Bob Walters is the managing partner of The Bank CEO Network, an educational program founded in 1992 that provides current information on the banking industry to community bank presidents and chief executive officers throughout the United States. As a result of his involvement in this program, he consistently has “taken the pulse” of the community banking industry for over two decades. This constant and continuing interaction with community bank CEOs affords Mr. Walters the opportunity to identify and analyze emerging trends in product development and delivery, pricing of products and services, operational efficiency and related technological advances, economic/demographic and competitive changes, service quality evolution, marketing/sales efforts, and evolving regulatory developments, to name a few.
In 1989, Mr. Walters also established The Bank Advisory Group. For ten years prior to that, Mr. Walters formed and headed the community bank merger & acquisitions and bank stock valuation advisory services of Sheshunoff & Company. As a result, Mr. Walters has represented hundreds of banks through brokering selling banks, and through developing negotiating strategies, formulating pricing and transaction structure alternatives, and determining pro forma financial performance opportunities for bank buyers and bank merger partners. By representing selling banks, buyers of banks, as well as partners in “merger-of-equals” transactions for over three decades, Mr. Walters has compiled a depth and breadth of experience that is unparalleled in the community bank M&A advisory business.
Additionally, since 1980, Mr. Walters has participated in well over 1,500 client relationships involving the evaluation of both “control” and “minority” blocks of community bank stocks. In this regard, Mr. Walters has provided expert witness testimony regarding the valuation of community bank stocks, and the overall financial performance characteristics of the community banking industry. He is a recognized expert in quantifying the financial determinants of community bank value for both “control” and “minority” ownership positions, and he holds a Certified Valuation Analyst (CVA) designation from the National Association of Certified Valuators and Analysts (NACVA).
Additionally, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr. Walters pioneered the use of the federal “Call Report” data to design numerous bank peer group financial analysis tools that have become nationally-recognized standards in the community banking industry. Also, in the 1990s, Mr. Walters developed analytical tools utilizing financial and market price data derived from publicly-traded banking organizations that identify and correlate bank financial performance measures with bank stock market price performance. Consequently, Mr. Walters is well-recognized as an expert in the field of community bank financial performance analysis.
Prior to becoming an expert in the fields of bank mergers & acquisitions, bank financial performance analysis, and bank stock valuation, as well as an educator and trend-spotter regarding the community banking industry, Mr. Walters was a senior accountant at Touche Ross & Co. in Austin, Texas. Mr. Walters graduated from Texas A&M University with a BBA in Accounting in 1972, and is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). Neither the Bank CEO Network nor the Bank Advisory Group, L.L.C., however, are CPA firms.