Jill Castilla is one of the few bank chief executives with a Twitter following of customers and NBA owners.
As the coronavirus pandemic began to grip the U.S. economy earlier this year and small businesses scrambled to find help, Castilla, the CEO of Citizens Bank of Edmond in Oklahoma, took to the social media site to keep customers informed. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban began directing his followers to Castilla.Soon, the two would partner on multiple fronts. A plan Cuban had been trumpeting since the start of the pandemic to allow business owners to overdraft their banking accounts without paying fees was readily embraced by Castilla, and over the next three months her $317 million-asset bank collected no overdraft fees from its business customers. Then, after hearing from people desperate to get through the labyrinth of the Paycheck Protection Program, Castilla and Cuban partnered to build a website borrowers could use to prepare applications for loan forgiveness.
