Ask college students to consider a career in banking and most will automatically think Wall Street. But increasingly, colleges and universities have designed undergraduate finance programs with an eye to the needs of commercial and community banking. [Continue]
Ask bankers what they want from a graduate school of banking program, and they’ll tell you. That’s what Chris Kelley and fellow board members found in 2001, after the estate of Paul W. Barret, Jr. granted $8 million to what was then the Mid South School of Banking in Memphis, Tenn. Barret was the chairman of Barretville Bank and Trust Co., Barretville, Tenn., established by his father in 1920. [Continue]
Historic in its legacy since 1935, the American Bankers Association’s Stonier Graduate School of Banking holds special appeal for its unusual partnership. The respected Ivy League Wharton School of Business hosts the program on its campus at the University of Pennsylvania, and executives successfully completing the courses and a capstone project graduate with both a Stonier diploma and a Wharton leadership certificate. [Continue]
For Kent Belasco, becoming director of the commercial banking program at Marquette University in Milwaukee was the start of a second career. He had retired as executive vice president, chief information and operations officer at First Midwest Bank in Itasca, Ill., after 37 years in banking. In mid-2015, Marquette University was looking for a finance professor with teaching experience and a commercial banking background. MU had begun to understand “not all students wanted to be investment bankers,” Belasco said. He began to build a curriculum during his last year at the bank. [Continue]
Mary Kay Bates was at a pivotal point in her career as head of human resources at Bank Midwest in Spirit Lake, Iowa, when she weighed the options of enrolling in a master’s degree program versus attending a graduate school of banking. She opted for the latter, choosing to attend the Graduate School of Banking at Colorado. [Continue]
“The trouble with opportunity is that it always comes disguised as hard work,” Dr. Herbert V. Prochnow once wrote. That could be a fitting description for the programs at the Graduate School of Banking at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which students describe as challenging, yet career-changing. Prochnow, a noted toastmaster and author who went on to become an executive at the First National Bank of Chicago, started the school in 1945 in collaboration with what was then the School of Commerce at UW-Madison and the Wisconsin Bankers Association. [Continue]
Business incubators provide support for businesses in the earliest stages of their existence. They provide space for ideas and inventions (the beginning of the business lifecycle) and access to working capital through pooled funds provided by banks, micro-credit financiers, venture capitalists, grants, and guaranteed loan programs. [Continue]
The best companies in your loan portfolio are likely the ones at capacity, providing stable and predictable return on investment. It doesn’t matter if these firms are large economic enterprises or small mom-n-pop shops — sales and earnings variances are low and businesses experience planned growth with long term stability. [Continue]
In 1995, Mary Kay Bates walked into the Okoboji, Iowa, branch of Bank Midwest with a portfolio full of “B” credits. She had been working as a mortgage lender with Stockdale Bank, one of the last in a strange breed of private banks that took uninsured deposits and originated mortgages for high-risk customers. Regulators weren’t pleased to have private banks operating outside the system, so on its way to extinction Stockdale Bank sold its deposits and mortgages to Bank Midwest, which was why Bates was in that day, fully prepared to explain every relevant detail to the portfolio’s new owners. [Continue]
In the span of one February weekend in 2018, just days after a forum was convened at the Shooting Star Casino in Mahnomen, Minn., to discuss the region’s opioid crisis, 10 additional overdoses occurred in the county, three of them fatal. [Continue]