CHARLOTTE, NC — Meridian National’s entire Hispanic Heritage Month rollout this year is a single LinkedIn carousel posted at 6:47 a.m. Saturday, vetted by eleven outside attorneys, three internal compliance officers, and a brand strategist who has since taken indefinite medical leave.
The carousel — five slides, beige background, the word “celebrate” appearing exactly once and only inside a quoted employee testimonial — replaces what was previously a six-figure campaign featuring concert sponsorships, branded loterías, and a small empanada cart that idled outside the Uptown branch every September from 2017 through last year.
“Last year we had a mariachi trio in the lobby,” said a teller at the Tryon Street branch who asked not to be named because she had not yet seen the new compliance memo. “This year there’s a printed sign taped above the deposit slips that says ‘Heritage Recognized’ in 11-point Helvetica. The toner is also low.”
Internal planning documents — left in a glass-walled conference room next to a half-eaten Bojangles biscuit and a coffee gone cold in a logo mug — show the campaign budget was reduced from $1.4 million to $14,200, a figure the bank’s general counsel rounded down to “essentially zero from a materiality standpoint” in a memo printed, for reasons no one has explained, on legal-size paper.
Of the surviving $14,200, nearly $11,000 went to legal review of the LinkedIn carousel itself, including a separate engagement letter to determine whether the word “vibrant” carried disparate-impact risk in adjective form. It does, the firm concluded, in seven jurisdictions, and is permissible only when paired with a noun cleared by an additional eight-page rider.
Marisol Reyes, who ran the bank’s HHM programming for nine years before her role was “absorbed laterally” in March, learned about this year’s rollout from a Glassdoor review. “The carousel uses a stock photo of a guitar,” she said. “It is not a Spanish guitar. I checked. It is a Taylor 814ce, which is from El Cajon, California — but only in the sense that the factory is there.”
On the bank’s last earnings call, CEO Trent Halliburton described the new approach as “right-sized for the current operating environment,” a phrase he used eleven times in nine minutes, occasionally substituting “calibrated” or “discipline-forward” when the rotation got stale. Analysts pressed him only on net interest margin.
The LinkedIn post, as of Saturday afternoon, had 412 likes — 38 of them from employees of the bank’s own communications team — and a single comment, since deleted, that simply read “this is a guitar.”