John Nichols was promoted to executive VP and chief credit officer at MidSouth Bank, and Carolyn Lay has been named senior VP and chief retail officer.
Nichols, who previously served as a senior VP and president of the bank’s west Louisiana region, based in Lake Charles, will retain the regional president’s responsibilities until a successor is named. Nichols will office at the bank’s Lafayette headquarters on Versailles Boulevard and will continue to be a member of the Lake Charles market’s regional loan committee.
Nichols now oversees the commercial/consumer underwriting departments and loan operations department and is in charge of developing the bank’s loan policies and practices, along with its credit risk review policies and procedures. He also identifies credit risk situations and provides guidance to line of business lending managers.
Nichols joined MidSouth Bank in 2001, having previously worked as senior VP and business banking manager for Bank One (now JPMorgan Chase) in Lake Charles and Alexandria. He has 34 years of banking experience.
Lay was VP and regional retail manager at the bank for the past six years, overseeing the bank’s locations in Lafayette, Lake Charles, Sulphur and Jennings.
As CRO, she is providing strategic direction and day-to-day supervision for the retail sales and service of the bank’s 35 banking centers in Louisiana and Texas, replacing Dwight Utz, who left the bank in mid-2009 for the president and CEO position at ECB Bancorp Inc., the holding company for The East Carolina Bank in Engelhard, N.C. Lay, who has 32 years of banking experience, had been serving as interim CRO since Utz’s departure.
Lay has been employed by MidSouth Bank for 11 years, having initially managed the bank’s Oil Center branch.
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.