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ASSOCIATIONS
• Edward P. Schreiber has been elected chair of the Risk Management Association (RMA). The one-year term began Sept. 1. Schreiber is executive vice president and chief risk officer at Zions Bancorporation, Salt Lake City, and is past vice chair of RMA’s board of directors. Schreiber began his banking career with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). During his 19 years of service with the OCC, he served in managerial, analytical and technical positions. Prior to joining Zions, he was managing director with Alvarez & Marsal Financial Industry Regulatory Advisory Services. He also served as chief risk officer and regulatory liaison for TD Bank NA and its predecessors for 11 years. Founded in 1914, the Risk Management Association is a not-for-profit, member-driven professional association whose purpose is to advance the use of sound risk management principles in the financial services industry.
BANKING
• Bank of Utah, Ogden, has promoted Eric DeFries to team lead over the bank’s residential construction and consumer loan portfolios. DeFries will be responsible for managing the risk and returns for the residential construction and consumer lending products, developing policy and procedures around approvals, managing the bank’s residential construction loan committee and approving consumer and mortgage loans. He will also originate and underwrite commercial loans with the commercial lending team at the Bountiful branch. DeFries has served as vice president consumer and mortgage finance manager for Bank of Utah since 2013, and earlier as assistant vice president secondary marketing manager and secondary marketing analyst. Before holding positions at Bank of Utah, DeFries was an operations analyst at Goldman Sachs. DeFries holds a bachelor’s degree in finance and economics from Utah State University, and is currently serving as the chair of the Ogden Housing Authority, for which he has served since 2014.
• EnerBank USA, Salt Lake City, has appointed Robb Kerry as executive vice president, chief credit officer and enterprise risk officer. EnerBank is a consumer lender that helps business partners and independent home improvement contractors increase their sales. In his new role, Kerry is responsible for all aspects of consumer and commercial credit risk within the bank’s portfolio of unsecured home improvement loans. He also will assume responsibility for creating and developing an enterprise risk management program. Kerry joined EnerBank in 2015 as senior vice president and chief credit officer. Prior to EnerBank, Kerry served at GE Capital Bank, where he spent five years leading the modeling and quantitative risk team, as well as overseeing all aspects of credit modeling and portfolio stress testing. He also held positions of chief credit officer at both ADB Bank and Cache Valley Bank. Kerry began his banking career as a financial examiner for the Utah Department of Financial Institutions. He Kerry holds a bachelor of arts in business administration and Spanish from Weber State University and earned a master of business administration there.
CONTESTS
• Applications are being accepted for the “Best of the West” awards. To qualify, organizations must be located west of Interstate 15 in Salt Lake County. Anyone may submit an application for an organization to be recognized. Details are at http://saltlakesbestofthewest.com/.
EDUCATION/TRAINING
• The Weber State University School of Nursing will be named in honor of Annie Taylor Dee with a ceremony set for 5:30 p.m. Oct. 2 at the WSU ballroom. Annie Taylor and Thomas Dee married and settled in Ogden in 1871. She resolved to honor her husband’s memory after his death in 1905 by building a community hospital. The Dee family donated three acres of land on the corner of Harrison Boulevard and 24th Street and the hospital was dedicated in 1910. Weber College was one of only seven schools in the nation selected to pilot a revolutionary associate degree model of nursing education and 1953, it opened its first nursing classes to 36 women. The nursing school has more than 40 full-time faculty members and educates nearly 1,000 nursing students each year.
HEALTHCARE
• BrightStar Care of Salt Lake City, a home healthcare agency that also provides medical staffing solutions, has hired Suzanne Ellison as branch manager, Amy Streeper as customer care manager, and Sarah Sherwood as director of business development. Ellison will lead all operational aspects of the agency. She has years of experience in healthcare, human resources and operational experience. Streeper will manage major aspects of BrightStar Care’s client experience and employee scheduling. She has significant healthcare experience working with physicians and pharmacies. Sherwood will lead sales and marketing activities along with development of community programs. She has experience in home health and relationship-building in Utah and South Carolina.
• DW Healthcare Partners, a Park City-based healthcare-focused private equity firm, has sold its portfolio company, Reliant Rehabilitation, to H.I.G. Capital LLC. Financial terms were not disclosed. Based in Plano, Texas, Reliant provides contract therapy services to post-acute facilities in the United States. Deutsche Bank served as financial advisor to DWHP on the transaction. Paul Hastings LLP served as DWHP’s legal counsel.
INVESTMENTS
• Incorporate Massage, a Salt Lake City-based on-site corporate massage and wellness company, has closed its seed round of financing with an oversubscribed commitment of $635,000. The round was led by Park City Angels, with participation from Salt Lake City Angels and Reno Investment Group. Incorporate Massage received $200,000 from ArkusNexus and was recently awarded a $100,000 grant from the state of Utah for the company’s on-demand platform. The company said the funding will be used to continue to develop its software, to recruit high-level executives, and to further the company’s expansion into new markets.
LAW
• Dorsey & Whitney LLP has added Craig Frame, Aaron Murdock and Jeff Bowman as partners in the firm’s Corporate Group in Salt Lake City. Frame counsels public and privately held companies, investors and entrepreneurs in complex corporate and securities transactions, with an emphasis on mergers, acquisitions and divestitures. His practice also includes serving as outside general counsel to emerging growth companies. He represents clients across a broad range of industries, including technology and biotechnology; medical devices and services; manufacturing; and oil, gas, renewable energy and natural resources. Murdock focuses on the representation of technology companies, emerging growth companies and venture capital firms. He also works with private investment fund managers and investors in connection with the formation and operation of alternative investment funds. He handles a variety of corporate and securities law matters, including entity formation and structuring, corporate governance, private equity and debt financings, mergers and acquisitions and private fund offerings. Bowman assists clients in executing sophisticated corporate transactions at every stage of the business life cycle. He also advises clients on the broad spectrum of day-to-day legal issues that impact entrepreneurs and emerging growth companies. He acts as outside general counsel to numerous emerging growth companies. He works with a broad array of corporate clients.
• BYU Law has launched its Law and Corpus Linguistics Technology Platform, including three new and historically significant corpora. This first-of-its-kind platform for the legal community advances the field of law and corpus linguistics, a methodology that uses naturally occurring language in large collections of texts called “corpora” to help determine the meaning of words and phrases. Its first corpora to be released on the new platform include the Corpus of Founding Era American English, Corpus of Supreme Court of the United States and Corpus of Early Modern English. These resources are free and available to legal professionals, judges, scholars and the public at lawcorpus.byu.edu. The platform offers the ability to search these corpora by terms and phrases with filters for year, primary author, genre and source.
MEDIA/MARKETING
• Method Communications, a marketing and public relations agency for companies in technology and life sciences, has named co-founder Jacob Moon as general manager of its Salt Lake City office. He will oversee the office, with a focus on building corporate culture, generating revenue, fostering strong relationships and helping drive key strategic initiatives. Prior to joining Method, Moon helped lead the public relations efforts for the Sorenson family and its portfolio of 30-plus companies. He was also previously the managing editor of Utah Business and several other publications under the Olympus Publishers umbrella.
PHILANTHROPY
• World Trade Center Utah participated in the Sept. 11th National Day of Service and Remembrance by volunteering at the Utah Food Bank. WTC Utah is part of a global network of world trade centers around the world that united to remember the attacks at the New York headquarters, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. The Sept. 11th National Day of Service and Remembrance is a federally recognized day set aside to pay tribute to the victims of 9/11 and the men and women who rose up in service in the days and weeks following the attacks.
• The USANA True Health Foundation has deployed meals and volunteers to the East Coast to provide aid for those affected by Hurricane Florence. The foundation, in partnership with International Relief Teams, has issued a grant of $41,000 to provide emergency meals for those not able to return to their homes and who do not have the means to provide for their families during the storm. The foundation is working with its partners to collect a surplus of food and supplies to send following the end of the storm.
REAL ESTATE
• Colliers International has named Vic Galanis as executive vice president at the firm’s downtown Salt Lake City office. Galanis previously was at CBRE in Salt Lake City and a real estate advisor to many professional service firms, IT businesses and corporations and public institutions in the Intermountain West. He has expertise in headquarters and regional office assignments; multi-location site selection; relocation; expansion; and consolidations requirements, acquisitions and sale/leaseback transactions.
RECOGNITIONS
• CRN, a brand of The Channel Co., has named Matt Medeiros to its 2018 list of Top 100 Executives. Medeiros is chairman and CEO of StorageCraft, Draper. The annual list recognizes leaders from the technology industry who have played an integral role in shaping today’s IT channel. CRN also named Medeiros to its 25 Most Influential Executives category of the Top 100 Executives.
• Four Utah companies have made the Forbes 2018 Cloud 100 list, a list of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world. They are No. 7 Qualtrics, Provo; No. 62 Workfront, Lehi; No. 71 Health Catalyst, Salt Lake City; and No. 93 Podium, Lehi. Forbes developed the list in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners.
• United Van Lines has selected its Van Operators of the Month for May, June and July. The list includes Daniel Simi of Mesa Moving & Storage, Salt Lake City, in June in the category of household goods in the company’s western region. The recognition acknowledges excellent performance in the areas of operational proficiency, cargo claims prevention, customer service and safety.
• Simplus, a Salt Lake City-based provider of quote-to-cash advisory, implementation and managed services, has been named a “leader” in Salesforce consulting by the B2B user review platform G2 Crowd, based on the company’s market dominance and exceptional customer satisfaction scores. G2 Crowd rated 285 Salesforce consulting providers across all salesforce market segments using the company’s proprietary Grid Scoring system, which places all consultants into one of four categories: niche, contenders, high performers and leaders. Simplus was the only Salesforce consulting provider to earn a spot in the leaders category.
RESTAURANTS
• Olive Garden has completed the remodel of its four Salt Lake City restaurants (Layton, Provo, Murray and Salt Lake City). Built between 1990 and 1992, the locations now feature updated artwork, fabrics, materials, lighting, seating and flooring, as well as the new Olive Garden logo. The restaurants donated select furniture and décor to the local Habitat for Humanity ReStores. The sale of the items will help fund the construction of Habitat homes in the community. Since 2010, Olive Garden restaurants nationwide have donated more than $460,000 in furnishings to local Habitat for Humanity ReStore outlets.
SCHOLARSHIPS/GRANTS
• The Utah Steel Fabricators Association (USFA) is accepting applications until Oct. 1 for five $2,000 education education grants to active or soon-to-be students furthering themselves in the steel industry. The grants from the USFA Education Grant Fund are from contributions from part of the membership dues that are collected to help strengthen the educational core in Utah’s steel industry. The funds will be awarded to those institutions or individuals who successfully demonstrate the need and ability to utilize financial assistance in the field of steel fabrication in increments of $2,000. Applicants may be either a program director or faculty member at an accredited vocational school or college, or a student who has been accepted and is enrolled at an accredited vocational program. Completed applications should be submitted to Adam Lux (alux@jrgalv.com), the director of the USFA Educational Grant Program. Details are at http://www.utahsteelfabricators.com/Education-Grant.
SERVICES
• Simplus, a provider of quote-to-cash advisory, implementation and managed services, has announced its new headquarters will be in the Clift Building at 10 W. Broadway, Suite 510, Salt Lake City. The company said the move from Sandy will expand the amount of office space for the company; create co-workspace for Simplus customers and Salesforce partners; and host a dedicated, state-of-the-art salesforce training lab. The company also has hired Tanner Ainge as vice president of corporate development. He will direct the company’s mergers and acquisitions strategy. Ainge began his career with HGGC, a private equity firm, and also practiced law with Kirkland & Ellis LLP. His education includes a bachelor of arts degree in international studies from Brigham Young University.
TECHNOLOGY/LIFE SCIENCES
• The Utah Science Technology and Research Initiative (USTAR) recently hosted a panel discussion at Science Diplomacy 2018 in Washington, D.C. The international event is the fourth annual conference hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Center for Science Diplomacy. It brought together scientists, engineers, policymakers and diplomats from around the world to discuss emerging and timely issues of science diplomacy. The panel discussion was titled “Think Locally to Impact Globally: Science Diplomacy at the State Level.”