One year after it was formed in the merger of three local banks, Verus Bank of Commerce has broken through the ranks to emerge as one of the top 100 banks in the nation with assets under $500 million.

Among its clients are some of Northern Colorado’s premier companies, such as Eldon James, Colorado CustomWare, US-Reports and Palmer Flowers.

Brand-name clients, however, aren’t enough to make the list. So how did Verus do it? How did it end up as No. 19 on the SNL Financial ranking of banks its size? How did it become the only Colorado bank to make the list?

For perspective, it’s important to note that 4,316 financial institutions were eligible for the list.

When deciding a bank’s ranking, SNL Financial takes into account three criteria: profitability, asset quality, and growth. Here’s how Verus stacked up:

Profitability

Profitability takes into consideration a bank’s efficiency ratio. In Verus’s case, this ratio is 43.66 percent, well below the state average of 77.55 percent. The lower the ratio, the better.

The efficiency ratio is based on the amount of overhead it takes to generate every $1 of profit.

In total,