The Sentinels

Every bank has a front door and a back door. The front door is where the handshakes happen — where the relationship bankers buy lunch, pitch terms, and promise the world to the business owner across the table. The back door is where someone has to sit down with the file, read the financials, stress the assumptions, and decide whether the bank’s capital should actually be put at risk. The front door gets the glory. The back door keeps the institution alive. This article is about the people who guard the back door.

Anyone can make a loan. The hard part is making sure you get paid back.

— Houston Banking Wire

Chief credit officers and chief risk officers are the most consequential people in banking that almost nobody outside the industry has heard of. They do not appear at ribbon cuttings. They do not take clients to Astros games. They do not close deals — they kill them, or they bless them, and either way they own the outcome. When a bank fails, it is almost always because the credit function failed first. When a bank endures decades of economic turbulence without a catastrophic loss, it is almost always because someone in the credit chair refused to let standards slip when everyone else was chasing volume. These are the people who say no — and who are right often enough that the institution trusts them to keep saying it.

The ten men and women profiled here collectively oversee the credit and risk functions of institutions holding more than seventy billion dollars in assets. They are former bank examiners who crossed over to the private side, career credit analysts who rose through the ranks without ever originating a loan, and seasoned executives who have watched entire portfolios unravel in downturns and learned lessons they have never forgotten. Some of them approve every significant loan their bank makes. Others build the frameworks, the policies, and the stress tests that determine what “safe” means at their institution. All of them share one thing: the weight of knowing that their judgment is the last line of defense between the bank’s capital and the borrower’s promise.

What follows are ten profiles of the sentinels who stand watch over Houston’s banking community — the credit and risk leaders whose names you may not know but whose decisions shape every dollar this city’s banks put to work.

Credit discipline is not a constraint on growth. It is the only thing that makes growth sustainable. Every bank that forgot that lesson learned it the hard way.

— Houston Banking Wire, on West’s philosophy

Joe West came to banking through the side door that produces the best credit officers: he is a certified public accountant. That background — the training to read a balance sheet the way a radiologist reads an X-ray, finding what others miss — has defined a career that now spans more than four decades and sits at the center of the most consequential bank merger in Houston’s recent history.

West earned his BBA in Accounting from Baylor University in 1978 and began his career in public accounting before moving into banking. His path took him through Horizon Capital Bank in Houston, where he served as Senior Credit Officer, and then to Vista Bank Texas, where he spent seven years as Executive Vice President and Senior Credit Officer. In 2013, he joined CommunityBank of Texas as Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Credit Officer — the role that would place him at the center of the institution’s growth trajectory and, ultimately, its transformation into Stellar Bancorp.

When CommunityBank of Texas merged with Allegiance Bancshares in 2022 to form Stellar Bancorp, West was named SEVP and Chief Credit Officer of the combined entity — a $10.79 billion institution with a commercial loan portfolio spanning thousands of relationships across the Houston market. That appointment was not a formality. Merging two credit cultures is among the hardest things in banking. Every acquired portfolio carries its own underwriting assumptions, its own risk tolerances, its own definition of what constitutes an acceptable deal. West’s job was to build a single credit framework that honored both legacies while imposing the discipline the combined institution demanded. He did it.

Now, with the Prosperity Bancshares merger on the horizon — a combination that will create a fifty-four-billion-dollar institution — West faces the same challenge at an even larger scale. The accountant from Baylor has spent his career reading the numbers that others skim past. At Stellar, and soon at the largest bank headquartered in Houston, those numbers are the last thing standing between the institution’s capital and the market’s optimism. That is exactly where Joe West has always been most comfortable.

You cannot manage risk from a spreadsheet. You manage it by knowing every corner of the institution — the people, the markets, the culture. That is why the best risk officers have run something.

— Houston Banking Wire, on Akin’s approach

Okan Akin is one of the rare executives in Houston banking who has sat in the CEO’s chair and chosen to move into risk management — not because the opportunity was smaller, but because he understood that the role was larger than most people realize. As Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Risk Officer of Stellar Bancorp, Akin oversees the enterprise risk function of a ten-billion-dollar institution. But his path to that chair is what makes him unusual: he has been a commercial lender, a deputy chief credit officer, a regional president, a chief administrative officer, and the president and CEO of a nationally chartered bank. He has seen every side of the house. That is exactly what you want in the person responsible for seeing around corners.

Akin’s career began as a commercial lender at Sterling Bank in Houston, where he spent five years building the foundational skills of relationship banking. From Sterling, he moved to Independence Bank, N.A., where he rose to President and CEO — leading the institution and managing its credit function as Chief Credit Officer simultaneously. When Allegiance Bank was formed, Akin joined as one of its earliest senior leaders, holding titles that evolved from Deputy Chief Credit Officer to Regional President to Chief Administrative Officer and Chief Risk Officer. He was instrumental in Allegiance’s growth into one of Houston’s largest community banks.

When the Allegiance-CommunityBank merger created Stellar Bancorp in 2022, Akin was named SEVP and Chief Risk Officer of the combined company. It was the natural destination for a career that had touched every function in banking. A CRO who has never run a bank can read the risk reports. A CRO who has been the CEO — who has made payroll, approved the largest loans, and answered to the board — reads those same reports with a fundamentally different understanding of what the numbers mean for the people behind them.

Akin earned both his MBA in Finance and his BS in Finance from the University of Houston. He represents a model of risk leadership that the industry talks about but rarely produces: the executive who has done every job in the building and now applies that operating knowledge to the discipline of keeping the institution safe. At Stellar, with the Prosperity merger approaching, that experience is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

When you have spent a decade examining banks for the Federal Reserve, you develop a very specific understanding of what goes wrong — and why. That perspective does not leave you when you cross to the other side.

— Houston Banking Wire, on Spaulding’s career

Audrey Spaulding spent eleven years inside the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas — first as a bank examiner, then as a senior examiner, and ultimately as a commissioned examiner with the authority to lead examinations of the institutions the Fed supervised. She walked into banks, opened the books, tested the portfolios, and wrote the reports that told management and boards what they did not want to hear. That career produces a particular kind of credit officer: one who has seen how loans fail not in theory but in practice, across dozens of institutions and hundreds of portfolios, in every economic condition Texas can produce.

Spaulding earned her BBA in Finance from Texas Tech University in 1986 and went directly into the Federal Reserve system. By the time she left the Dallas Fed in 2000, she had examined banks through the tail end of the savings and loan aftermath, the commercial real estate cycles of the 1990s, and the early tremors of the energy volatility that would define the next two decades. That foundation shaped everything that followed.

From the Fed, Spaulding moved to LegacyTexas Bank, where she spent more than a decade in progressively senior credit roles — Senior Vice President and Credit Officer, then Executive Vice President and Chief Credit Officer, and finally Director of Credit Risk Management. She built and oversaw the credit framework of an institution that grew substantially during her tenure. In June 2015, she joined Third Coast Bank SSB as Executive Vice President and Chief Credit Officer, and was promoted to Senior Executive Vice President in January 2021 — the same year Third Coast went public on the NYSE under the ticker TCBX.

Third Coast has been one of Houston’s fastest-growing banks, expanding from a community institution into a publicly traded company with $5.34 billion in assets. That kind of growth creates enormous pressure on the credit function — more loans, more borrowers, more markets, more complexity. Spaulding’s job is to ensure that the growth does not outrun the discipline. For someone who spent a decade watching banks from the examiner’s chair, that is not just a professional obligation. It is a reflex.

Twenty-eight years at one institution is not inertia. It is conviction — the belief that the place you are is worth the career you are giving it.

— Houston Banking Wire

In an industry where career advancement often means changing institutions every five to seven years, Craig Barker has spent twenty-eight years at Moody National Bank — and he has held nearly every credit and lending title the bank offers. Commercial loan officer. Vice president. Area lending manager. Chief lending officer. Chief credit officer. And now, Executive Vice President and Chief Risk Officer. That progression tells you two things: Barker never stopped growing, and Moody never wanted him to leave. Both speak volumes.

Barker is a Texas A&M University graduate who supplemented his undergraduate education with the Graduate School of Banking at Louisiana State University — one of the premier advanced banking programs in the country. He joined Moody Bank in the late 1990s and rose through the lending ranks before transitioning into the credit and risk side of the house. The move from CLO to CCO to CRO is a rare arc — it means an executive who understood the borrower’s perspective first, then learned to evaluate it objectively, and now oversees the entire risk framework that governs how the institution operates.

Moody National Bank is a century-old Galveston institution with $1.57 billion in assets, deep roots along the Gulf Coast, and a conservative credit culture that has kept it standing through every storm — literal and financial — that the Texas coast has produced. Barker is the custodian of that culture. His ten years in the CRO chair have coincided with some of the most challenging periods in recent memory: Hurricane Harvey, the 2020 energy downturn, the pandemic, and the rapid rate environment of 2022–2024. Through all of it, Moody’s credit quality has held.

Barker serves on the Advisory Board of Texas A&M’s Commercial Banking Program and has been active in League City civic life, including past president of the League City Lions Club and the League City Economic Development Corporation. He is the kind of banker that community institutions depend on: deeply knowledgeable, institutionally loyal, and impossible to rattle. Twenty-eight years at one bank is not a career. It is a marriage. And the institution is better for it.

The best credit decisions are made by people who have sat across the table from the borrower and across the table from the board. You need both perspectives to get it right.

— Houston Banking Wire, on Moore’s dual experience

Preston Moore is a Houston native who has done something almost no one in the city’s banking community has done: he ran a publicly traded bank as President and CEO, then moved into the credit chair at a different institution and made it his permanent home. That trajectory — from the corner office to the credit committee — is the opposite of how most banking careers work. It is also exactly why Origin Bancorp trusts him with a title that exists almost nowhere else in the industry: Chief Banking and Credit Officer.

Moore earned his BA from Washington and Lee University and his MBA in Finance from the University of Texas at Austin. His early career included senior roles at Amegy Bank, where he served as Executive Vice President and Manager of the Investment Division. In 2009, he became President and CEO of Encore Bank — a Houston-based institution that he led through a period of significant transition. The experience of running a bank — managing capital allocation, regulatory relationships, board expectations, and the daily reality of keeping an institution solvent — gave Moore a perspective on credit risk that no amount of portfolio analysis can replicate.

In 2012, Moore joined Origin Bank — then operating as Community Trust Bank — as Houston Regional President, tasked with building the bank’s presence in the city. He has since risen to Chief Banking and Credit Officer of Origin Bancorp, with oversight of the credit function across the company’s operations in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The dual title reflects the reality of his role: Moore is not just managing credit policy in a vacuum. He is integrating credit decisions with the bank’s broader commercial strategy, ensuring that growth and discipline are not treated as competing priorities but as two sides of the same coin.

Origin Bancorp is a publicly traded company with approximately $9.8 billion in assets and a multi-state footprint that has expanded aggressively into Houston over the past decade. Moore has been at the center of that expansion from the beginning — first as the man who built the Houston franchise, and now as the man who ensures the credit quality of the entire enterprise holds up as it grows. A Houston native running credit for a bank that has made Houston its most important growth market. The fit is not accidental.

There is no substitute for having examined banks from the regulatory side. You learn what kills institutions — and it is almost never a single bad loan. It is a culture that stopped asking hard questions.

— Houston Banking Wire, on Barnhart’s perspective

Steve Barnhart spent fifteen years as a national bank examiner for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — the federal agency that charters, regulates, and supervises national banks. He did not examine banks from a desk in Washington. He walked into the institutions, reviewed the loan files, tested the credit processes, and wrote the findings that determined whether a bank’s credit function met federal standards. Across two stints at the OCC — from 1980 to 1985 and again from 1988 to 1995 — Barnhart developed a depth of credit knowledge that most bankers spend entire careers trying to approximate.

When Barnhart crossed to the private side, he brought that examiner’s discipline with him. He served as Chief Credit Officer at Amegy Bank — one of the most prominent CCO roles in Houston — overseeing the credit function of what was then an eleven-billion-dollar institution. From Amegy, he moved to IBERIABANK as Senior Credit Officer for the Texas market, then to Cadence Bank as Executive Vice President and Chief Credit Underwriting Officer, where he managed the credit underwriting function across the bank’s footprint.

In 2021, Barnhart joined Origin Bank as Regional Executive Vice President and Senior Credit Officer for the Houston market. It is a role that pairs him with Preston Moore — Moore overseeing the enterprise-wide credit function, Barnhart applying his examiner’s eye to the Houston portfolio that is Origin’s most strategically important market. The combination of a former bank CEO and a former national bank examiner running credit at the same institution is unusual. It is also formidable.

Barnhart’s career is a reminder that the best credit officers are often the ones who spent years on the other side of the table — not as lenders but as regulators, trained to see what the institution cannot or will not see about itself. He has examined banks, run credit at banks, and underwritten credit at banks across four decades. At Origin, he brings all of that experience to bear on a Houston market that rewards optimism and punishes complacency. Barnhart has never been accused of complacency.

Risk management is not about avoiding risk. It is about understanding it well enough to take the right ones. That distinction separates the banks that grow from the banks that stagnate — and the banks that survive from the ones that do not.

— Houston Banking Wire, on Bussey’s philosophy

Christy Bussey has spent thirty-five years in community banking, and she has done something that very few credit and risk executives manage: she has been as influential outside her own institution as inside it. Before joining Integrity Bank SSB as Executive Vice President and Chief Risk Officer, Bussey spent four years at the Independent Bankers Association of Texas — the organization that represents the interests of Texas community banks at the state and national level. She served as Director of Solutions and Strategies, then Director of Growth and Development, working directly with community banks across the state on the operational, compliance, and risk challenges that define the industry. In 2024, IBAT honored her with its Excellence in Leadership Award — a distinction that recognized not just her work at the association but the totality of a career devoted to making community banking better.

Bussey’s banking career began on the credit side. She earned her BBA in Finance from the University of Texas at Tyler and later completed the Stonier Graduate School of Banking — one of the industry’s most rigorous executive education programs. She rose to Executive Vice President and Chief Credit Officer at Texas Bank & Trust, where she oversaw the credit function of a respected East Texas institution. That combination — hands-on credit leadership at a producing bank, followed by years of advising dozens of banks on risk and compliance at the industry association level — gives Bussey a breadth of perspective that is rare in the CRO chair.

At Integrity Bank — a de novo institution that opened its doors in October 2024 — Bussey is building a risk management framework from scratch. There is no inherited portfolio to clean up, no legacy systems to work around, no institutional habits to break. There is only a blank page and the opportunity to build something right from the beginning. For someone who has spent years advising other banks on what best practices look like, the chance to implement them herself — from day one, without compromise — is the culmination of a career spent preparing for exactly this moment.

Bussey serves on the Advisory Board of the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University and is a member of the International Association of Risk and Compliance Professionals. She is the kind of executive that the community banking industry produces at its best: technically rigorous, deeply experienced, and committed to the idea that small banks can be run with the same sophistication as institutions ten times their size. At Integrity Bank, she is proving it.

Prosperity does not do flash. It does discipline. And the person responsible for ensuring that discipline holds at thirty-eight billion dollars in assets is the one whose name almost nobody knows.

— Houston Banking Wire

Jennifer Willcoxon is the Chief Risk Officer of the largest bank headquartered in Houston — and she may be the least publicly visible executive at her level in the entire Texas banking industry. That is not a criticism. It is a reflection of the institution she serves. Prosperity Bancshares has built a thirty-eight-billion-dollar franchise on a philosophy of quiet efficiency, conservative underwriting, and an almost allergic aversion to publicity. The bank’s CRO operates in the same mode: no conference keynotes, no industry magazine profiles, no public pronouncements about risk philosophy. Just the work.

Willcoxon is a Rice University graduate who began her career in regulatory compliance at Prosperity Bank, rising through the ranks from compliance roles to Executive Vice President and Chief Risk Officer. Her tenure has coincided with the most consequential growth period in the bank’s history — more than thirty acquisitions that transformed a small-town Texas bank into the dominant Houston-headquartered institution. Each acquisition brought a new portfolio, new risk exposures, and new regulatory considerations. Willcoxon’s job was to ensure that the integration of those risks never outpaced the bank’s ability to manage them.

The scale of what Willcoxon oversees is worth pausing on. Prosperity Bancshares holds more assets than any bank headquartered in Houston. Its loan portfolio spans commercial real estate, commercial and industrial, agricultural, and consumer lending across Texas. The risk function she manages must account for energy price volatility, Gulf Coast weather exposure, concentration risk from acquisitions, interest rate sensitivity, and the regulatory expectations that come with being the largest institution in the market. Forbes named Prosperity “America’s Best Bank” in 2014. The risk discipline that earned that distinction did not happen by accident.

With the Stellar Bancorp merger approaching — a combination that will create a fifty-four-billion-dollar institution — Willcoxon’s role becomes even more critical. Integrating the risk frameworks of two publicly traded banks is a regulatory and operational challenge of the highest order. The woman overseeing that process has spent her entire career at Prosperity, building the systems that allowed the bank to absorb thirty acquisitions without a stumble. One more — the biggest one — is next.

Credit is the conscience of a bank. When the conscience is strong, the institution can take risks with confidence. When it is weak, every loan is a gamble.

— Houston Banking Wire

John Morrell was named Chief Credit Officer of Texas First Bank effective January 1, 2025 — inheriting a credit function that had been managed by a single executive for more than eighteen years. That kind of succession carries weight. The institution had known one credit philosophy, one set of standards, one voice in the room for nearly two decades. Morrell’s appointment signaled that the board and management trusted him not to reinvent the wheel but to maintain the discipline that had kept the bank’s portfolio clean through multiple economic cycles while bringing the energy and perspective of a new generation of credit leadership.

Morrell is a Port Neches native who earned his bachelor’s degree from Texas Christian University and his MBA from Lamar University. He spent more than a decade as a commercial banker in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Texas — the Beaumont-Port Arthur-Orange corridor — before joining Texas First Bank in 2020 as Regional Loan President for the Southeast Texas market. His appointment to the CCO chair five years later reflected a deliberate succession plan: bring in a proven lender with deep regional knowledge, let him learn the institution’s credit culture from the inside, and elevate him when the time is right.

Texas First Bank operates twenty-seven locations across seven counties, stretching from Galveston Island through the Houston metropolitan area and into Southeast Texas. The bank’s $2.36 billion in assets are built on a foundation of commercial real estate, small business, and consumer lending in communities where the bank has operated for more than fifty years. That portfolio reflects the real economy of the Gulf Coast — petrochemical facilities, medical practices, retail centers, multifamily developments — and it requires a credit officer who understands the specific risks of lending in a region where hurricanes, energy cycles, and industrial concentration are constants, not variables.

Morrell is active in the Beaumont community, serving on the boards of the Greater Beaumont Chamber of Commerce and the Beaumont Children’s Museum. He represents the next wave of credit leadership in Houston banking: young enough to bring a fresh perspective, experienced enough to have weathered real credit cycles, and grounded enough in the communities the bank serves to understand that the numbers on the page represent real businesses and real families. At Texas First, the credit torch has been passed. Morrell is carrying it.

A growing bank without a strong credit framework is a building without a foundation. It looks impressive until the ground shifts. Then you find out what it was really built on.

— Houston Banking Wire

Jonathan Sparling came to First Liberty Bank from one of the most demanding credit environments in Texas banking. As Executive Vice President and Regional President at Independent Financial — formerly Independent Bank Group — he oversaw lending operations across the bank’s North Texas footprint, managing a portfolio that spanned commercial real estate, commercial and industrial, and construction lending across one of the state’s most competitive markets. Before that, he served as EVP of Lending at Independent Bank Group, responsible for the credit production and oversight that fueled the institution’s growth. The experience of running credit at a publicly traded, multi-billion-dollar bank prepared Sparling for the very different challenge he faces at First Liberty: building a credit framework for an institution that is growing fast and needs the infrastructure to match.

Sparling earned his MBA from the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University — one of the top business programs in Texas — and brings a combination of academic rigor and hands-on portfolio management that is particularly valuable at a bank in First Liberty’s position. The institution, with approximately $430 million in assets and operations spanning Liberty County and the Houston market, is in a phase of deliberate expansion. New markets mean new borrowers, new risk profiles, and new concentrations. The CCO’s job at a growing bank is fundamentally different from the CCO’s job at a mature one: at a mature bank, you maintain. At a growing bank, you build — and you build while the institution is moving.

At First Liberty, Sparling is doing exactly that. He is building the credit policies, the approval processes, the concentration limits, and the portfolio monitoring systems that will define how the bank lends as it grows. It is foundational work — the kind of thing that does not generate headlines but determines whether an institution can sustain its growth trajectory or will eventually be forced to pull back. Every well-run community bank in Houston has a credit framework that was built by someone. At First Liberty, that someone is Jonathan Sparling.

The test of a chief credit officer is not how the portfolio performs when the economy is strong. It is what happens when the cycle turns. Sparling’s experience at Independent Financial — navigating credit through multiple economic environments at a publicly traded institution with regulatory expectations to match — is the foundation he is building on at First Liberty. The framework is going up. The question is not whether it will be tested. It is when. Sparling is building for that day.

Ten sentinels. Ten institutions. Seventy billion dollars in assets under their collective watch. They are the people who read the files after the handshakes, who stress the assumptions after the pitches, and who carry the weight of knowing that their judgment is the last line of defense between ambition and catastrophe. They do not close deals. They close the door on the ones that should not happen — and they open it, carefully, for the ones that should. Houston’s banking community exists because its lenders are bold. It endures because its credit and risk leaders are disciplined. These ten are the reason the discipline holds.

Houston Banking Wire · The Sentinels · Fourth in a Series