An ex-Square exec’s ‘extreme pain and frustration’ with banks led her to buy one of her own

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

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com