Jerry Host
Analyst · Truist Securities. Please go ahead
Great, thank you, Louis. If you look – I think we’re putting up Slide 18 which is the announced succession plans. At first, I’d like to begin by congratulating Duane and Tom on their new upcoming roles. We are extremely excited about these two gentlemen moving into the CEO and CFO respectively over the next six months or so. You saw the announcement yesterday afternoon, a variety of changes taking place. I thought I’d take just a minute and go through them. The process for the succession of both the CEO role and the CFO role has been in place for over two years now. Our board has taken a very thoughtful and deliberate process in making this happen. They have used the council of outside expertise both from a legal and from the perspective of leadership consultants to help make that decision. It is, as I mentioned been a very thoughtful and deliberate process. I will tell you that over the next several months Duane and I will be transitioning the remaining responsibilities of the CEO role to include risk and finance between now and the year-end. And I will tell you that I plan to stay very active in the company, but in a very different way. We have a very engaged Board of Directors and I plan to be very involved in board governance, stay very involved in the strategic planning process, M&A and investor relations, but Duane will be running the company making no doubt of that. And he is well prepared to do that. He has been here for over 17 years and has had a lot of prior experience in both large and smaller organizations over his banking career. So I’m really excited about Duane moving into this role and what he’s going to bring to this company. In addition effective January 1, we’re going to make some changes around our administrative process, Granville Tate, many of you have not – many of know, but some of you on this call has not had the opportunity to listen to the Granville talk about the company. He is currently our General Counsel and Chief Risk Officer. We plan on having Granville, take on the additional responsibilities of Chief Administrative Officer and that should help support Duane as it relates to a lot of the other activities that are involved in running the organization. Both of those changes will be effective January 1, 2021. In addition on March 1, and this is so that we can get through the year end, get through the K, get through preparations of proxy and a lot of other things. Louis has provided us with his intent and his letter of intent to retire from the company as of March 1, 2021. Louis is remaining on to assist Tom Owens and working us through that year-end process and all the financial reporting associated with that. So Louis will retire, then Tom Owens will step into the Chief Financial Officer role. In addition, Tom Chambers, who has served as our Controller will become our Principal Accounting Officer for the Corporation and he will become our Chief Accounting Officer for the Bank and will assist Tom in the financial reporting issues of the company. And then the last change we want to communicate to you is that several months ago Maria Sugay, we call her Ria has joined the company, she came in initially as Co-Treasurer, but in the back of our mind, we felt like if all of these transition plans played-out that beginning in March 1 of next year, Ria will be ready to move into the Treasurer role taking Tom’s place. So a number of significant changes in the company, all well-thought out we believe, all with a very competent group of people that are going to bring, I think, a new dimension, a new perspective to the company. They’ve all got tremendous energy and are ready to go once we get out of this COVID funk, I guess this is what I might call it. We’re excited about it as I said, I’m looking forward to it. And with that let me suggest that, operator, we open it up for calls on either the work changes or the financials.