Masthead

Charterbend is published by Charterbend Publishing, LLC, of Birmingham, Alabama. It reads the public filings of banks in the Southeastern United States and explains what those documents say. It carries no advertising and takes no money from any institution it writes about. Nothing on the site is for sale; the desk is paid for by its owner and by research commissioned from it, which is never published here.

The names on this page are placeholders

Charterbend Publishing, LLC, the four people listed below, the post-office box, and the telephone number are invented. No company of that name has been formed, the box has not been taken out, and the number sits inside the range the North American Numbering Plan reserves for fiction, so it will never ring. Anyone putting this site to commercial use replaces all of it with a real entity and real people first, or removes the claim altogether. A fictitious publisher on a site that names a real public company is the one combination that reads as deception rather than as a placeholder.

The publisher

Every other channel is on the contact page.

A post-office box is used on purpose rather than a street address. A registered post-office box is a valid physical postal address for the purposes of the CAN-SPAM Act, 15 U.S.C. § 7701 and the following sections, and it avoids placing a company that does not exist inside a real building.

Five things are deliberately not printed here: a tax identification number, an entity number in a state register, a license number, an ISSN, and membership of any trade body. United States law requires none of them on a website, and an invented number can collide with a real one and attach this site to an organization that has nothing to do with it.

The editors

Four people, one role each, one rubric each. There are no portraits, and no biography here names a school, an employer, a license, or a membership, because nothing of that kind would be true.

DADella Ainsworth

Editor · responsible for corrections · The Company

Reads the annual and current reports of the holding company, together with the subsidiary lists filed alongside them. Wrote both pieces in The Company and keeps the corrections log on the standards page.

RPRoland Petrey

Staff writer · The Filings

Reads the forms rather than the summaries of them: what an annual report on Form 10-K contains, and what the quarterly Call Report asks a bank to answer. Wrote both pieces in The Filings.

WKWinona Kearse

Staff writer · The Footprint

Reads the office registers and the annual deposit survey, and counts the entries rather than the descriptions of them. Wrote both pieces in The Footprint.

CLCurtis Landreneau

Staff writer · The System

Reads the statutes and agency rules that decide how a bank merger is approved and when an asset threshold changes what a bank must file. Wrote both pieces in The System.

No real, identifiable person is named anywhere on this site: not an executive, not an official of a supervisory agency, not an analyst. The documents say what they say about an institution, and there is nothing true to add about a named individual on top of that.

Funding and independence

These are the positions of the publication. They are printed here and on the independence page in the same words.

• The publication is funded by its owner and by research commissioned from it. It has no investors, no grants and no sponsors.
• It carries no advertising, no affiliate links, no sponsored content and no paid placement of any kind.
• No institution it covers has paid for coverage, and none ever will.
• No institution it covers may commission work from it either, and no commission may be used to obtain coverage, prevent it, or change it.
• Commissioned work is never published here, is never a source for anything that is, and has never changed a word of what is.
• The editor, the writers and members of their households hold no securities of any institution the publication covers, and do not trade them. A broad index fund that happens to contain such a security is disclosed as a category and is not treated as a position.
• The publication seeks no non-public information and uses none.

The rule on securities positions is set out in full, with the reason it exists, on the independence page, together with what would have to be disclosed if any of these positions ever changed.

Method

Charterbend works from public filings and public registers only. There are no interviews, no unnamed sources, no ratings, and no advice. A claim about a named institution reaches a page only when a filed document is named beside it, and every page states the documents it rests on before it says anything else. How that works, and how an error is corrected once it is published, is on the standards page.