Former Square executive Jackie Reses bought the 100-year-old Lead Bank

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Women are gaining board seats but continuing to lose top roles, Penguin Random House is letting go of two of its most prominent female publishers, and this founder solved her biggest fintech challenges by buying her own bank. Have a wonderful Wednesday.

– Count on it. Jackie Reses bought a bank. This news surprises many people who hear it, but not those who know the story of Reses.

Reses was an executive at Square (now Block), where she led the fintech company’s banking and lending products. While at Square, she encountered “extreme pain and frustration in working with banking partners,” she told Michal Lev-Ram on a recent episode of The Fortune Leadership Next podcast. Fintech startups’ credit cards, debit cards and other financial services all rely on underlying banking partners. Often, these traditional financial institutions operate very differently from Silicon Valley startups.

So Reses and his fellow Square alumni cofounders came up with the idea of ​​buying a bank and merging two distinct lines of business. He is now CEO of Lead Bank, a Kansas City, Missouri-based bank that serves both local banking customers and fast-growing fintech companies. Lead Bank’s fintech clients “all want to run highly compliant programs because they are very successful businesses, but they want someone who can operate at the same speed as them,” Reses says. At the same time he had to earn the trust of the customers and long-time employees of the century-old bank.

Buying a bank was an exercise in creativity within limits, he says. “How do you apply creativity to things that might be incredibly arcane, mundane, and legally restrictive?” she asks.

“It’s really strange to say that yes, I own a bank. I went and bought a bank,” she says. “But when you understand the story… it seems obvious.”

Listen to the full episode of Leadership Next on Spotify OR Apple Podcasts.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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EVEN IN THE TITLES

– New board, same game. So far in 2024, women account for 30% of board seats at Russell 3000 companies, continuing an upward trend from late 2022, according to company data from ISS. The number of women in S&P 500 executive roles, however, declined in 2023 for the first time since 2005, and only two of the 21 CEOs appointed in the first quarter of 2024 were women. Financial Times

– Written. Penguin Random House fired Reagan Arthur and Lisa Lucas, who led two of its biggest imprints. Arthur, publisher of the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, oversaw the release of bestsellers such as Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Lucas was Schocken’s editor and Pantheon’s first black editor. Their departures are reportedly part of ongoing cost-cutting efforts. New York Times

– Posed for rights. The New York State Senate passed the Fashion Workers Act on Monday. The bill aimed at giving models legal workplace protections will now move to the state assembly. Sara Ziff, executive director of the nonprofit Model Alliance, which co-sponsored the bill, says “there’s no excuse to keep sculpting [models] by the same rights and protections granted to other sectors”. Fashion business

– Sponsorship served. The Saudi Public Investment Fund will become the first naming partner of the Women’s Tennis Association. Critics accused the WTA of ignoring human rights abuses against women and the LGBTQ+ community when it announced that the Saudi capital would host the final stage of the tour for the next three years. Reuters

-Power play. WNBA rookie Angel Reese is now the owner of the DC Power Football Club, a women’s soccer team that will begin its first season this summer. Reese says she wants to “help grow women’s sports and elevate female athletes at all levels.” Atletico

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Nominated Viome Sarah Dorsett to the president of the company’s consumer division. Name of health-Hades Jill McIntosh to its board of directors.

ON MY RADAR

How GSK CEO Emma Walmsley kept her job and turned a bellicose activist investor into an ally Fortune

After a heartbreaking bestseller, Chanel Miller takes on her dream project New York Times

Healthcare workforce challenges must be addressed to support Black mothers Fortune

WORDS OF PARTICIPATION

“Stigma is born and grows in darkness.”

— Julie Schott, the serial entrepreneur who founded Julie, an emergency contraceptive pill

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