Executive leadership · Portland
Thomas Achebe
Chief Operating Officer
“Nothing waiting, nothing wasted. A customer's time is the one thing we can't give back.”
Ran logistics for a shipping line before banking. Believes a branch should run like a well-loaded cargo ship: nothing wasted, nothing late.
- [email protected]
- Phone
- +1 (503) 555-0123
- Office
- Portland branch
- With Meridian since
- 2015
The story
Thomas was born in Lagos and raised in Houston, where his father worked as a port engineer. He spent his teenage summers on the docks at Barbours Cut learning how containers get where they're going, and came away with a lifelong conviction that most problems are scheduling problems in disguise.
He studied industrial engineering at Texas A&M and spent twelve years with Matson Navigation, eventually running West Coast terminal operations out of Oakland. In 2015, tired of the commute and curious about a different kind of flow, he answered a job posting for a head of operations at a bank in Oregon. He expected to stay two years. He became COO in 2020.
The project he is proudest of is the 2021 'Same Day' initiative: he mapped every step between a customer asking to open an account and the account being usable, found forty-one hand-offs, and cut them to nine. Account opening went from four days to under an hour. He keeps the original forty-one-step diagram framed outside his office as a reminder.
Thomas and his wife Adaeze, an architect, live in Lake Oswego with their three children. He coaches the under-12 soccer team at the local club, which he says is 'operations with more crying.'
Off duty
When not at the bank
Woodworking
He builds Shaker-style furniture in a converted garage, almost entirely with hand tools, and has made a dining table for each of his three children to take when they leave home. The third is at the sanding stage.
Youth soccer coaching
Head coach of the Lake Oswego U-12 boys for four seasons. His team has a set-piece playbook that is, by several parents' accounts, more thorough than most high schools'.
West African cooking
Sunday is jollof day, and he has strong and well-documented opinions about the Nigerian versus Ghanaian versions. Visiting staff from the Bend branch have been known to time their trips accordingly.
Ask me about
Education
- B.S. Industrial Engineering, Texas A&M University, 2001
- M.B.A., University of California, Berkeley (Haas), 2009
