we found is, we went and found these experts at the bigger banks that felt a little stymied by the bureaucracy and by the shifting priorities at three or four layers above them. And we said, hey, we don't have shifting priorities. It's just about supporting doctors. If you obviously have a history in that, come over on board and be aligned with our mission-driven company to help this group. And through this whole journey from 2020 to now, there have been forks in the road, of people said, hey, you should broaden out to attorneys, or broaden out to X, Y and Z vocation, which is tempting. But for us, we have made the decision and concerted effort to say, no, we're staying with doctors. We're just going to go deep with this group and truly provide value in more ways than one for this community.