Chet Samuelson gave his children a plastic bag of cash and coins before a family road trip. The money was theirs to spend. It was also theirs to exhaust. At a gas station, a packet of chips or a souvenir would come out of the same small reserve. The budget had to survive the journey, even if the appetite did not.
It is an unusually portable introduction to a banking executive. Samuelson, BOK Financial’s Arizona Market President and CEO, has been responsible for a commercial loan portfolio measured in billions. Yet the family anecdote brings money back to a size a child can hold. A purchase becomes a decision with a visible remainder.
His explanation is plain: “Kids need to feel a sense of ownership over their money to learn.” There is little ceremonial about that sentence. The children get something to manage, an opportunity to choose, and a reason to think about the next stop. A plastic bag is admirably free of management jargon.
That episode offers a way into his public career. Follow the jobs and the responsibilities grow: credit analysis, commercial banking, regional expansion, market leadership. Follow the civic commitments and the circle widens again, into economic development, youth organizations and workforce planning. The recurring subject is how people acquire the means to do something, then decide what to do with them.
The road out of Ogden
Samuelson’s banking career began in Ogden, Utah, at Bank One. He stayed through its merger with JPMorgan Chase and worked in positions ranging from credit analyst to senior banker. He also earned his undergraduate business degree and MBA at Weber State University. His early professional geography and his education were rooted in the same Utah city.
The distinction between those early jobs matters. Credit analysis asks whether a business can support an obligation. Banking relationships require understanding the people making that obligation. His subsequent appointments brought those responsibilities into larger territories. In 2008, he led the effort to expand Chase Commercial Bank into Idaho through the Washington Mutual acquisition.
He moved to Wells Fargo in 2014, working with middle-market customers on global banking expansion across eight mountain states. In January 2019, Hillcrest Bank appointed him its Utah market president as it entered the Wasatch Front. These were assignments in which the map itself was part of the job: an existing bank reaching customers in another place.
- 2014Wells Fargo
Eight-state global banking remit - 2019Hillcrest Bank
Utah market president - 2022BOK Financial
Arizona market CEO
The Utah years also included board service with business and enterprise organizations. World trade, entrepreneurial networks and small-business development appeared alongside the banking work. That combination would recur in Arizona. A regional assignment could bring a new title; becoming useful in a region involved a longer list of people and institutions.
An Arizona inheritance
Samuelson moved to Arizona in 2019. Before joining BOK Financial, he led Wells Fargo’s Arizona commercial banking operation, with responsibility for a $4 billion loan portfolio. That figure describes the lending responsibility of his earlier role. It belongs to a particular job and period, rather than to his personal wealth or the size of his current operation.
Loan portfolio under his responsibility as Wells Fargo’s Arizona commercial banking leader, before his 2022 move.
On July 11, 2022, he became BOK Financial’s Arizona market CEO. Dave Ralston, his predecessor, had held the market leadership role since 2005. Samuelson was entering an operation with seventeen years of history under the same leader. There were relationships to understand and a team whose work predated his arrival.
At the time, his stated ambition was to work with the leadership team and continue the Arizona operation’s success. The attraction he described combined the capabilities of a larger financial institution with an emphasis on local service. His arrival therefore carried two obligations: bring his experience to the job and take account of what other people had already built.
A January 2024 leadership photograph puts him among four colleagues, rather than alone at a desk. The accompanying description of the Arizona operation emphasized access to decision-makers and familiarity with a client’s plans. It is a demanding promise precisely because it sounds ordinary. Knowing someone’s business requires time; putting that promise into practice involves more people than the executive in the photograph.
The rest of the borrowing conversation
Samuelson’s April 2023 writing about business borrowing gives that promise some practical detail. Interest rates had risen, and he described clients whose growth plans still made the higher cost of borrowing worth considering. A business opportunity could arrive on a timetable that did not politely wait for cheaper money.
He discussed owners seeking to expand facilities, equipment or services. Their calculations included expected returns and future cash flow, alongside the price of a loan. He also described services that could improve the movement of money through a business, from collecting customer payments to processing card transactions.
Read as a description of that moment, the essay shows the breadth of the conversation he wanted a banker to have. There was the borrowing request, then the surrounding operation. An owner’s problem might include when receipts arrive or how much administrative effort it takes to collect them. The interest rate occupied a place in that account, alongside several other practical concerns.
The family road-trip story has a similar clarity about choices, though the stakes are different. Children can see the coins remaining in a bag. A company’s decisions require a more complicated view of incoming cash, commitments and timing. In both accounts, Samuelson makes the discussion understandable by attaching money to a use.
A place at the regional table
His Arizona commitments extend into institutions that consider the region beyond an individual banking relationship. At GPEC Next, he is a co-chair alongside CBRE’s Cathy Teeter. The council advises the Greater Phoenix Economic Council on strategy. Its stated fiscal 2026 priorities included feedback on market conditions and helping guide the following year’s action plan.
That is work concerned with what comes next for a place: how a region understands its economy and organizes its efforts. Banking supplies one perspective on those questions. A council brings it into conversation with others. The responsibility is specific enough to be more informative than a general declaration of enthusiasm for the community.
The Greater Phoenix Chamber gives another example. Its June 2026 announcement named Samuelson investment committee chair for fiscal year 2027. He also appears on the boards of Boys & Girls Clubs of the Valley and among the members of Greater Phoenix Leadership. The organizations operate in different parts of civic life, from youth programs to business leadership.
In September 2025, the Workforce Arizona Council welcomed him as a new member. By March 2026, meeting minutes recorded his participation and his seconding of a nomination for the council’s first vice chair. It is a modest detail, the sort that rarely makes an awards biography. It nevertheless puts him in the actual business of a public body: attending, considering decisions and taking part.
These commitments widen the setting of his story. The child with spending money needs practice. The business seeking capital needs an operation that can support its plans. The region needs employers, skills and institutions capable of working together. Samuelson’s documented roles place him at several of those levels, with different responsibilities at each.
Who gets the credit?
Recognition has followed. Samuelson was named to the Phoenix TITAN 100 in 2024 and appears on the 2025 list. He was also recognized among AZ Big Media’s 50 Most Powerful People in Arizona Business for 2025 and included in its banking industry leaders for 2026. Awards supply dates and public acknowledgment. The exchanges around them sometimes supply better character detail.
After the 2024 TITAN 100 dinner, colleague Austin Harris praised Samuelson’s thoughtfulness toward employees and his willingness to work alongside them. Samuelson replied with thanks, appreciation for the team and a joke: “Next event you can leave your phone at home!” It is a small puncture in the formal language of an awards night, and a welcome one.
“Next event you can leave your phone at home!”
Samuelson, replying to a colleague after the 2024 TITAN 100 dinner
In June 2025, BOK Financial received the Greater Phoenix Chamber’s Excellence in Business Award in the publicly held organization category. Samuelson’s response credited the team’s work over twenty years. He had led the market for roughly three of them. Giving credit across that longer period acknowledged the institution he had inherited as well as the operation he now led.
The award considered economic growth and business leadership, community impact and social responsibility, and workplace culture. Those three measures connect parts of Samuelson’s working life that a conventional job history keeps apart. The lending operation, the civic appointments and the colleague’s description of his leadership all belong in the account. His response to the award brought them together through the team’s sustained effort, giving the occasion a longer memory than his own tenure.
Return, finally, to the bag of coins. It is a family memory with enough detail to resist becoming an executive slogan. There are snacks, souvenirs and a finite amount of cash. Samuelson’s children had to make choices with something they could count. Across a career of larger responsibilities, that remains a useful beginning: understand what is available, know what it is for, and think about the road still ahead.