Chady AlAhmar arrived at U.S. Bank in 2010 and noticed something peculiar. People kept talking about Richard. They wore the bank’s lapel pin with conspicuous pride. The enthusiasm for chief executive Richard Davis was so pronounced that the newcomer briefly wondered whether he had joined a cult. Banking, it seemed, came with a fan club.
He later told the story with affection. Working with Davis changed his understanding of the enthusiasm. Davis made people feel that their contribution mattered. Years later, after their careers had taken them to different organizations, AlAhmar recalled being greeted with open arms. The professional relationship had outlasted the reporting line.
Today, as CEO of Wealth Management at Old National Bank, AlAhmar has his own organization to think about. His career poses an appealing question: how do you build something larger without making the people inside it feel smaller? The question connects his work on bank structure with his unusually personal descriptions of leadership.
Beirut, Paris, then a different kind of circuit
AlAhmar studied electrical engineering at the American University of Beirut, then pursued postgraduate studies in strategy and finance at ESCP Europe in Paris. His professional path included strategy, finance and management positions at GMAC, now Ally Bank, and ACG in New York, before senior wealth management work at U.S. Bank.
Those are useful coordinates for understanding the range of his experience. Engineering and financial strategy both demand attention to relationships between parts. A change in one place can produce a result somewhere else. A carefully drawn diagram, however, has an advantage over a banking organization: the components rarely have competing calendars.
The comparison only goes so far. People bring judgment, loyalties and experience that resist neat schematic treatment. AlAhmar’s subsequent emphasis on coaching makes that distinction interesting. His education supplies one part of the biography. The way he talks about colleagues supplies another. Both belong in the picture.
He is based in Minneapolis and speaks several languages; his LinkedIn profile lists French and Arabic at native or bilingual proficiency. Beirut and Paris are chapters in his education, while Minnesota is the setting for much of his professional and civic work. The result is a career with international educational roots and a distinctly regional banking assignment.
Three businesses, one client
When AlAhmar joined Old National in early 2020, the bank was undertaking a wider reorganization. Its annual report introduced him among the leaders joining that effort, with responsibility for wealth and a base in Minneapolis. The bank’s stated direction placed more emphasis on client relationships and a consultative experience rooted in planning.
By 2022, he was describing a practical obstacle. Trust, brokerage and personal banking had tended to operate separately. Each business could grow while the overall client experience remained disjointed. Three successful departments could still give a customer three separate versions of the bank. An organization can look perfectly sensible from the inside and remarkably complicated from the other side of the desk.
AlAhmar’s response centered on bringing those capabilities together. That is an organizational undertaking with consequences for everyday service: how professionals coordinate, how they share responsibility, and how a client moves between specialties. The ambition was to make the bank’s breadth useful in a single relationship.
“We put the human side first.”
Chady AlAhmar, on Old National’s approach
It helps to imagine the service design from the customer’s chair. Financial decisions cross categories. A conversation about a business can lead to questions about investments, family ownership or charitable plans. That is the logic behind an integrated model. Its value depends on whether the specialists can work together when the client’s circumstances refuse to respect departmental boundaries.
The year on the door
In 2021, Old National recruited Jim Steiner, Joe Colianni and Eric Holman from the world of Wells Fargo’s Abbot Downing business. The appointments brought investment, advisory and operational experience into its wealth operation. Steiner was to report directly to AlAhmar as chief investment officer and president of a planned registered investment adviser.
The recruitment also had a geographic dimension, with a recently established Scottsdale office serving clients in Arizona. Before the new division had its public name, people and capabilities were being assembled. This is the less photogenic part of building a business: determining who will do the work before deciding what goes on the stationery.
On January 18, 2023, Old National unveiled 1834. The name borrowed the bank’s founding year. The division emerged after the 2022 combination with First Midwest, with AlAhmar, Steiner and Colianni among its executive leaders. Its proposition combined a bank’s range of services with more individually coordinated advice.
managementTrust &
estate servicesFinancial
planningPrivate
banking
A single point of contact, with direct access to in-house specialists. A service map, not a reporting chart.
The model pairs a wealth advisor with professionals including trust officers, financial planners, private bankers and portfolio managers. Clients have one point of contact and access to a wider group. Business succession, executive compensation and philanthropy also form part of the offering. The point of putting those disciplines together is that a client’s goals may require several of them at once.
The founding year gives the division a connection to institutional history. The operating model gives it a contemporary task. A familiar date can establish continuity; it cannot coordinate a meeting or resolve a handoff. For AlAhmar and his colleagues, the new name carried a promise that had to become a working practice.
A coach with a very full team sheet
In 2025, AlAhmar received the Family Wealth Report award for Outstanding CEO in Banking. Asked about leadership, he described his role in coaching terms: providing guidance and tools while assigning the credit for accomplishments to colleagues. He connected the division’s development to a shared approach to finding and serving clients.
His explanation also addressed the integration following the First Midwest merger. The work involved combining services and expertise, expanding investment capabilities, strengthening planning and developing technology for clients. These are concrete companions to the warmer language of teamwork. Shared intentions need systems through which people can act on them.
“My leadership style is that of a coach”
Chady AlAhmar, 2025 award interview
He has also made a public commitment to his own development. In an endorsement of the Good Leadership Breakfast series, he described returning over a decade and the importance of that experience to his work. There is a modest charm to the setting. Leadership development can arrive with an elaborate vocabulary; it can also begin by showing up for breakfast again.
Repeated participation gives this part of his biography a different rhythm from the promotion history. An appointment happens on a date. Learning to lead other people continues through recurring conversations, habits and corrections. His endorsement presents development as something worth returning to, even after the executive title is already on the business card.
Beyond the meeting room
AlAhmar’s civic record includes a current board role at Holy Family Catholic High School in Victoria, Minnesota, and former board service at the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint John’s University. These institutions put education, science and the preservation of written culture alongside his financial career.
His public record also includes Rotary service and earlier involvement with the Friends of the Hennepin County Library. Those commitments provide a broader picture of how he has spent time in Minnesota. A banking biography organized exclusively around employers would leave out institutions that occupy quite different places in community life.
At a Big Ten gathering in 2024, he celebrated International Women’s Day with colleagues and his wife, Mireille. His accompanying message thanked women in his life and singled out Kendra Vanzo for initiating his journey to Old National. The photograph offers a welcome change of setting from the standard executive portrait.
Another post recorded downtown Nashville in the morning, at midday and at night. AlAhmar used the pictures to celebrate the work of commercial banking and wealth leaders in that market. The camera had noticed the skyline; the accompanying message returned to the people working together beneath it. Even his travel snapshots came with a team list.
The next names on the roster
Expansion continued. In November 2025, 1834 announced a Naples-based team led by regional executive Jeff Robinson, with Rick Sterioti, Jolene Wall and Eric Cosentino among the local professionals. Florida joined a network that included Midwest offices, Nashville and Scottsdale. The announcement extended the same model of an advisor supported by specialists into another market.
In September 2026, Old National named Katie Florig the next president of 1834 and Tom Weizenegger its next chief investment officer. Florig had been regional executive for Chicagoland; Weizenegger had been managing director of investment management. AlAhmar welcomed the appointments in terms of succession planning, organizational alignment and continued investment in wealth management.
The sequence gives his coaching language something tangible to sit beside. The business has recruited experienced colleagues, combined services, opened markets and assigned new leadership responsibilities. Each step increases the number of relationships that have to work. Growth adds opportunity and coordination work in the same motion.
That leaves AlAhmar with the question that runs through his career: what does a larger organization feel like to an individual? His admiration for Davis began with a personal experience of attention. His work at Old National brings the same concern into the design of a wealth business. Behind the new offices, appointments and service diagrams, someone still has to make the person across the table feel heard.