Dan Weber to retire from banking
During the summer of 1971, Dan Weber helped with end-of-the month statements and provided incidental labor at the Wanda State Bank, and two days before heading back to class to study accounting and business, he was offered a banking job. He was pleased to receive the offer, and started work on Monday, August 31. He worked his way up the ladder, was named bank president in 2000, and now 44 years and four months later, he is stepping down from his banking career.
Having grown up on a farm near Wanda, where farming has been a way of life for generations, he feels good about having served farmers, businesses and families in community banking with loans in all shapes and sizes. “It’s a great feeling to help people and watch them achieve and become successful; to have made a difference in their lives,” he said during a recent interview. He’s proud that the bank has grown from assets of $75 million in 2000, when he became its president, to current assets of $131million.
He doesn’t hesitate, however, to say that banking was much more fun years ago than today. “Too many regulations today,” he says. To be sure, it is important to have a system of oversight to govern the actions of financial institutions, but regulation that applies to the banking industry has increased in layers, usually in response to a crisis or the misdeeds of one or a few financial institutions, he continued. “Regulatory reform is needed, but it should be considered in a targeted manner rather than as a reaction that will penalize a broad group of banks for the actions of a few non-banks. Small community banks did not deserve the regulatory burden they received as a result of the Dodd-Frank Regulations,” he said.
Banks today are subject to volumes of consumer regulation. Most customers are familiar or come in contact with many of these laws that over time have increased the amount of paperwork they must complete to open an account or obtain a loan. A simple car loan has become two to three legal-size pages of language the consumer rarely reads. Home mortgage loan documents run about 10 pages in length. “To try to help people buy a home, we must be a registered lender, and we have to go to the sheriff’s office to be fingerprinted,” he said, disgustedly. Additionally, banks must bear the costs of increased regulatory compliance staffing, software development, annual staff regulatory training, paper and risk management.
Time and technology, too, have changed the banking business.
“The first years I worked here, we would make loans at the counter and type the information on a card. We didn’t have a loan committee then,” Dan said. “Forty years ago, people didn’t consider a farm boy’s education necessary beyond high school. Farming today is high tech and high finance. From a typical $20,000 - $25,000 farm loan then, many farm loans today are a half million dollars. It takes good management on the farm and in the bank.”
Other trends in the financial industry over the past decade and a half — mergers that increased the size and scope of large banks and competition from mutual funds, large banks and other nonbank financial institutions — have potentially threatened the competitiveness of small banks. “We are an ag bank and the bulk of our business is with farmers,” said Dan. “We have a pretty loyal customer base.”
“There are ups and downs in all businesses. For the most part, I have enjoyed banking,” Dan said. “I have enjoyed doing business with many good people and making many friends. We have a strong bank and a good staff — the bank is in good hands. The time seems right to retire and move on to other things.”