Building a bank for doctors: The origins of Panacea Financial

Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd, president and co-founder of Panacea Financial, opens discussion about the company by describing his own financial circumstances as a young physician. Those days of intensive study, hard work and high debt influenced his career path — as did treatment by lenders.

Medical Economics: How did panacea financial get started? Can you explain how you came together with your co-founders?

Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd: We are a fintech that provides banking services and financial services to just doctors and doctors only. And I did have a background in economics in undergrad, but certainly didn't have a deep expertise in delivery of financial services. But what I did have deep expertise in is, at least understanding the pain points that we doctors feel financially through our life cycle, both in training and in practice. So as an example, in med school, I was fortunate enough to get married and have our first child. It was a fairly hefty hospital bill that was well worth it, of course. My wife worked for a small business and had a high deductible plan there in Memphis, and then when we matched, which is also super-exciting. The less exciting part about a match is, you have no more student loans to live off of, and you have to move across the country with no money. And so you show up to residency with debt, not even including your student debt, which I had $250,000 of, and then you don't get paid until the middle of July. Just so there's some little bit of detail here, but just to paint the picture right? So you show up probably in June on credit card debt, most of us, then you don't get paid till the middle of July. So you're just trying to figure out residency and how to order Tylenol on your EMR. And you also are trying to figure out how to make ends meet. And then in residency, we actually were fortunate enough to have our second child, huge blessing, but also some stressors there that that brought. And then in my third year of residency, I was on the cardiovascular ICU rotation, CV-ICU. So that means I'm taking care of folks with heart transplants and heart failure and recent heart attacks and heart surgery, some of the sickest of the sick. Like I'm entrusted with a lot we doctors are, especially in the acute care setting. In that same month, at home, my basement flooded with three feet of water, had a lot of damage, and we wrecked our family car. Things were tight, so I engaged with a normal financial institution. I was like, look, I don't want to load up on more credit card, high-interest debt. I'm going to be an adult, I'm going to go to a bank and a lender and say, hey, can I get a consumer loan to help me cover some of these costs? And I had a great credit score, but unfortunately, I had lots of debt and wasn't making lots of money. So on paper, on Excel, someone's Excel spreadsheet somewhere, I didn't look like a great borrower, and I actually was declined by multiple banks. I was told, go get a co signer by multiple banks.