Features

Outstanding Women 2022: Rosa Rivera

Rosa Rivera has always been a trailblazer. Rivera, who emigrated from Mexico to the United States with her family in 1976 at the age of 13, became the first bilingual teller in the history of Garden City, Kan., as a senior in high school. Over the next four decades, Rivera established herself as a personable banker determined to help immigrants navigate the financial landscape of the United States, forging close relationships with customers and coworkers in the process. [Continue]

Outstanding Women 2022: Sherri Reagin

Growing up, Sherri Reagin saw firsthand what it meant to live a life in service to others. The preeminent example was set by her father, whom she described as “a good old-fashioned country doctor.” [Continue]

Outstanding Women 2022: Jamie Nelson

Jamie Nelson had been president and CEO of Farmers Security Bank in Washburn, N.D., for about a year when the bank’s owner, Jan Stroup, walked into her office one day in March of 2018 and made a simple announcement: “I’d like to sell you the bank.” [Continue]

Outstanding Women 2022: Pennie Lutz

Pennie Lutz was seeking a change of pace in the mid-1990s after seven years as an FDIC bank examiner. Though Lutz enjoyed her job, she was growing tired of the grueling stretch of travel the position entailed, the frequent long car rides across the Mount Rushmore state and western Minnesota.
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Outstanding Women 2022: Mary Williams

Growing up in a large family instilled in Mary Williams a great sense of responsibility. As the third-born of 12 children raised on a Winsted, Minn., farm, “we took care of our own,” Williams explained. [Continue]

Outstanding Women 2022: Brenda Franke

There was a time when the only thing Brenda Franke knew about a loan was “how to make a payment on one,” she laughed. The affable vice president and Eden Prairie, Minn., branch manager for $390 million Star Bank has spent most of her 25-year career working in the operations side of a bank. [Continue]

FHLB Des Moines marks 90 years

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines opened its doors — along with the other 11 Home Loan Banks — on October 15, 1932.  The core mission of the FHLB System was the same then as it is now: To provide readily available, low-cost liquidity to local lenders in all economic cycles. [Continue]

Ag bankers, farmers seek solutions to 2022’s challenges

Farmers have spent 2022 working through challenges like rising inflation and supply chain delays, just like other businesses and consumers across America have had to do. Those who make their living in agriculture, and the ag bankers who work with them, have needed to think even more creatively and constructively than usual. [Continue]