CXO Conversation
“I would rather be argued with than modelled incorrectly.”
Chief Financial Officer, Meridian Bank
Meridian Bank’s new finance chief on publishing her own provisioning methodology, why deposit franchise quality is the number the market skips, and what a decade on the sell side taught her about reading her own disclosures.
Transcript
- ClubCXO
- You publish your provisioning methodology. Most banks do not.
- Ananya Iyer
- Because the alternative is that analysts guess, and their guess becomes the number the market trades on. I have been the analyst doing the guessing. The model does not come with a disclaimer attached once it is in a client note.
- ClubCXO
- What does the market misread about mid-sized banks?
- Ananya Iyer
- Deposit franchise quality. Everyone models loan growth because it is on the front page of the deck and it is the number that moves. The liability side decides whether that growth is worth anything, and it is genuinely harder to analyse from outside, so it gets a paragraph instead of a page.
- ClubCXO
- Ten years on the sell side. What did you keep?
- Ananya Iyer
- The habit of reading our own filings badly on purpose — skimming them the way someone with forty covers and an afternoon would. If a number can be misread in ninety seconds, it will be.
- ClubCXO
- Is sector disclosure adequate?
- Ananya Iyer
- It is compliant. Compliant and informative are different standards and we are comfortably clearing the first one. I do not think that is a scandal, I think it is an equilibrium nobody has an incentive to break individually.