In July, C.K. Lee was appointed president and chief operating officer of Oklahoma City-based InterBank. He will oversee operations and become part of a five-member executive management team. Capital planning, as well as mergers and acquisitions, are also part of Lee’s new responsibilities. Since 2017, he has worked on at least eight whole bank and thrift M&A deals in Texas, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data. Lee previously served as a managing director with Piper Sandler & Co. Based in Texas, he will remain in the state working out of Fort Worth.

“I felt like if I did something like this, I wanted to actually have a day job in a bank working on day-to-day, bread-and-butter issues,” Lee told S&P “Loans, deposits, branch network, that kind of stuff.” He added that he wanted to get involved in the community with the businesses and customers the bank serves.

InterBank has branches in Texas and Oklahoma, and Lee’s contacts around the region were part of his appeal to the company, J. Ross McKnight, chairman of InterBank parent Olney Bancshares of Texas Inc., told S&P. He has “a Rolodex that would be invaluable to us in the future for any possible acquisitions,” McKnight said.

“The market sophistication that he brings to us [can create] better funding opportunities that we have never had because we didn’t really ever trust any of the salesmen,” McKnight told S&P. “We found in C.K. somebody that we could trust.”

Lee’s career has included serving as a congressional staffer helping with work on the Senate Banking Committee. He then served 10 years with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and later the Office of Thrift Supervision. After that, he joined Commerce Street.