Wall Street's fierce woman, Vance's aide, and a century-old bank Lead Bank

Title: Wall Street Woman Madwoman, Vance’s Advisor, and a Century-Old Bank Lead Bank

Author: Dongcha Beating

Source:

Reprint: Mars Finance

At the end of last year, JPMorgan Chase froze accounts related to two stablecoin payment startups funded by YC, BlindPay and Kontigo. They primarily targeted Latin American markets but triggered sanctions and compliance red lines because their operations touched high-risk jurisdictions like Venezuela.

Coincidentally, another bank long considered crypto-friendly, Lead Bank, also recently tightened cooperation with some stablecoin payment companies, adding new customer identity verification, extending transaction settlement times, and increasing account opening durations.

As compliance became a mandatory requirement, many entrepreneurs in the payments and stablecoin sectors realized that often they were not dealing directly with the banking system but only with a very few banks willing and capable of opening and maintaining accounts.

However, Lead Bank and JPMorgan Chase have fundamentally different backgrounds. As one of the first banks to participate in Visa’s USDC settlement on the Solana chain, Lead Bank did not choose to cut off banking services to startups outright. Instead, it plans to leverage native support for crypto enterprises to achieve a competitive edge.

The Century-Long Rise and Fall of Garden City Bank

To understand Lead Bank’s current state, we must first look back at its history.

In 1928, before the clouds of the Great Depression cast over America, a small institution called Garden City Bank was established in Cass County, Missouri.

It was an era relying on handshake deals and reputation as collateral. As a typical community bank, its fate was closely tied to local farms, livestock, and small family businesses. Over the following decades, it witnessed the prosperity and decline of American agriculture and survived the Great Depression of the 1930s. This was a significant achievement, considering thousands of similar institutions across the country failed at that time.

For the next 77 years, the bank quietly operated much like the small town of Garden City itself.

In 2005, Garden City Bank experienced its first major turning point.

Landon H. Rowland, a Kansas City industrial legend, and his wife Sarah decided to buy the bank after retiring. Rowland was not an ordinary banker; he was the former chairman and CEO of Kansas City Southern Industries. Under his leadership, the railway company expanded into Mexico, and he spun off two financial giants, Janus Capital and DST Systems.

Driven by old-fashioned business ideals, Rowland bought this sleepy rural bank, fully aware of the power of infrastructure—whether rail tracks or capital flows—both fundamentally meant to connect and circulate.

In 2010, the Rowland family renamed the bank Lead Bank. The name hinted at ambition—no longer confined to Garden City but aiming to be an industry leader.

Subsequently, Landon’s son, Josh Rowland, took over as CEO. A banker with a legal background and influenced by humanism, Josh was tired of the cold, bureaucratic counters typical of traditional banks. He wondered why banks couldn’t be like Starbucks or public libraries—becoming a third space for the community.

To realize this vision, Josh realized the bank had to leave its comfort zone in the countryside and move into the heart of economic activity. In 2015, Lead Bank made a bold decision to relocate its headquarters to the Crossroads Arts District in downtown Kansas City.

Once a dilapidated industrial warehouse area, the district was revitalized in the early 2000s by artists, galleries, and tech startups, becoming the heart of innovation in Kansas City. Lead Bank created a space in this avant-garde neighborhood.

No bulletproof glass, no queues—Josh even commissioned students from Kansas City Art Institute to hold art exhibitions in the lobby, and designed a rooftop terrace for yoga classes and cocktail parties.

During this period, Lead Bank appeared trendy on the outside but remained a traditional community bank at its core. It served local small business owners, relying on a warm local network to survive.

The Woman from Silicon Valley

While the Rowland family reshaped Lead Bank’s physical form, a formidable woman in finance named Jackie Reses was experiencing deep frustration.

Reses’s career is a textbook on capital efficiency. She spent seven years at Goldman Sachs, specializing in M&A and private equity, honing top-tier deal intuition.

Later, Reses joined Yahoo, leading its most significant and complex asset management—Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba. Through intricate negotiations and structural design, she ultimately unlocked over $50 billion in value for Yahoo, establishing her as a top dealmaker.

In 2015, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey recruited her to Square, where she was responsible for the then-18-month-old small business lending division, Square Capital. This division aimed to leverage merchant transaction data to provide loans to millions of micro and small enterprises. It was a perfect business cycle—except that U.S. regulations kept tech companies out of the banking system.

Thus, to comply with lending regulations, Square had to adopt a licensing model, partnering with Utah-based industrial banks like Celtic Bank, issuing loans in the bank’s name, then repurchasing them through Square.

In an interview, Reses said working with traditional banks was very difficult. For example, most banks had almost no software engineers, relying instead on rigid, patched legacy systems. This made it hard for fintechs, which excel at user experience, to customize transaction methods on demand. Every new product launch involved long battles between compliance and tech departments.

Living under such constraints was extremely painful. After leaving Square in 2020, Jackie Reses decided to own her own bank. When choosing an acquisition target, she avoided crowded California and New York markets, focusing instead on Lead Bank in Kansas City.

Thanks to the prudent management of the Rowland family, Lead Bank had a clean balance sheet and an innovative management team. More importantly, she didn’t want to be constantly mingling with CEOs; she wanted to get closer to real small and medium-sized business owners—the core clientele of Lead Bank.

On August 1, 2022, the acquisition was completed. It was a rare deal approved swiftly by regulators including the Federal Reserve and Missouri State Banking Department, largely thanks to Reses’s good regulatory relationships.

An important point to note is that Reses’s brother, Jacob Reses, a young political star, served as chief of staff to JD Vance in the Senate. As JD Vance assumed the U.S. Vice Presidency in early 2025, Jacob continued to serve as a key staffer, becoming one of the White House’s policy architects.

This secret channel to Washington’s power center, while not a get-out-of-jail-free card, provided Lead Bank with very low misunderstanding costs and smooth communication under the intense Chokepoint 2.0 regulatory pressure, enabling it to venture into innovative areas other banks avoided.

Reses’s vision for Lead Bank was to build on the existing community bank in Kansas City by layering a fintech infrastructure—an in-house banking platform that could be sold to other fintech companies.

At that time, Lead Bank attracted notable fintech clients like Affirm and began engaging with crypto industry clients. Despite the crypto winter, Lead Bank’s growth accelerated. In Q3 2023, revenue increased by 9% quarter-over-quarter to $37 million; net profit surged 50% to $5 million; total assets reached $951 million, over $100 million more than a year earlier.

After the BaaS Industry Earthquake

Jackie Reses brought more than just Wall Street capital and Washington attention to Lead Bank—she almost directly transferred a core team from Square.

This included CTO Ronak Vyas, Chief Legal Officer Erica Khalili, Chief Product Officer Homam Maalouf, and former Meta design director Albert Song. This team covered everything from core code development, compliance risk management, to front-end user experience design, giving Lead Bank the core capability to independently build financial products without relying on external vendors.

When Vyas first examined traditional bank core systems, he was struck by a sense of shock from the last century. Most U.S. banks still operated on mainframes running COBOL from the 1970s. These systems used batch processing—your card swipe today would only be processed after hours, and balances updated the next day. For fintech companies demanding millisecond responses, this was prehistoric.

Upon taking office, Vyas made a very hardcore decision: no off-the-shelf solutions, only self-developed systems. Built directly on AWS cloud services and Snowflake databases, this parallel ledger and risk orchestration layer reduced dependence on traditional black-box middle layers, enabling real-time accounting.

While other banks still bought middleware to patch their aging systems, Lead Bank had already transformed into a tech company disguised as a bank. Although this heavy approach was mocked as inefficient at first, time proved Reses and Vyas’s foresight.

In 2024, the well-known middleware provider Synapse declared bankruptcy, triggering a chain collapse in the BaaS industry.

As mentioned earlier, many fintech companies lacked banking licenses and the ability to interface with the old mainframe systems. Synapse served as an intermediary, providing simple APIs to fintechs and managing complex underlying accounts for banks. Before its collapse, Synapse supported over 100 fintech firms, indirectly managing accounts for 18 million end users, with an annual transaction volume of $76 billion.

Its failure revealed a terrifying black box: the sub-ledgers recording accounts often mismatched the actual bank-held funds. Millions of dollars vanished into thin air, and thousands of depositors couldn’t withdraw funds. Soon after, BaaS banks like Evolve Bank and Blue Ridge Bank, which had aggressively expanded, faced severe regulatory penalties and were forced to halt new business.

The entire industry plunged into panic. Fintech founders realized that their supposedly rock-solid banking partners were built on quicksand.

This was the moment Reses had long anticipated. Because Lead Bank refused to use middleware and built its core in-house, it remained unscathed in this storm.

The panicked unicorns began seeking safe harbors. One of the world’s largest digital banks, Revolut, fully migrated its U.S. operations to Lead Bank. Corporate expense management giant Ramp abandoned its old partner and embraced Lead Bank.

More importantly, this hardcore tech plus full licensing model attracted intense capital market enthusiasm. In September 2025, Lead Bank completed a $70 million Series B funding round led by ICONIQ and Greycroft, with top VCs like a16z and Ribbit Capital participating. At this point, Lead Bank’s valuation soared to $1.47 billion, making it a rare banking unicorn.

The New Cycle of Crypto-Friendly Banks

If you only see Lead Bank as a fintech partner, you underestimate Jackie Reses’s ambitions. The bank is quietly becoming a key gateway between the crypto economy and fiat currency.

After the collapses of Silvergate and Signature Bank, the crypto industry lost two major USD settlement pillars. Lead Bank swiftly filled this vacuum, but its approach is smarter and more discreet than predecessors.

By the end of 2025, Visa announced the launch of USDC settlement on the Solana chain, supported by Lead Bank as one of the initial banks behind this feature. This means that when you use a Visa card somewhere in the world, the fund flow may no longer go through the slow SWIFT system but be settled within seconds via Lead Bank accounts in USDC.

Lead Bank is not just helping crypto companies hold funds; it also maps fiat accounts to on-chain addresses. Through its API, compliant crypto enterprises can achieve 24/7 real-time fiat inflows and outflows.

Looking at Lead Bank’s financial statements, its growth logic is entirely different from traditional community banks.

By Q3 2025, Lead Bank’s total assets surged to $1.97 billion, more than double before the acquisition. The key was restructuring its deposit base. Traditional banks rely on fixed-term deposits paying 4%-5% interest, but Lead Bank, serving fintech and crypto clients, gained large amounts of commercial demand deposits. These funds are usually for payment settlements, insensitive to interest rates, giving Lead Bank extremely low-cost liabilities.

On the asset side, Lead Bank is very conservative. It doesn’t, like Silicon Valley Bank, use short-term client deposits to buy long-term government bonds, nor does it issue high-risk commercial loans. Instead, it allocates large sums into highly liquid short-term assets or rapidly circulates funds through its fintech partners’ short-term credit offerings.

In 2024, data showed that non-interest income from payment fees, API call charges, and card issuance commissions grew by 39%, far exceeding the growth rate of traditional interest income.

This creates a flywheel: low-cost settlement funds generate risk-free fee income, funds circulate quickly, forming a trading-like revenue model rather than a traditional bank’s interest margin model.

Reading this, you’ll understand that during this turbulent period of financial and crypto industry transformation, the language of regulation, banking, and tech companies has never been aligned. Every misalignment could someday turn into a regulatory order.

Lead Bank has demonstrated that in the era of AI and blockchain, the most radical innovation may not come from destroying the old world but from the old world’s self-awareness. By blending a century-old banking reputation with Silicon Valley engineering and modern artistic humanism, Lead Bank has not only survived but redefined what a 21st-century bank should be.