New CIOs at Christopher & Banks, First American Payment Systems and Columbia Bank

Womens apparel retailer Christopher & Banks Corp. hired Steven Danker on October 23, 2006 as its first SVP of information systems and strategy. He reports to the Minneapolis-based company’s EVP and COO Monica Dahl. Danker most recently worked as a consultant, serving as an interim CIO for various companies.  Previously, he was SVP and CIO of ValueVision Media/ShopNBC from 2003 to 2004. Prior to that, he was CIO at Boston Chicken, Waldo’s Dolar Mart de Mexico and Musicland Stores.

Mike Lawrence joined First American Payment Systems as its SVP and CIO.  He comes to the Fort Worth, Texas-based credit card processing provider from Ace Cash Express in Irving, Texas.  At Ace, he most recently served as VP of retail store systems.  In that position he was responsible for the development of the company’s in-store point-of-sale system and ATM platform as well as hardware maintenance and deployment, operations support and management of the self-service ATM business unit.  Previously, he was director of applications development and systems integration at American Parts System, and a systems engineer for EDS’s transportation and plant automation divisions.

Peter Wild is depositing his 14 years of information services experience at Tacoma, Wash.-based Columbia Bank as its new SVP and CIO.  He most recently worked for Providence Health Systems, which promoted Jody Albright to CIO last January.  Prior to that, he was director of technology at Umpqua Bank for six years.