The Jon Park File
NAME: Jon Park
TITLE: Chairman and CEO
COMPANY: Westfield Bank
Born: Oberlin
Education: He majored in accounting at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and earned his bachelor’s degree in business.
What is something that you’ve done, but never thought you would do in your lifetime? Probably the biggest one would be starting and growing a company like Westfield Bank. It’s something you can dream about but you just think wouldn’t really happen.
What is something that you always thought that you would do, but have yet to do? Learning to fly an airplane. It’s always been an interest of mine but I have never done anything like that. I’m a boater, so I always have interest in extended boating trips or exploring places. I haven’t really had time to do that, maybe someday.
If you could go back in time and talk to yourself just after being tasked with starting Westfield Bank, what piece of advice would you give yourself? Well, I’d say I should have partnered with PayPal because it’s going to be a really big thing. Another one would be the evolution of banking away from a geographic branch based system to an online system. Some people say banking used to be noun, a place you’d go, and now it’s a verb, it’s something you do mobily. So I guess the advice would be that that transformation is going to go a lot slower and play out a lot longer than I’m thinking, and kind of pace yourself, and probably earlier on in Westfield Bank’s history spend more time developing the infrastructure, the branches and the ATM’s, and not jump as quickly to an all online model. You see us today, and we are kind of a blend. However, we started out with more of a focus to be more online. So that one comes to mind.
