2025 BankBeat Rising Stars in Banking: Matt Jenkins

Banker who ‘connects the dots’ strengthens culture for Iowa bankBy the time Matt Jenkins joined Iowa Trust & Savings Bank in 2022, he’d already started or enhanced treasury management services for five other community banks. With that depth of experience, Jenkins could have telecommuted from a beach chair and given his new employer a baseline for what it needed to grow..Yet Jenkins, a BankBeat “2025 Rising Star in Banking” honoree, isn’t a phone-it-in type of banker. Instead, Jenkins rolled up his shirt sleeves and racked up a litany of early treasury management wins: Adding fraud mitigation tools to existing products; improving or creating treasury management forms and agreements; developing internal campaigns to cross sell TM products along with merchant and card services; leveraging cash sweep products to grow institutional deposits; jumping on the asset/liability committee; implementing DocuSign bank-wide; implementing a CRM to gain a 360-degree view of existing accounts, clients and prospects; launching a new website; implementing ITM technology and data aggregation, creating a digital channel for online account opening … the list goes on.Jenkins has also been pivotal as the bank converted a loan production office in the crowded Des Moines market – where he estimates there are 150 competitors – into a newly-constructed, full-service branch. Jenkins was also part of the integration and conversion of the bank’s 2023 acquisition of a failed bank in Sac City, Iowa, acquired from the FDIC. It was an institution that had a great team but had suffered from operational and physical neglect. Jenkins also gave of his time and talent to ensure that branch got its badly-needed upgrades.Of his early wins, many of which lay outside his core competency, Jenkins said it really was about laying a foundation so the bank could focus on account acquisition, both retail and commercial. “Like a lot of community banks, in Iowa specifically, everybody has a need to raise deposits and [Iowa Trust] wasn’t doing a lot of things on the treasury side,” Jenkins said. “I have been running project after project since I’ve been here. We did turn out a lot of technology on the treasury side, but my main focus has been the bank rebrand, the new full-service location here in Clive, and the culture piece.”An area Jenkins has been especially effective in is marketing, said Kris Ausborn, CEO. “He looked at how, from treasury management, we could get our name out there.”To be successful in a crowded market, the bank needed name recognition, Ausborn explained. Jenkins “took it on in full stride; piece by piece he took on marketing; he got the correct people in place. Matt fully comprehended the situation we were in and he understood what we were trying to accomplish.”Right now, Jenkins’ focus is all on culture. That challenge is multi-faceted. “We’ve had some people leave and we’ve gotten some negative feedback on some things,” Jenkins said. Ausborn has tasked Jenkins with creating a “culture playbook” and Jenkins is eager to roll up his sleeves again “to put some structure together and position us to do things the right way,” he said. To succeed he’s reflecting on his own work history.“The biggest thing I’ve learned over the years, and it exists here, is the culture disconnect that exists between rural and metro Iowa,” Jenkins said. Having been witness to a number of bank acquisitions, “you know, a big metro bank sees a small rural bank for sale. We come in, but this bank has been kind of running on its own and done things their own way with their own decision-maker, and you take that away … that presents a lot of cultural issues.” Iowa Trust, for instance, started in Emmetsburg, Iowa, more than 100 years ago and entered Des Moines less than 10 years ago. “Now we have a lot of executives sitting in Des Moines, and the growth is in Des Moines,” Jenkins explained. “Now Emmetsburg feels like they’re losing their ability to move the needle for the bank because the focus is on Des Moines.”Jenkins believes open communication, branch facetime and transparency will break the barriers between the locations. “Our Emmetsburg location is very important to us,” Jenkins said. “They’re heavy in deposits and do a great job in their community. We want to emulate what they’re doing in the community down here in the metro. They are super important to what we’re doing.”He said similar things about the team at Sac City.Iowa Trust has 54 employees, with roughly 26 of them having been hired in the past two years, Ausborn said. Getting everyone motivated and moving in the same direction is a huge lift. Jenkins has “seen the best practices,” Ausborn said. “He continues to impress upon our staff the importance of this culture,” which included updating the bank’s mission, vision and values. “He has a knack for it.”Jenkins has only known banking as a career, having become a teller right out of college, then moving to personal banking, on to branch management, over to operations, ultimately landing in treasury. In 2002, he started a treasury division from scratch at a community bank and found his niche. “It did really, really well,” Jenkins said. “I did that four times over the last 20 years.”Now he’s jumped up and out of the niche, and is looking at things more broadly. Part of his transformation was enrolling at the Graduate School of Banking at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With the bank’s full support, Jenkins is sharpening leadership skills, his knowledge of loan portfolio management, and risk management. “It has connected so many dots in my head about how all of this works together and what it can do to help a bank be successful,” Jenkins said, his eyes on a future position with executive leadership.Ausborn, who has formalized his own retirement plans, recognizes in Jenkins “the broader impact that executive management has with the staff,” he said. “He can grasp the information and has mastered the skills to get the information across to employees and to directors. Matt connects the dots.”