Larry
Katz

October 2025 was a busy month for Larry Katz. Centerbridge Partners closed its $2 billion all-cash acquisition of MeridianLink, Inc., taking the publicly traded lending-software company off the Nasdaq. On that same day, Katz — who had joined as CFO just 18 months earlier — stepped into the role of CEO and President.

He didn't inherit the position from a long grooming process. He compressed the arc. April 2024: CFO. August 2024: President. October 2025: CEO. The progression was fast enough to raise eyebrows and slow enough to suggest a board that had run out of patience with searching further afield.

MeridianLink, headquartered in Irvine, California, makes the software that powers loan origination, digital account opening, and credit decisioning for community banks and credit unions — institutions that collectively serve tens of millions of Americans but often lack the engineering budget to build their own technology. MeridianLink is what fills that gap. Katz now runs it as a private company, with Centerbridge as owner and Silversmith Capital Partners as a minority investor.

What Katz inherited was a business with proven market fit but an evolving identity. MeridianLink had been growing steadily in a space that was becoming increasingly competitive as larger technology platforms eyed community banking as an opportunity. His first move as CEO wasn't a restructuring or a cost reduction — it was a brand.

In March 2026, MeridianLink unveiled "Lending Made Human." The phrase is doing a lot of work. It signals that despite all the AI tools Katz is deploying — and there are several — the company's thesis is that borrowers are people, not credit files, and that community financial institutions understand that distinction better than any mega-bank algorithm does. His job is to build the technology that honors that intuition.

Larry Katz started at The Walt Disney Company in Strategic Planning. That is not where most future fintech CEOs begin. Disney's Strategic Planning group in the early 1990s was a kind of internal management consulting operation — the kind of role that teaches you to read an industry, spot leverage points, and synthesize complexity into decisions executives can act on. It was, it turned out, exactly the training a future CFO-turned-CEO would need.

From there, he moved through Bank One before landing at JPMorgan Chase, where he stayed for 15 years. That is a long time at any company; at JPMorgan it means you ran real things. He served as Chief Administrative Officer for Chase Merchant Services and CFO for JP Morgan Treasury Services — two businesses operating at a scale that most executives never touch.

In 2016, Katz left JPMorgan for Genesys, a customer experience software company backed by Permira. As CFO he oversaw global financial operations across more than 100 countries and 5,000 employees. The move from a major bank to an enterprise software company mattered: it's where Katz learned the rhythms of SaaS — ARR, net revenue retention, the economics of land-and-expand.

StubHub came next. From March 2020 — the month the global pandemic effectively canceled live events — Katz joined as Treasurer and within three months was serving as Acting CFO. If there is a more difficult environment in which to run finance for a ticketing marketplace, it is hard to imagine. The experience was brief, but it sharpened his ability to operate under discontinuous change.

After StubHub, Katz spent two years as a Partner at WestCap, the strategic operating and investing firm co-founded by Laurence Tosi. There, he also served as a Board Director and Audit Committee Chair at Stratim Cloud Acquisition Corp, a SPAC. Then came a year as an independent consultant to private equity firms — a role that essentially involved evaluating companies from the inside and thinking about what they needed to grow. It was, in retrospect, ideal preparation for what came next.

In April 2024, MeridianLink brought him in as CFO. By August he was President. By October 2025 he was CEO. The pattern is clear: boards hire operators who can see everything and decide accordingly. Katz had spent three decades becoming that person.

MeridianLink went public in 2021 at a time when software companies commanded premium valuations. By 2025, the public market environment had shifted, and the company had attracted interest from private equity. Centerbridge Partners — a New York-based alternative investment firm — moved first, agreeing to acquire MeridianLink for $20.00 per share in an all-cash transaction valuing the company at approximately $2 billion.

The deal closed in October 2025, the same month Katz formally became CEO. Silversmith Capital Partners joined as a minority investor, adding a growth-equity perspective to the cap table alongside Centerbridge's operational expertise. The combination — a company taken private with fresh capital and a newly installed CEO — is the setup for an accelerated chapter.

Private company status changes the calculus. No quarterly earnings calls. No public market pressure on short-term numbers. The trade-off is the absence of a liquid stock as a currency for acquisitions and employee compensation. For a CEO who came up through finance, Katz understands the mechanics of both sides of that equation.

Under private ownership, MeridianLink can prioritize product investment over margin optimization and pursue acquisitions without the scrutiny of a public market reacting to every deal. Katz has an acquisition-friendly environment and a clear mandate: expand the platform, deepen the AI capability, and grow within the community financial institution segment. The Millie launch in May 2026 was the first major strategic signal. More will follow.

Larry Katz studied political science at Yale. Not finance. Not economics. Political science — the discipline of understanding how power moves through systems, how institutions behave under pressure, how coalitions form and fall apart. It is an unusual foundation for a career built almost entirely on CFO roles, and probably explains why he was consistently placed in positions requiring more than accounting acumen.

His 15 years at JPMorgan are notable not just for their duration but for their breadth. He ran the finances of the Treasury Services division — a business that handles cash management and payments for corporations globally — and served as Chief Administrative Officer for the Merchant Services division. Both roles required him to understand the plumbing of how money actually moves, not just how it's reported.

The StubHub chapter is one that few biographies linger on, but it deserves attention. He joined a ticketing marketplace in March 2020, the same month professional sports canceled their seasons and the concert industry ground to a halt. The company's core revenue — fees on ticket sales for live events — vanished. Working as CFO through that period required a particular kind of composure: managing cash, maintaining creditor relationships, and keeping a team focused on a business whose core premise had been temporarily eliminated by a virus.

After StubHub, rather than returning to an operational role, Katz spent time as a Partner at WestCap and then as an independent consultant to PE firms. This period is where he developed the acquisition evaluation skills that private equity requires — the ability to look at a company, diagnose its financial and operational health, and articulate what it needs to grow. He was essentially practicing for the job he now holds.