The Southwest Ledger

Seagoville-based Homebank Texas has hired Marcelo Mills as senior vice president and Dallas market president. Mills joins from American National Bank of Texas in Terrell, where he spent nearly three years as emerging markets president, focused on relationship-building in South Dallas.

Earlier in his career, Mills helped found Integro Bank in Phoenix in 2021, serving as senior vice president and head of business banking, overseeing commercial real estate and conventional commercial-and-industrial lending. He has also held roles at JPMorgan Chase, First Citizens Bank and Pacific Mercantile Bank, and attended Texas A&M University–Commerce.

A market-president hire is one of the clearest talent-movement events a community bank produces: the banker carries commercial relationships, and the seat behind them opens on the way out — here, the emerging markets president role at American National Bank of Texas. In Dallas–Fort Worth, bankers who bring an established book of commercial relationships remain the scarce resource community banks compete for, and moves at the market-president level tend to set off a chain of openings rather than a single one.

WestStar Bank in El Paso has promoted Liliana Miranda to chief operating officer. Miranda joined WestStar in 2002 and has served in several executive leadership roles, most recently as chief commercial banking officer and, before that, as chief risk officer. She brings nearly three decades of banking, risk management and financial services experience, and her new role covers enterprise operations, strategic execution, technology initiatives and business transformation.

An internal elevation to COO leaves the seat below it open, and in this case that is the chief commercial banking officer role. Commercial-banking-leadership seats are among the harder community-bank positions to fill, because they pair a book of relationships with credit authority, and banks that promote from within a deep bench move that vacancy one rung down rather than out to the market.

Legend Bancorp Inc., the Bowie, Texas holding company for Legend Bank NA, has received the approvals it needs to acquire Graham Savings and Loan. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas approved the application on August 24, 2026, and the Texas Department of Savings and Mortgage Lending also signed off. The companies anticipate an October 1, 2026 closing, with a full systems conversion expected by late April 2027; Legend Bank customers will gain access to three additional branch locations after the conversion is complete.

Jay Bearden, Legend Bank's president and CEO, said "the approvals received from shareholders and regulators represent an important milestone for both organizations." Codie Hedge, Graham Savings and Loan's president, CEO and senior lender, said the milestone "represents far more than shareholder and regulatory approval—it reflects confidence in the future of our bank."

When two community institutions combine, the systems-conversion timeline — here running through late April 2027 — is usually the window in which retention questions surface for the acquired institution's lenders and branch staff. Overlapping roles across a small combined footprint are where seats open, and conversion periods are typically when bankers weigh whether to stay through the integration or move.

Texas Patriot Bank has submitted an application to establish a new bank charter with the Texas Department of Banking, according to Bankers Digest's weekly charter column. The proposed bank would be based in Frisco, in the northern Dallas–Fort Worth suburbs.

De novo charter applications are uncommon, and each one that advances has to assemble a founding team — typically a chief executive, a chief lending or credit officer and a first slate of commercial lenders. Those teams are most often built by recruiting experienced bankers out of established institutions in the same metro, which is why a new charter in a market like Frisco tends to register as a demand signal for commercial-banking talent well before the bank opens its doors.