Executive leadership · Salem
Helen Kowalczyk
Chief Risk Officer
“My job is to be the person in the room who has already imagined the bad day, so nobody else has to live it.”
Twenty years as a bank examiner before crossing to the other side of the table. Her job is to say 'what if' before anyone else has to.
- [email protected]
- Phone
- +1 (503) 555-0131
- Office
- Salem branch
- With Meridian since
- 2017
The story
Helen grew up on a dairy farm outside Tillamook, the youngest of five, in a family that learned the hard way what a bad year and a thin margin can do. Her father lost the farm's milk contract in 1986; the family kept the land only because a local bank restructured the mortgage rather than foreclose. She remembers the examiner who came through that bank the following year, and decided at fourteen that she wanted his job.
She got it. After an economics degree at Oregon State she joined the FDIC as an examiner in 1996 and spent two decades reviewing banks from Alaska to Nevada, including through the 2008 crisis, when she closed four. She describes those closings as the worst days of her career and the reason she takes the work seriously.
In 2017 she joined Meridian Trust as the bank's first dedicated chief risk officer. Her signature achievement is the 'Red Folder': a single quarterly document, read by every board member, that lists the five things most likely to hurt the bank in the next year and what is being done about each. The board chair has called it the most useful twelve pages she reads all year.
Helen lives in Salem with her partner Ruth, a veterinarian, and a rotating population of foster dogs. Her siblings still farm; she still gets a wheel of cheese every Christmas.
Off duty
When not at the bank
Sailing
She keeps a 1978 Cal 27 named *Audit Trail* at the Salem Yacht Club and races it most summer Wednesdays on the Willamette. She has never won the series and says that is not the point, though her crew disagrees.
Fostering dogs
Thirty-one dogs placed through the Willamette Humane Society since 2015, mostly senior dogs nobody else wanted. Two of them 'failed' fostering and stayed permanently.
Crossword construction
She has had three puzzles published in the *Los Angeles Times*. Her favorite clue, which she will share if asked, involved the word 'collateral.'
Ask me about
Education
- B.S. Economics, Oregon State University, 1995
- Graduate School of Banking, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2008
