Executive leadership · Portland
Priya Venkataraman
Chief Financial Officer
“If I can't explain our balance sheet to a customer in one page, the problem is the balance sheet, not the customer.”
Former Big Four auditor who switched sides because she 'wanted to build the numbers, not just check them.'
- [email protected]
- Phone
- +1 (503) 555-0118
- Office
- Portland branch
- With Meridian since
- 2014
The story
Priya was born in Chennai and moved to Fremont, California, at age nine when her mother took an engineering job in Silicon Valley. She was the kid who ran the lemonade stand with a profit-and-loss sheet taped to the table. A high-school economics teacher, Mr. Albrecht, entered her in a statewide stock-market simulation; she came second and has never quite forgiven the student who came first.
After Berkeley and a CPA, she spent nine years at Deloitte auditing regional banks across the western states. By her own account she audited Meridian Trust three years running and kept thinking the finance team was leaving opportunities on the table. In 2014 she called Daniel Reyes and told him so. He hired her as controller four months later; she became CFO in 2019.
Her defining moment came in March 2023, when two large banks failed within a week and nervous customers lined up outside the Bend branch. Priya had already built a liquidity model that assumed exactly that scenario. She published a one-page plain-English explanation of the bank's balance sheet on the website that afternoon, and the line was gone by Thursday. The one-pager is still updated quarterly; she insists it stay at one page.
She lives in Northwest Portland with her husband Arjun, a pediatric nurse, and their son Dev, eleven, who is currently beating her at chess roughly one game in three. She is on the finance committee of the Oregon Food Bank.
Off duty
When not at the bank
Marathons
Eleven finished, including Boston in 2019 (3:38) and Chicago twice. She trains before dawn on the Springwater Corridor and says the first four miles are where she does her best thinking about the balance sheet.
Carnatic violin
She studied from age six and still practices most evenings. Once a year she plays at the Portland Tamil Sangam's spring festival, which she describes as far more nerve-wracking than any earnings call.
Chess with her son
A standing Saturday-morning game at the kitchen table, scored on a chalkboard. Dev is currently up 14–31 for the year and gaining.
Ask me about
Education
- B.S. Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley (Haas), 2003
- CPA, State of California, 2005
