Sally Helm
speaker
201 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 22 Apr
Sally Helm’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So, Sally, you've spent the last six months or so talking to these two women in Columbus, Ohio, who've been doing something that in today's world is kind of rare.
Right. Like, where are you going to even go to get, like, big, gigantic marble columns?
Hearing all of this just really drives home for me just how many tiny parts make up a bank. And like just for how every single bank in the country, at some point, someone had to figure out how to do this stuff. Like none of it is just like available out of the box.
Those numbers used to be way higher. Before the 2008 financial crisis, there were more than 100 new banks opening in the United States every year. But for reasons we'll get into, starting a bank has gotten a lot harder. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erika Barris.
Yeah, how do you start a bank? Why would you bother? And is there an argument to be made that more people should be doing it?
That is Lisa Berger.
The title company is a success. She sells it and then starts looking for her next big idea.
And so I did. She started poking around and she found that very few banks are owned by women. Of the more than 4,000 banks in the country, only about 20 are women owned. And Lisa told us that only three of those were intentionally started by women. The others were like a father left his bank to his daughter, that kind of thing.
That banker? Ilaria Rawlins. We met her earlier. She was the one who didn't want to show Sally the vault. When Lisa started thinking seriously about starting her own bank, she wanted Ilaria on board.
Alaria had been in the industry for decades. She started out opening accounts, worked her way up to top leadership positions, and she'd actually worked at a startup bank before. In the banking world, these are called de novo banks, which essentially means new in Latin.
Research does suggest that women starting businesses can have more trouble getting financing. But women own a lot of businesses and also stand to inherit a lot of wealth. If you're a bank, there's an opportunity there to help people and to make money.
And to be fair, a lot of us never interact with any banks besides the big name institutions like Chase.
Bank of America.
And maybe that's kind of fine if all you want is a safe place to put your money and an app that works. But these smaller community banks are actually really important for small businesses.
Yeah, a little local hot dog stand or new indie bookstore. They're often better off getting a loan from a small community bank. The banker might know this business owner or be willing to work with them to strengthen their plan. That ends up meaning more loans for small businesses. And that's important for like Columbus, Ohio overall, because those businesses can then hire people and pay taxes.
To find out why, we went to Kate Judge, professor at Columbia Law School, expert on banking.
Yeah, before the financial crisis in like the 1990s and 2000s, it's like banks, banks, banks, banks, banks all the time. And then boom, 2008 goes off a cliff. Some years, literally zero. There's been a little uptick lately, but it's still way lower than it was.
Unless your new business is a bank. Then low interest rates make it harder to get started. Banks don't make as much money on loans if interest rates are low. And something else happened after 2008 that would make banking an even harder business.
Broadly, this new industry is called fintech, financial technology. These are companies like Venmo, Cash App, companies that do bank-like things but are not banks. The rise of these companies increases competition. Banks have to work harder to survive.
Right. Small banks like Fortuna have to pay third-party vendors that help them with cybersecurity. but also with all these other basic online functions like online accounts, a mobile app.
Showing 141–160 of 201 · page 8 of 11
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