Our CEO, Jackie Reses, has been featured on Forbes Daily Cover and we couldn’t be more delighted and proud!
In this Forbes feature, Jackie Reses, a financial luminary and Lead Bank's driving force, takes the stage in a tale of fintech disruption. With a bold vision and $100 million in capital from notable investors, Jackie transforms the 95-year-old Lead Bank into a tech-savvy powerhouse. Embracing hybrid work culture and attracting top talent, Jackie positions Lead Bank at the forefront of fintech innovation. The article delves into the institution's rapid growth, strategic partnerships with fintech giants like Affirm, and Jackie’s commitment to navigating regulatory challenges. As Lead Bank redefines embedded finance, Jackie emerges as a trailblazer steering the industry into a dynamic and disruptive future.
Here are some highlights:
- “…Reses, “This is a very hard business, and you have to be good at three things. You have to understand the complexity of regulation. You have to be good at technology. And you need to have a strong balance sheet and liquidity management. We need to do all three of those things really, really well to be good at our day jobs.”
- “Reses has been signing up big-name fintech customers like Affirm, and she is taking on crypto customers as well. Lead Bank’s growth is already accelerating in spite of fintech’s lingering winter. In the third quarter of 2023, revenue rose 9% from the second quarter, reaching $37 million, and net profit jumped 50% to $5 million. Total assets hit $951 million, an increase of over $100 million (or 13%) versus a year ago. Lead bank’s net income of $11.8 million over the past nine months is 86% higher than it was two years ago…"
- “...Reses’ long-term vision is to use her regulated, FDIC-insured bank to build a big business helping fintechs and non-fintechs alike offer financial services within all types of apps and environments, a term dubbed embedded finance by fintech insiders. “It's becoming more obvious that it's easier to do banking businesses in different components of your life,” she says. For instance, you can insert payment features into a fitness app or a shopping app, or let people pay their rent through an app. She wants Lead to build infrastructure “to make that experience seamless...”
- “..Lead Bank has taken on eleven new fintech customers including buy-now, pay-later giant Affirm (where she also sits on the board) and New York credit card startup Ramp. Most of Lead’s fintech business so far has been helping companies offer loans, issue credit and debit cards and provide bank accounts, and it eventually wants to help companies in any industry offer payment features to their customers. “I have never seen this kind of market pull from very large, scaled players who want to use financial products,” says Michael Gilroy, a Lead backer who’s a general partner and head of fintech investing at Coatue…”
- “...In addition to its growing fintech business, Lead continues to operate its decades-old community bank with two Missouri branches. Lead is on track to record higher revenue and profits this year than any year in the bank’s 95-year history: in the first nine months of 2023, it brought in $107 million in revenue and $12 million in net income, up from $79 million in revenue and $6 million in net income two years ago…”
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Read the original article here: A Fintech Titan In Community Banker’s Clothing