Bank First National, Manitowoc, Wis., has received regulatory approval to merge the $176 million First National Bank of Waupaca, Wis., into its organization.
Mike Molepske, president and CEO of the $1.3 billion Bank First National, said the approval’s timing couldn’t be better. “The transition teams have been working diligently,” Molepske said. [Continue]
Flooding in July destroyed all the cash in the vault of a southeastern Wisconsin bank. [Continue]
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First Bank & Trust, Brookings, S.D., is buying two Minnesota banks operating under one holding company: Peoples Bank of Commerce, and State Bank of New Prague, both owned by the Duke Financial Group, Minneapolis. The $296 million Peoples Bank of Commerce is based in Cambridge and has branches in Princeton, East Bethel, Edina and Roseville. State Bank of New Prague has one location and assets of $112 million. The name of both banks will change to First Bank & Trust. [Continue]
Why can’t consumers and business managers send and receive payments as easily as they can send and receive email messages?
That’s a question Kevin Christensen has been pondering for some time. Christensen is vice president, risk and financial services, for SHAZAM, the Johnston, Iowa-based electronic funds transfer company. Along with Bob Steen, CEO of Bridge Community Bank, Mechanicsville, Iowa, and Tina Giorgio, president/CEO of ICBA Bancard & TCM Bank, Christensen participated in a panel discussion on payments at the annual convention of the Community Bankers of Iowa in Okoboji on July 21, one day prior to the long awaited release of the final report from the Federal Reserve’s Faster Payments Task Force.
Christensen highlighted the interoperability of the email system. Regardless of the company behind the email – Gmail, AOL, Yahoo and others – users can send and receive messages to and from each other without delay. Christensen said that level of “functional interoperability” is what he is seeking in payments. He said the technology already exists; the hurdles are mainly political. “Transferring payments from one organization to the next can occur easily if we just agree to do it,” he said. [Continue]
You run a bank. You do well enough that some profits accumulate. Now what? [Continue]
While the Comptroller of the Currency continues to supervise most of the country’s largest banks, the percentage of state banks in relation to all banks has been growing for years, a fact not lost on Gary Kahn, president of FNNB Bank, Newton, Iowa.
Attending an OCC outreach program in July 2015, Kahn noted a mention of the decline in the number of national banks in Iowa. From 41 in 2008, the figure had fallen to 23 as of that meeting. When he sought out some of the bankers who had converted their banks to state charters, they told Kahn how easy the process was. Perhaps more importantly, they described a significant cost savings.
Kahn said he grew concerned the number of national banks would decline so much the OCC would close its duty station in Des Moines, shifting the supervision of his $84 million bank to examiners based elsewhere, such as Omaha or someplace even farther away than that. (The OCC’s Des Moines office remains open.) [Continue]
If you want to know how to market to millennials, watch Social Finance, the online lender that calls itself SoFi. This is the company that started out refinancing student loans, but now also makes personal loans and mortgages. It just applied for a charter to operate an industrial bank in Utah, which would give it the opportunity to offer credit cards and FDIC-insured deposit accounts. [Continue]
There are two sides to the figurative coin. On one side, a banker helps a small business owner open a second store. The first-time homeowner makes a down payment and the 30-year mortgage clock starts ticking. A commercial real estate developer needs up-front funding. The loans have always been obvious.
On the flip side, the bank must bring in enough deposits to fund those loans. The established business owner’s payroll account, the retiree’s savings, and the young professional’s ACH paycheck all help fund those loans.
Nearly all banks focus on loans; that is, after all, how banks make most of their money. [Continue]