It’s great to keep your money with local banks and credit unions — you save money and help build the wealth of your community all while helping to create a more fair financial system. But it’s also a wonderful experience to be a George Bailey-style community banker, where you know your depositors and they know you. As the daughter of one of these types of bankers, Katy Welter had it in her blood from birth.
It’s easy to suppose that I was raised with a sense of entitlement about the bank. But that wasn’t the case. I learned that the bank existed because of its employees and customers–not its shareholders. And that the money in the bank did not belong to us. We were its custodians. We mediated between the savers and the borrowers in an act of financial alchemy I now know to be called the “multiplier effect.” The process, as we’ve all learned, is more treacherous than a circular saw and as mysterious as the FBI. But I grew up with it, and came to understand and appreciate the magic of collecting one hundred deposits in order to provide one loan, which generates more deposits and loans, and so on.
Upon my college graduation, my dad gave me a strange-looking picture I had made when I was nine years old. I’d drawn a large grey cat in a shirt and tie (presumably an illustration of my father, modeled after our family cat), wearing a familiar bank pin on his lapel. The cat stands in his office and next to a yellow couch sprinkled with dollar signs. Above the couch, I drew a brown wooden frame around the declaration, “To Be a Banker is To Be in Heaven!” I knew my place in the world earlier than most.
Do you know your banker? If you bank with a local financial institution, you probably do. And odds are their kids are drawing adorable pictures of them.
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