A Wall Street Maverick, a Vance Insider, and a 100-Year-Old Bank: Inside Lead Bank

At the end of last year, JPMorgan Chase froze the accounts of two YC-backed stablecoin payment startups, BlindPay and Kontigo. Both companies focused on the Latin American market, but because their operations involved high-risk jurisdictions like Venezuela, they triggered the banks’ compliance and sanctions thresholds.

Likewise, Lead Bank—long considered crypto-friendly—recently tightened its partnerships with certain stablecoin payment companies, adding new customer identity checks and extending both transaction settlement and account opening times.

With compliance now a requirement, many entrepreneurs in the payments and stablecoin sectors have realized they’re not dealing with the banking system as a whole, but rather with a select few banks willing and able to keep their doors open.

Yet Lead Bank and JPMorgan Chase are fundamentally different. As one of the first two banks to participate in Visa’s USDC settlement on the Solana blockchain, Lead Bank didn’t simply cut off startups from banking services. Instead, the bank aims to outpace competitors by offering native support to crypto businesses.

The Century-Long Rise and Fall of Garden City Bank

To understand Lead Bank today, you have to look at its history.

In 1928, just before the Great Depression struck the United States, a small institution called Garden City Bank was established in Cass County, Missouri.

This was an era when deals were sealed with a handshake and reputation was the true collateral. As a classic community bank, its fate was tightly woven with local farmland, livestock, and family businesses. Over the decades, it witnessed the boom and bust of the American agricultural economy and survived the Great Depression of the 1930s—a remarkable achievement, given that thousands of similar institutions failed during that period.

For the next 77 years, the bank quietly sustained itself, much like the small town of Garden City where it was based.

In 2005, Garden City Bank faced its first turning point.

Landon H. Rowland, a Kansas City business legend from 80 kilometers away, and his wife Sarah decided to purchase Garden City Bank after retiring. Rowland was no ordinary banker; he was the former chairman and CEO of Kansas City Southern Industries. Under his leadership, the railroad company expanded into Mexico, and he orchestrated the spin-off of financial giants Janus Capital and DST Systems.

Landon acquired the sleepy rural bank out of an old-school sense of business idealism. He understood the power of infrastructure—whether railways or financial rails, both are fundamentally about connection and flow.

In 2010, the Rowland family renamed the bank Lead Bank. The name itself signaled ambition: no longer limited to Garden City, it aimed to become an industry leader.

Soon after, Landon’s son, Josh Rowland, took over as CEO. With a legal background and a strong humanistic influence, Josh was tired of the cold, bureaucratic design of traditional bank counters. He wondered why a bank couldn’t serve as a “third space” for the community, like Starbucks or a public library.

To realize this vision, Josh knew the bank had to leave its rural comfort zone and move to the economic core. In 2015, Lead Bank made a bold decision to relocate its headquarters to Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District.

The Crossroads Arts District, once a run-down warehouse area, was revitalized in the early 2000s by artists, galleries, and tech startups, becoming the innovation hub of Kansas City. Lead Bank created an unconventional space in this cutting-edge neighborhood.

No bulletproof glass, no queue ropes—Josh even invited students from the Kansas City Art Institute to host art exhibitions in the bank’s lobby and designed a rooftop terrace for yoga classes and cocktail parties.

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

The Woman from Silicon Valley

While the Rowland family was reshaping Lead Bank’s physical identity, a powerhouse in finance named Jackie Reses was experiencing deep frustration.

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

Reses later joined Yahoo, where she led the company’s most significant and complex asset management deal—Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba. Through highly complex negotiations and structuring, Reses ultimately unlocked over $50 billion in value for Yahoo, cementing her status as a top dealmaker.

In 2015, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey recruited her to Square, his payments company, to lead Square Capital, a small business lending unit just 18 months old at the time. The unit aimed to leverage merchant transaction data to provide loans to millions of small businesses. While this should have been a perfect business loop, US regulations kept tech companies firmly outside the banking sector.

To lend compliantly, Square had to rent licenses, partnering with industrial banks like Celtic Bank in Utah. Loans were issued under the bank’s name and then repurchased by Square.

In an interview, Reses said working with traditional banks was extremely difficult. Most banks had almost no software engineers and operated on rigid, patched-together legacy systems—making it nearly impossible for fintechs, which excel at user experience, to customize transaction processes. Every new product launch required lengthy negotiations between the bank’s compliance and technology teams.

This dependency was intensely frustrating. After leaving Square in 2020, Jackie Reses resolved to own a bank herself. When choosing a target for acquisition, she bypassed crowded California and New York, focusing instead on Lead Bank in Kansas City.

Thanks to the Rowland family’s prudent management, Lead Bank had a clean balance sheet and a management team open to innovation. More importantly, Reses wanted to engage with real small business owners—the core clientele of Lead Bank—instead of constantly mingling with CEOs.

The acquisition was completed on August 1, 2022. This rare transaction received swift approvals from regulators including the Federal Reserve and the Missouri Division of Finance, largely due to Reses’s strong regulatory relationships.

Another key factor: Reses’s brother, Jacob Reses, a rising political star, served as chief of staff to Senator JD Vance. With JD Vance set to become US Vice President in early 2025, Jacob Reses remained a key aide, making him a central figure in White House policymaking.

This discreet channel to Washington’s power center, while not a “get out of jail free” card, gave Lead Bank extremely low misunderstanding costs and smooth communication with regulators under Chokepoint 2.0, enabling it to explore innovative areas other banks avoided.

Reses envisioned building a fintech layer atop the existing community bank in Kansas City—a banking infrastructure that could be sold to other fintech companies.

Lead Bank soon attracted well-known fintech clients like Affirm and began engaging with crypto industry clients. Despite the fintech winter, Lead Bank’s growth accelerated. In Q3 2023, revenue rose 9% from Q2 to $37 million; net profit jumped 50% to $5 million; and total assets reached $951 million—over $100 million more than a year earlier.

After the BaaS Industry Shock

Jackie Reses brought more than Wall Street capital and Washington’s attention to Lead Bank—she nearly transplanted her 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 and compliance risk management to front-end user experience, giving Lead Bank the ability to independently build financial products without relying on external vendors.

When Vyas first examined the core systems of traditional banks, he was struck by their outdated nature. Most US banks still run on COBOL-based mainframes from the 1970s, using batch processing—if you swipe your card today, the bank runs the program after closing, and your balance updates the next day. For fintech firms seeking millisecond-level response, this is prehistoric.

Upon joining, Vyas made a bold decision: no off-the-shelf solutions—everything would be developed in-house. Their proprietary system was built directly on AWS cloud services and Snowflake databases, serving as a parallel ledger and risk control layer, reducing reliance on traditional “black box” middleware and enabling real-time accounting.

While other banks patched legacy systems with middleware, Lead Bank transformed itself into a technology company in a bank’s clothing. Although this heavy approach was once mocked as inefficient, time soon proved Reses and Vyas’s foresight.

In 2024, renowned middleware provider Synapse declared bankruptcy, triggering a domino collapse in the BaaS industry.

As previously mentioned, many fintech companies lack banking licenses and cannot connect to banks’ legacy mainframes. Synapse acted as an intermediary, providing easy interfaces to fintechs and handling complex core accounting for banks. Before its collapse, Synapse supported over 100 fintech companies, managed 18 million end-user accounts, and handled $76 billion in annualized transaction volume.

Its failure exposed a frightening black box: the sub-ledgers managed by the middleware often didn’t match the banks’ actual ledgers. Tens of millions of dollars vanished, and thousands of depositors couldn’t withdraw funds. Soon after, aggressively expanding BaaS banks like Evolve Bank and Blue Ridge Bank received harsh regulatory penalties and were forced to halt new business.

The entire industry panicked as fintech founders realized their supposedly solid banking partners were built on quicksand.

This was the moment Reses had been waiting for. By refusing to use middleware and building its own core system, Lead Bank emerged from the storm unscathed.

Panic-stricken unicorns began seeking safe harbor. Revolut, one of the world’s largest digital banks, fully migrated its US business to Lead Bank, and corporate spend management giant Ramp left its old partner for Lead Bank.

More importantly, this hardcore technology-plus-full-license model attracted feverish interest from capital markets. In September 2025, Lead Bank completed a $70 million Series B round led by ICONIQ and Greycroft, with top VCs like a16z and Ribbit Capital participating. Lead Bank’s valuation soared to $1.47 billion, making it a rare banking unicorn.

Crypto-Friendly Banking in a New Cycle

To view Lead Bank merely as a fintech partner would underestimate Jackie Reses’s ambition. This bank is quietly becoming a key gateway between the crypto economy and the fiat world.

After the collapse of Silvergate and Signature Bank, the crypto industry lost two key pillars for dollar settlement. Lead Bank quickly filled this gap, but with a smarter, more discreet approach than its predecessors.

At the end of 2025, Visa announced the launch of USDC stablecoin settlement on the Solana blockchain, with Lead Bank as one of the two initial banks supporting the feature. This means that when you use your Visa card anywhere in the world, the underlying fund flows may bypass the slow SWIFT system and instead settle in seconds via Lead Bank accounts using USDC.

Lead Bank does more than just hold deposits for crypto companies. It maps fiat accounts to on-chain addresses, and through its API, compliant crypto firms can move fiat funds in and out 24/7 in real time.

A look at Lead Bank’s financials reveals a growth model completely different from traditional community banks.

By Q3 2025, Lead Bank’s total assets had soared to $1.97 billion—more than double the pre-acquisition level—driven by a restructured deposit base. Traditional banks compete for retail time deposits, paying 4–5% interest.

In contrast, Lead Bank, by serving fintech and crypto clients, attracted a large volume of commercial demand deposits. These funds, typically held for settlement purposes, are not sensitive to interest rates, giving Lead Bank an extremely low funding cost on the liability side.

On the asset side, Lead Bank exercised restraint. It did not, like Silicon Valley Bank, invest short-term deposits in long-term Treasuries or aggressively issue high-risk commercial loans. Instead, it allocated significant funds to highly liquid short-term assets or rapidly revolving short-term credit through fintech partners.

In 2024, non-interest income—mainly from payment fees, API usage fees, and card issuance commissions—increased 39%, far outpacing growth in traditional interest income.

This created a flywheel: low-cost settlement funds come in, earning risk-free fees, and capital circulates rapidly. This is a transactional revenue model, not a traditional interest margin model.

At this point, it’s clear that in the current turbulent transition of the financial and crypto sectors, regulatory language, banking language, and tech company language are never fully aligned. Any misalignment can, at any moment, result in a regulatory mandate for rectification.

Lead Bank has proven that in the era of AI and blockchain, the most radical innovation doesn’t always come from destroying the old world, but from the old world’s own awakening. By blending a century-old banking reputation, Silicon Valley engineering, and modern humanistic sensibility, Lead Bank has not only survived but redefined what it means to be a 21st-century bank.

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