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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The regulation process is extremely serious.
And it is long. It starts even before you submit your application to state and federal agencies. First, you'll want to meet with the regulators. Be like, I'm thinking of doing this. If I were to put together an application, would you by any chance be interested in reading that application?
We're flesh and blood people. That's true. Ingrid White is deputy superintendent for banks with the Ohio Department of Commerce, the Division of Financial Institutions. She's in a couple book clubs, has two big dogs.
Ingrid's office in Ohio will eventually give a new bank their charter. That's like a license to do business. And the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, they will eventually insure customers' deposits. This is a cornerstone of banking. It was invented after the Great Depression. If you put your money in a bank and that bank fails, it is insured by the government up to $250,000.
That helps make it so that we all trust banks, which helps keep the economy stable. These regulators, they want to make sure that a new bank is worthy of that FDIC logo that they'll eventually get to display.
But the Fortuna Group has banking experience. So regulators are like, yeah, we'd like to see your application. Fortuna has finished step one. Step two, Fortuna submits a draft application.
Yeah, pretty much. It includes the business plan, also the names of the organizers. They're going to have to go through background checks.
The very next month in March of 2023.
After they catch their breath, they're like, Silicon Valley Bank is really different from us. Like, hopefully this doesn't necessarily have to change anything about our business plan. We're much smaller. We're not going to be concentrated in tech. But also, the country's faith in banking was shaken.
And that's a problem for Fortuna because they're about to have to go out to investors and do the next key step in this process. They need to get people to believe in their business enough to hand over at least $20 million. At a time when those same investors are hearing the words bank failure for the first time in years.
Fortuna Bank submitted their application to regulators in February of 2023. Then the biggest bank failure in years happened. The FDIC got extremely busy. Fortuna expected full approval within about six months. That doesn't happen. But while they're waiting, Fortuna does start in on the last very important step in forming a bank, raising $20 million.
So they start going to business people and institutions and family members saying, do you believe in our idea? Will you invest? And both Ilaria and Lisa said this was way harder and took way longer than they expected.
Fortuna's sell to investors was this. A bank is not a unicorn tech stock. It won't have that kind of return. But this investment would actually pay out in much the same way.
Fortuna's pitch to investors was ultimately convincing.
In December, they technically opened as far as the regulators were concerned, but very quietly. They weren't advertising for new customers yet. They had to get their routing number from the Federal Reserve. That took a while. They had to work out all the kinks in the system.
It was in the vault, but when they looked for it on the computer systems, it somehow hadn't been recorded. Getting these systems up and running took a lot of work, but they eventually figured it all out. Everything was showing up where it needed to be. And by late January, they were ready.
Ready?
Fortuna! Got it on the first try.
This episode of Planet Money was produced by Emma Peasley. It was edited by Katie Mingle. It was engineered by Sina Lofredo and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
I'm Erica Barris. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
Showing 161–180 of 201 · page 9 of 11
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