By Monica C. Meinert
Jon Sisk with his wife, Margie Whiting Sisk, at the 2025 ABA Conference for Community Bankers. Join community bank leaders at the 2026 conference, Feb. 15-17 in Orlando. Register at aba.com/ccb.
When he’s not working hard behind the desk as chief banking officer of West Coast Community Bank, you’ll find this Northern California native out on the waves. One of the things he loves most about surfing? The relationships one can build with fellow surfers while waiting to catch the next wave. “When you surf, it can take a while for the waves to come,” Sisk explains. “So, you sit in the water for a half an hour just talking to the guys next to you before the next set. So many relationships have come from that.”
Building relationships has been at the heart of Sisk’s banking career, and it’s what — in his view — defines community banking.
And living in such close proximity to Silicon Valley, where technology is ever evolving and things like self-driving cars and AI chatbots are becoming the norm, Sisk believes personal connections are more important than ever.
Building a career in the heart of a tech boom
When Sisk entered the workforce — fresh out of St. Mary’s College in the San Francisco Bay area — Silicon Valley was just getting started. As companies flocked to build new offices and headquarters in places like Palo Alto and Cupertino, the real estate business boomed, and one of Sisk’s first jobs out of school was working for his father, a commercial real estate developer.
But in 1989, that business ground to a halt when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck California’s central coast. At the age of 24, and recently married to his wife, Margie, “my dad told me ‘better go out and get a real job,’ ” Sisk quips.
Looking for something that would keep him closer to his and Margie’s home in Santa Cruz, a connection with a friend brought him through the door of Coast Commercial Bank to work in construction lending, and Sisk never looked back. While he never envisioned that banking would ultimately become his career path, he acknowledges that banking is in his blood — his grandfather, an Irish immigrant, was chairman of the board of a small community bank in Southern California.
Community on the coast
Coast Commercial was, as Sisk recalls, the only community bank in the Santa Cruz region when he began his banking career. “I hopped in, living and working in the community and really enjoyed it — and as time went on, I moved up through the ranks.”
About a decade after he started, Coast Commercial was acquired. At the time, a group of senior leaders broke off to form Santa Cruz County Bank. A second group, including Sisk, struck out on their own to form Lighthouse Bank. Sisk describes the relationship between the two banks as “friendly competition.”
Lighthouse Bank was chartered in 2007 — right on the crest of the financial crisis that would rock the banking industry. But Sisk reflects that despite the turbulent time, Lighthouse weathered the storm well, standing, as its name implies, as a beacon for the community.
Another wave came in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. At that time, Sisk’s bank had just completed a merger with its friendly former competitor, with Lighthouse taking on the Santa Cruz County Bank brand. The bank’s leadership positioned the combined entity as a “super community bank in the market,” and when COVID hit, Sisk and his team were on the front lines providing economic support to keep the community afloat.
“We were the only community bank in town,” he recalls. “And we had been working on technology that would allow us to adapt to the [Paycheck Protection Program] very quickly.” Santa Cruz County Bank did virtually $500 million in PPP lending “overnight,” Sisk recalls. “We almost doubled the size of the bank in a couple of months.”
The bank continued on a growth path over the next few years, completing the acquisition of 1st Capital Bank, expanding the bank’s footprint into the Monterey Bay region, Silicon Valley, and down California’s central coast to San Luis Obispo. To better reflect its expanded service area, the bank’s leadership decided to rebrand as West Coast Community Bank in April 2025.
The bank’s business model is that of a traditional community bank, focused primarily on commercial lending. Sisk notes that WCCB also does a healthy amount of construction lending, as many in the tech community have sought second homes in the Monterey Bay area. It also maintains an asset-based lending group in Silicon Valley.
Today, Sisk serves as chief banking officer of the almost $3 billion institution. And though the bank has experienced significant growth, he still prides himself on maintaining the community bank ethos. “Being able to sit down and talk to decision makers — that is what is key,” Sisk says. “If a customer walks in the door to us and says, ‘Hey, I have a unique circumstance,’ we’ll tailor a product, we’ll make a product just for that particular customer.”
Silicon Valley ethos
With Silicon Valley right on his doorstep, it’s no surprise that Sisk leads with an entrepreneurial and innovative mindset.
“We want to be on the forefront of technology,” he says, though he acknowledges innovation can come with obstacles for community banks like his, which rely heavily on their core platform provider to integrate new solutions. At WCCB, he says his goal is to be a “fast follower”—an approach taken by many community banks.
“It’s a two-sided thing, right?” Sisk notes. From the customer perspective, “you need that personal relationship when you’re doing things that are life-changing for you. But then there’s the other side of banking that is just daily banking, checking account stuff, etc. It’s very easy for technology to make that faceless. So, we’ve got to walk a fine line to make sure that we have that technology to keep those deposits here in the bank, so that we can have those personal relationships with the client and be able to lend.”
As chair of ABA’s Community Bankers Council, helping other banks along their innovation journey is a top priority for Sisk. During his time on the CBC, he helped form the Tech Forward Working Group, which is focused on what tech evolution means for community banks.
“My personal mantra for this year is that we need to get smart on technology,” Sisk says. “We need to get smart on AI, we need to get smart on stablecoin, and we need to be fast followers. So, it may not be in 2026 where we do anything, but this is a good time to figure out how this is going to play into our business model. So that’s what I would say to the community bankers: This is a time to get educated.”
That desire to get educated and engaged on the important issues has led Sisk not just to be involved with CBC, but also with other ABA groups, including the Deposit Insurance Task Force, and ABA’s Government Relations Council, where he is involved with the Digital Assets Working Group, which is currently focused on the implementation of the Genius Act and shaping the future of regulation for stablecoins and tokenized deposits.
And speaking of the future, one of the CBC’s other priorities for 2026 is all about the future of talent in the banking industry, and positioning community banking as a career of choice for younger generations. Here again, Sisk has unique insights, given his proximity to Silicon Valley.
Being able to sit down and talk to decision makers — that is what is key. If a customer walks in the door and has a unique circumstance, we’ll make a product just for that one customer.
“Our competition for talent is Google and Apple, where, you know, it’s very glamorous,” Sisk says. “That’s extremely hard to compete with.” But with three daughters — Riley, Makenzie and Addy — all working for major tech companies, Sisk has seen the less-than-glamourous side, too: a much higher risk for large-scale layoffs that are commonplace in the tech sector.
When it comes to attracting younger talent, he believes banks have the opportunity to lean into selling “stability in banking, and that it is fun, and that banks like ours are publicly traded companies, and we do give out options, we do pay well, and there is some flexibility — and you’re not wearing a tie every day to work.”
Whatever waves of change may be coming for the banking industry in the future — whether it’s in technology, new payment rails, or in how banks attract and retain talent — Sisk is confident about the outlook for community banks and the future of relationship banking.
“As technology makes the world less personable, having those relationships or being able to build those personal relationships with somebody is more important, especially when you have life-changing events — you need to sit down and talk to somebody face to face.”
And as he’s seen firsthand throughout his career, “if you support the community as a bank, they’ll support you back.”
