Building a bank for doctors: Supporting physicians on the practice side

Young physicians who begin working with personal finance can grow in their careers to have financial needs involving medical practices. Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd, president and co-founder of Panacea Financial, continues his discussion about why it becomes difficult for physician to navigate the purchase or investment in a medical practice, and why general consumer banks may not be able to help.

Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd: So let me talk about the practice side for a second. And we support practice owners with common sense lending and banking solutions for them to start a practice, expand, acquire, with commercial real estate, all under one roof. And that is also supporting them on the consumer side. So we have plenty of people that we supported in residency that then come back to us and say, hey, actually I have an opportunity to buy a practice, can you help? Absolutely, you don't have to go anywhere else, we can do all that and it's not siloed, it's all together. And it's interesting, because the common theme, and I'm sure I know you guys have commented on this in Medical Economics, is that compared to 20 years ago, independent practice ownership the medical space has certainly declined relative to, you know, where it was again, 20 years ago. But that's still a large, addressable market of individual doctors that either want to own a practice outright, buy a practice outright, or, more commonly, by a minority ownership stake in a group ASC or practice. It's actually fairly difficult to navigate that for physicians, especially because of the same pain points I mentioned. One is, you're super busy, and two, the groups you need to talk to aren't open. Three, quite frankly, most brick and mortar branches and credit unions don't have the credit and banking expertise for doctor practices. They're very good at general business banking on opening up a restaurant or plumbing business. But to understand the nuances, ranging from a vascular surgery startup to a dermatology acquisition to a large MSO with 10 locations in primary care, that takes a very in-depth amount of knowledge and expertise to be able to support a doctor through that. So our model really was to say, hey, we want to be the one-stop shop for any business or personal banking or financial needs that the doctor has, and bring on board the expertise to allow us to do that.