6 / April 2021 / Scotts Valley Times www.tpgonlinedaily.com
COMMUNITY NEWS
Q&A With New Pres./ CEO Krista Snelling
First Woman to Lead Locally Owned Santa Cruz County Bank
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rista Snelling, the new president and CEO at Santa Cruz County Bank, describes herself as a math geek and an extrovert. She double-majored in math and economics in college and went to graduate school at UC Davis to get a doctorate in economics. A year in, she realized she should pivot out of academics. She got her master’s degree, bypassed accounting, and took a job in the audit division at Arthur Andersen. She enjoyed the work. Her next move was the KPMG audit division. Her experience working with a client company seeking to go public with an initial public offering led to a job at a bank seeking to go public. The bank then grew through three acquisitions. She left Sacramento, with her husband and two teenagers to join her in the summer, recruited to become the first woman president at the locally owned Santa Cruz County Bank, succeeding David Heald on March 1. “I’ve been a math person, I loved numbers — banking is a great place to be,” she said with a smile, holding up her calculator. Founded in 2004, Santa Cruz County Bank has achieved 10 years of record earnings, top ratings statewide and nationally, grown to $1.4 billion in assets, acquiring local competitor Lighthouse Bank and most recently expanding into Monterey. Snelling talked with Times editor Jondi Gumz about the impacts from the
Krista Snelling pandemic and the future for women in banking. ••• Competing with three major national banks, Santa Cruz County ranks fourth in the county with 14% of deposits. What’s your strategy to grow deposits? t absolutely is a priority. What we’re going to do, the same as always, is build relationships… Not just making loans, but understanding the needs of the business rather than having it be transactional. Competing is easier to do now. One of the initiatives we have is the future of online banking and mobile banking — making sure we’re right there relative to the majors. Use technology to level the playing field, we have the community focus, you get the whole package.
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