Photos by Jason Burt
Jay Brogdon leans back in a side chair at the conference table in his newly claimed office atop the Simmons Bank Tower in Little Rock. From this spot, the banking system’s new CEO is but a few blocks from his former digs at the prestigious Stephens investment bank.
It is but a five-minute jaunt by car to get from that point on Brogdon’s career trajectory to this one. In fact, depending on which window at Simmons headquarters one looks out of, the stately glass Stephens tower is easily within sight, on this day shimmering in the roiling Arkansas afternoon heat. Brogdon’s traversing of that distance, however, took considerably more doing.
“If I may, I’ll take you back a little bit,” he said with a wry grin. “George Makris [retiring Simmons CEO and chairman] called me in 2019 and asked me to come over and join as CFO of the company. I’d had a great relationship with the bank, worked very closely with them throughout my tenure at Stephens, but it just wasn’t something that was of interest to me at that point in time in my career, so, of course, I’m very nice about it, but I just said, I’m very flattered, but no.
“The fun part of the story, and if you know George very well, nothing could be more on brand for him — I get a call from him out of the blue in January of 2021, and he says, ‘Jay, you know, I called you a couple years ago, and you told me no. I really don’t like hearing no twice.’”
Brogdon agreed to a lunch meeting, and the long and short of it is Makris, a born salesman who has succeeded in everything from beer to banking, had his man. Brogdon, for his part, once convinced of the opportunity, never looked back.
“I’ve had such a respect for this company for so long,” he said. “I’m a lifelong Arkansan, born and raised here. I’ve had the great fortune of working for Stephens for a lot of my career and now Simmons. I just have a massive amount of respect for what companies like that mean to a state the size of Arkansas.
“George really laid out the kind of vision for overall succession and how there was a contingent of leaders who aren’t going to be able to do this forever and how the board wanted this company to continue to thrive as far into the future as we can see. There were no promises. The bank had to perform, and I had to perform, but as he laid out that vision and how I could fit into it, I felt like everything I had done in my career up to that point prepared me really well for some of the pieces Simmons was missing and needing to bridge to the future.”
It is not the first time Brogdon had been recruited, nor was it the first time he had faced a full-court press. A star basketball player at Highland High School, pride of a 1,000-soul hamlet in Sharp County, the 6-6 forward landed a basketball scholarship to Harding University in Searcy. He saw extensive playing time for the Bisons over four years, in addition to earning his degree.
Still, it was finance, not banking, that drew his attention following graduation in 2004.
“Banking had to have picked me,” he said. “My parents were schoolteachers. My dad was a basketball coach and a math teacher. My mom was an English teacher. I was interested in business. I got an accounting degree, I spent a few years at Deloitte, the global accounting firm, but I never woke up and said, ‘I want to do banking.’”
As it happened, however, many of the clients he worked with at Deloitte were banks, and by servicing them the way he did over four years, he created a business network practically by default. The pattern continued after he joined Stephens.
“It just so happened that an opportunity opened up at Stephens on the investment banking side,” he said. “Plus, and people may or may not know this, Stephens has a legacy in banking going all the way back to Jack Stephens, so I had the benefit of joining a firm with some commercial banking pedigree and a firm that had a very deep-rooted history in serving banks and growing the investment banking side to advise those banks.”
That practical experience put Brogdon on Simmons’ radar, while Simmons’ impact on Main Street, in turn, struck a chord with the young executive, finally prying him loose from Stephens in 2021 after 13 years.
“The purpose and the passion that fuels me is we have such a big impact in the communities we serve and the important role that we play in the formation of businesses, the growth capital for businesses to grow, the way we show up at the school as a booster — whatever it is,” he said. “Those are things that everybody in this company is very, very passionate about, and that’s been true from those who came before us.
“We all stand on the shoulders of some giants, right, when it comes to that type of commitment to our communities and to our customers and to this state.”
The shoulders Brogdon refers to are indeed broad, particularly over the past 40 years of the company’s 122-year history. Founded in Pine Bluff in 1903 on first-day deposits of $3,300, the bank grew steadily locally if unremarkably statewide and beyond. By the 1980s, the bank was on shaky ground, which precipitated native Arkie and former Marine Tommy May being named president and CEO in 1987. May, an indefatigable force of nature, took a figurative machete to waste and unnecessary spending wherever he saw it, no matter how seemingly inconsequential.
“One of the things I learned is it’s not always what you do; it’s the message you send. My message then was that we need to tighten up expenses,” May told Arkansas Money & Politics for a 2023 cover story. “We had these big coffee cups with our logo on them. The first thing I did was eliminate that and get smaller ones because when people pour coffee, they drink about a third of what’s in there.
“Next thing we did is we took some notepads that were kind of long, and we cut them in half. You could write on that just as easily as the other while doubling your inventory. It wasn’t that we were going to save a lot, but we were wanting to send a message. A lot of what we did was sort of for show, but it worked. Even today, I have people say something to me about us tearing those notepads in half and taking the coffee cups.”
May instilled a similar steeliness in lending discipline to reduce the number of bad loans, and by 1990, he built up enough reserves to go on the offensive. Simmons snapped up a string of failed savings and loan branches to increase its footprint and, in 1992, made national news for rolling out its own credit card. By the time May handed off the leadership baton to Makris in 2013, Simmons Bank had reached $4 billion in assets.
Makris, a former Simmons board member whose family’s beer distributorship in Pine Bluff goes back generations, was faced with the same predicament as his predecessor — expand or die. Within six months, he delivered his answer with the $53.6 million cash purchase of Arkansas-based Metropolitan Bank, an opening acquisition salvo that would continue all the way to the present.
Simmons’ latest big gain — purchase of Houston-based Spirit of Texas Bank, completed in 20221 — brought a former Fortune 100 “Fastest-Growing Company” into the fold, raking in $2.7 billion in deposits and $2.3 billion in loans. It also gained 37 branch locations and strong representation in growth-rich metros Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin.
As Makris told AMP in 2023 the company’s art of the deal did not lie in its ability to write the check but in the knack it developed to weed out potential suitors that did not mesh culturally.
“What we really want is to be the acquirer of choice, and over the last 10 years, most all of the acquisitions came to us, or it was mutual,” Makris said. “We’ve got, especially in our markets, a good reputation of coming in and really working with the management team and keeping their culture because it matches our own. Those are the banks we’re looking for, not somebody looking to cash out a deal.”
One primary tenet of that culture is the value Simmons places on talent and its commitment to finding and equipping the right people, placing them in roles where they can be successful. As Brogdon adds the title of CEO and board member to go with the role of president of Simmons First National Corp. and Simmons Bank he has answered to since 2023, that part of the company’s vision and values remains as sharp as ever.
“In this role, you know, I’m not really a recruiter,” he said. “When the team has a final-round candidate for a leader position or a very high performer, my role is to come in and paint the picture of what our business is focused on and really sell, in a very authentic way, that people have an opportunity to come here and make an impact — not just be a producer at a bigger bank than they’re at but to come here and help build and leave their mark on something. We have had incredible success doing that.”
Brogdon will lead a Simmons Bank that has become a regional powerhouse.
Brogdon said the future lies with the companies that can be progressive enough to not only deploy current technology but envision where such tools can take them in the future.
“Banks, in general, are dinosaurs,” he said. “I mean, banks are highly regulated and move at a really slow pace. When you think about the www. world that we live in and the size and scale that we have as a business today, that compels us to invest in the technology side in ways that will intersect in very advantageous ways, whether you’re a consumer or a small business or the largest commercial customer we work with or anywhere in between.”
Brogdon’s new role does not officially take effect until the first of the year, but he is already making an impression on the troops wherever he goes. He has traveled to various markets to put a face on the title and is known to engage random employees in conversation in hallways out of genuine interest in their jobs and opinions.
Today, Simmons Bank is a regional banking powerhouse with more than 200 locations in six states. It holds $17 billion in loans and $22 billion in deposits and $26.7 billion in assets, per its investor relations department, as of June 30, 2025.
For as impressive as it is, such stats merely serve to toe a starting line for its newest chief executive, whose exuberance makes him seem even younger than he is for a person leading such a massive enterprise. While no one can foretell the future, of course, his history of staying put professionally suggests a refreshing stability lies ahead, providing the foundation for continued growth even as market trends shift and change surrounds on all sides.
“The industry dynamics are what they are, and they don’t all excite me, by the way,” he said. “There were 20,000 banks, and then there were 10,000 banks, and now there are 4,000 banks. It just continues to consolidate. Where we have seen ourselves as primary beneficiaries in recent history and what I expect to be a primary beneficiary of here in the near future is in the talent acquisition game versus the whole-bank acquisition. With mergers and acquisitions, you have dislocation of associates at the banks that are involved and dislocations of the clients served within those banks.
“Just in recent weeks, in both Tennessee and Texas, we’ve seen some very large acquisitions, and when we look at ourselves and the investments we’ve been making in the business, we bring a very stable platform that is attractive to good talent that just wants to serve their clients well. You look at our company’s investment and succession, the youth that we have on the team — or, as I say a lot of times, the tread left on the tire — we’ve got a lot of runway to execute and grow this business.”
READ ALSO: Spotlight on Small Business: Pasta Grill
