Two years ago, the future of the family-owned Iowa Falls State Bank was uncertain. The Barlow family — siblings John Barlow, Pam Angstman, Cinda Classon and their children — had spent 15 years working on a transition plan to shift active ownership of the $153 million, central Iowa-based bank to the next generation of their family. [Continue]
In Phoenix in the summer, you expect temperatures in the triple digits. But for Alerus, the Valley of the Sun isn’t just hot; it’s the current hotbed where it looks to grow its four business verticals — what CEO Katie Lorenson calls the bank’s “holistic” approach to banking. [Continue]
Revolutionizing the way banks achieve their compliance objectives The industrialization of cybercrime operates like big business, pouring profits into research and development and establishing an ecosystem of leading-edge technology. Community banks face security risks from multiple fronts, including sophisticated cyber threats, emerging technology that can expose customer data, and expanding compliance requirements. Mark Sangster, Vice … Read more
Not long after I had my first child, I got her a piggy bank. I knew it would be important to her wellbeing to impart strategies to save for the future (lessons in delayed gratification, really), and the ceramic bank which sat on her dresser offered the conduit. [Continue]
Cryptocurrency is a new and developing area, requiring diligent consideration and ongoing monitoring of all the legal and regulatory factors. It is important to balance offering flexibility to customers while at the same time ensuring that the bank is protected from undue liability, security concerns or regulatory issues. [Continue]
In today’s ultra-competitive environment, banks are challenged to speed lending decisions with confidence and attract more farmers with convenient digital products — all while managing risk. Without modern lending tools, banks will lose out to competitors and stifle growth. [Continue]
Katherine Kierland Herberger began to collect coin banks after buying one as a gift for her son’s birthday. Over the course of the next half century, she assembled a vast collection of both mechanical and still coin banks spanning more than two centuries; in all she had 277 mechanical banks and 812 still banks. [Continue]
Even as talk of a recession comes on the heels of a red-hot job market, there’s no denying that candidate expectations for the hiring process have changed. In today’s job market, candidates are evaluating you as an employer as much as you’re evaluating them — and that’s unlikely to change even if the job market cools. [Continue]
Success in ag lending hinges on a banker’s “passion for people,” says Dave Coggins, the Wisconsin banker who chairs the American Bankers Association’s Agricultural and Rural Bankers Committee. Coggins learned the value of good people skills early in his career when he saw the impact to customers that resulted from one supervisor’s “sub-par” interactions. [Continue]
Traditionally, the branch where a customer opens an account receives credit for that customer’s business. But what about scenarios where a customer opens an account, say near where she works, but primarily does transactional banking at a branch near where she lives?
Branch profitability calculations can get complicated quickly. [Continue]