B2 Bank, a Minnesota-based bank owned by fintech entrepreneur Brian Barnes, is assembling a C-suite of Climate First Bank alums.
Ryan Jaskiewicz, most recently Climate First’s president of structured finance, has been named B2 Bank’s CEO, the bank said in a press release last week.
Jaskiewicz’s LinkedIn profile lists him as having joined B2 in January. However, Randy Peterson, his predecessor as CEO of $71.8 million-asset B2, retired this month, the bank noted in a recent Facebook post.
Joining Jaskiewicz at B2 are Climate First’s former chief strategy officer, Chris Cucci, and its recent chief credit officer, Chris Van Buskirk.
Cucci will serve as B2’s president, while Van Buskirk has been named the bank’s chief credit and risk officer.
“We have the regulatory foundation, the infrastructure, and now the leadership team to build something significant — a bank that operates at the intersection of community banking's trust and relationships with the speed and scale that modern financial technology enables,” Jaskiewicz said in B2’s press release last week.
Along with the C-suite makeover, B2 is “expanding its commercial lending platform, strengthening relationships with traditional clients and delivering modern banking infrastructure to digital banking clients,” the bank said in the press release. Namely, it’s pursuing a national digital banking strategy.
“B2 Bank is at a genuinely exciting inflection point,” Jaskiewicz said. “We're not building incrementally; we're building the model for what a next-generation community bank looks like.”
Together, Jaskiewicz, Cucci and Van Buskirk count seven decades of banking and finance experience, B2 said. Before joining Climate First in 2024, Jaskiewicz founded the commercial finance firm 12Five capital and led it for 17 years, until it was acquired in 2023 by Breakout Capital.
Cucci, according to his LinkedIn profile, began his banking career at JPMorgan Chase in 2007 before becoming a vice president at Wells Fargo and ascending to a commercial-banking leadership role at SouthState Bank.
Before working at Climate First, Van Buskirk cut his teeth at Citi.
Until 2022, B2 was known as the First National Bank of Buhl. Barnes, who founded M1 Finance, a digital wealth management platform, bought the bank a year earlier. B2 has more than doubled its assets and deposits in Barnes’ tenure as owner.
The bank, though, also spent nearly two years under an enforcement action from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which noted weaknesses in management and internal controls. The OCC terminated its order against B2 last September, after the bank bolstered its strategic planning and risk management.
“B2 Bank represents a rare opportunity – a bank with a clear strategic vision, enterprise risk management built for scale, and the operational flexibility to move fast,” Cucci said in a statement last week. “I’ve built lending verticals from scratch at high-growth institutions, and I see an extraordinary runway here to build something differentiated and durable.”
