Terry R. Jorde, who today will become the chairman of the Independent Community Bankers of America, owes her enthusiasm for small banks partly to a potato farmer.
Having grown up in Chicago and studied finance at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, she thought she would wind up at a big bank, with a Lake Shore Drive office overlooking Lake Michigan.
But in 1979, with a bachelor's degree and a new husband, she moved to tiny Cando, N.D., where he runs a 1,000-acre potato farm.
In Cando she got a job as a teller and bookkeeper at CountryBank USA. Eleven years later, at the age of 32, she was named its president and chief executive officer.
It now has $39 million of assets, and Ms. Jorde - who has long been an active member of the ICBA and is a former chairman of its North Dakota affiliate - has become one of small banks' most vocal advocates.
"I became a very passionate believer in the need for community banking and the need for local control and ownership," she said.
Fellow members say she is perfect for the role she will assume today at the annual convention, in Las Vegas, because she is well known in Washington and on top of the hot-button issues: regulatory burden, competition from tax-exempt credit unions and Farm Credit System lenders, and Wal-Mart's bid for an industrial loan charter.
Among the biggest threats to rural banks is depopulation. Cando's population dropped 24%, to 1,185, from 1990 to 2004.
Ms. Jorde said that though a larger bank might abandon a community like Cando, small banks like hers cannot. But she also said that small banks need regulatory relief because their employees spend a disproportionate amount of their time on compliance.
Even filling out quarterly call reports is a huge task. She said she would like the regulators to look at the 458 pages of instructions and forms that are part of every call report and see whether small banks ought to be required to file all that.
Her solution: "Two quarters out of the year there should be a short-form call report." That, she said, would save two to four weeks a year - time her employees could use to meet with customers and drum up business.
James P. Ghiglieri, the president of the $224 million-asset Alpha Community Bank in Toluca, Ill., is the ICBA's new chairman-elect. He said Ms. Jorde is an excellent advocate for regulatory relief because she understands firsthand how hard banks must work to comply - and because she is a good listener.
"Her bank isn't big enough to have experts, so she has to get involved in all these areas," Mr. Ghiglieri said.
"When she speaks, her thoughts and opinions are so well organized and thought out," he added. "They have always made a strong impression on me because they are not just spewed out."
On the subject of Wal-Mart, Ms. Jorde has made her feelings clear in a comment letter she wrote to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in September. Wal-Mart has said it wants an industrial loan charter so that it can process its own payments. But Ms. Jorde is urging the FDIC to reject Wal-Mart's ILC application because, like many community bankers, she believes that the retail giant would use the charter as an entree into retail banking.
"If Wal -Mart is allowed to enter into banking, I fear that many of the nation's 6,000 banks under $1 billion [of assets] will succumb to the same fate as our Main Street businesses have," she wrote. "Over the long run, my $40 million bank cannot stand up to Wal-Mart's ability to undercut pricing until the competition is gone."
C.R. "Rusty" Cloutier, a former ICBA chairman who is the president and CEO of the $701 million-asset MidSouth Bancorp Inc. in Lafayette, La., said Ms. Jorde is in a good position to advance bankers' interests because she is politically well connected.
She has also testified many times in Congress, is the only active banker on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s advisory committee on banking policy, and was under consideration in 2001 for a Federal Reserve Board seat.
Having been "on the short list for the board of governors … speaks volumes for her banking experience," Mr. Cloutier said.
