Born inside National Semiconductor, National 1st became part of PremierOne in 2013. Its history turns on a practical question: how do you keep banking personal when convenience keeps getting more expensive?
After returning to profit in 2025, the member-owned lender is widening its insurance-agent specialty. Its next test: broader business banking, a shorter name and an app that brings back a feature members missed.
Conexus built its edge by treating banking deposits as Saskatchewan development capital. Now a three-way merger has made the co-op bigger, richer and harder to keep personal - which is exactly why its experiment matters.
UNIFY began as a savings circle for airline employees. Seventy-eight years later, its merger with CommunityAmerica shows what happens when a workplace cooperative becomes a national banking network.

Larry Katz is CEO and President of MeridianLink, a leading SaaS platform for digital lending and account opening used by banks and credit unions across the United States. A Harvard MBA and Yale graduate, Katz spent 15 years at JPMorgan Chase before leading finance and operations at Genesys and StubHub, then pivoting to private equity advisory before joining MeridianLink as CFO in 2024. Within 18 months he rose to President and then CEO, steering the company through a $2 billion acquisition by Centerbridge Partners in October 2025 and launching an AI-powered lending agent called Millie. His platform ethos — 'Lending Made Human' — sits at the intersection of algorithmic decisioning and community financial relationships.