Ex-Square exec Jackie Reses bought 100-year-old Lead Bank
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Women are gaining board seats but still missing out on C-suite roles, Penguin Random House lets two of their most prominent female publishers go, and this founder solved her biggest challenges in fintech by buying her own bank. Have a wonderful Wednesday.
– Bank on it. Jackie Reses bought a bank. That news surprises many people who hear it—but not those who know Reses’s story.
Reses was an exec at Square (now Block), where she led the fintech company’s banking and lending products. While at Square, she ran into “extreme pain and frustration in working with bank partners,” she told Michal Lev-Ram on a recent episode of Fortune’s podcast Leadership Next. Fintech startups’ credit cards, debit cards, and other financial services all rely on underlying banking partners. Often, those traditional financial institutions operate very differently from Silicon Valley startups.
So Reses and her fellow Square alumni cofounders had the idea to buy a bank and merge two distinct lines of business. She is now the CEO of Lead Bank, a Kansas City, Mo.-based bank that serves both local banking clients and fast-growing fintech companies. Lead Bank’s fintech clients “all want to run highly-compliant programs because they’re highly-successful companies, but they want someone who can operate at the same speed that they can,” Reses says. At the same time, she’s had to earn the trust of longstanding customers and employees of the 100-year-old bank.
Buying a bank has been an exercise in creativity within limits, she says. “How do you apply creativity to stuff that could be incredibly arcane, banal, and legally restrictive?” she asks.
“It’s such a weird thing to say, yes, I own a bank. I went and bought a bank,” she says. “But when you understand the story…it kind of feels obvious.”
Listen to the full Leadership Next episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Broadsheet is Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
– New board, same game. Women account for 30% of the board seats of Russell 3000 companies so far in 2024, continuing an upward trend since the end of 2022, according to ISS Corporate data. The number of women in S&P 500 C-suite roles, however, decreased in 2023 for the first time since 2005, and only two of the 21 chief executives appointed in Q1 of 2024 were women. Financial Times
– Written out. Penguin Random House has dismissed Reagan Arthur and Lisa Lucas, who led two of its most notable imprints. Arthur, publisher of the Alfred A. Knopf imprint, oversaw the release of bestsellers like Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Lucas was the publisher of Schocken and the first Black publisher of Pantheon. Their departures are reportedly part of ongoing cost-cutting efforts. New York Times
– Posed for rights. The New York state Senate passed the Fashion Workers Act on Monday. The bill aimed to grant fashion models legal labor protections will now advance to the state assembly. Sara Ziff, executive director of nonprofit the Model Alliance, which cosponsored the bill, says “there’s no excuse to keep carving [models] out of the same rights and protections afforded to other industries.” Vogue Business
– Sponsorship served. The Saudi Public Investment Fund will become the first ever naming partner for the Women’s Tennis Association. Critics have accused the WTA of ignoring the country’s human rights abuses against women and the LGBTQ+ community when it announced that the Saudi capital would host the tour’s finals tournament for the next three years. Reuters
– Power play. WNBA rookie Angel Reese is now an owner of the DC Power Football Club, a women’s soccer team set to kick off its first season this summer. Reese says she wants “to help grow women’s sports and elevate female athletes across the board.” The Athletic
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Viome appointed Sarah Dorsett to president of the company’s consumer division. Health-Ade named Jill McIntosh to its board of directors.
ON MY RADAR
How GSK CEO Emma Walmsley kept her job and turned a belligerent activist investor into an ally Fortune
After a wrenching bestseller, Chanel Miller takes up her dream project New York Times
Health care workforce challenges must be addressed to support Black mothers Fortune
PARTING WORDS
“Stigma is born and bred in the dark.”
— Julie Schott, the serial entrepreneur who founded Julie, an emergency contraceptive pill
