Winner – Outstanding CFO—Public Company
Patti McKee
ViewPoint Bank
When Patti McKee took a file clerk position 28 years ago with ViewPoint Bank in Plano, she looked at it just as a summer job. “I really wasn’t looking for a banking career,” she says. “I had just graduated from high school and was planning on going to the University of Texas.”
McKee never made it to Austin. She attended night classes at the University of Texas at Dallas instead, all the while climbing the ladder at ViewPoint. By 1997, the one-time file clerk was the bank’s executive vice president and CFO.
She has kept busy in that role: McKee was instrumental in the organization’s conversion in 2006 to a mutual savings bank, and last year to a full-stock bank holding company.
Thanks in large part to her leadership, ViewPoint has $2.9 billion of assets today, and had its most successful year as a public company in 2010. The bank raised $198 million through a “second-step” stock offering that made the bank fully public. It improved its market share in 10 of the 14 cities it serves.
McKee saved the bank $1.1 million in interest expense by adjusting its interest-rate sensitivity. And she helped reduce by $3.5 million the cost of acquiring deposits—in part through the development of a checking account that rewards customers for using lower-cost electronic banking.
This year, McKee’s challenges include helping to steer the bank through what she sees as a tenuous recovery. “The economy is improving,” she says, “but I’m concerned about economic conditions and how that’s going to affect families and the business community.”
Finalist – Outstanding CFO—Public Company
Ralph A. Beattie
Capital Senior Living Corp.
“I majored in math in college and began my career as a systems analyst for a Fortune 500 company. I then decided that I wanted to pursue a career in corporate finance, got my MBA at Carnegie Mellon University, and joined Ford Motor Co.’s finance team. By the early 1990s, I had become CFO at Haggar Clothing Co., which I took public through an IPO. It was perhaps the most exhausting but rewarding thing I have accomplished as a CFO. Today, I’m executive vice president and CFO for Capital Senior Living Corp. We have been fortunate to experience rapid growth during the past year, but like most companies, we’ve been reluctant to increase our overhead at the same rate. Consequently we have been holding our resources at existing levels and asking each of our employees to do more with less. It has forced us to be more productive, but we realize that we now need to add key resources to achieve the next level of growth. We recently filed a $100 million universal shelf registration statement and plan to draw down some or all of the shelf, depending on circumstances. As an NYSE company, we have access to capital so we can grow in a profitable and accretive manner.”
