Banker started two of the three banks on her resumeLike many bankers, Amy Lubrant, chief operating officer at Faribault, Minn.-based Reliance Bank, started her banking career as a teller..Unlike most bankers, she has spent the rest of her career in banks she helped to start.In 2007, Lubrant was a member of the de novo team at Reliance. It was the second-to-last bank in the state to receive a new charter before the financial crash of 2008. “Our timing was perfect, yet almost catastrophic,” Lubrant said, reflecting on that crucible-like startup phase.The organizing investors recruited Lubrant, in part because 10 years earlier she had been among the small group of bankers who left Marquette Bank, N.A., to open a de novo in New Prague, Minn. Her experience and expertise are among the qualities that influenced her selection for our BankBeat 2026 “Outstanding Women in Banking.” Lubrant was one of the youngest members of Reliance’s nine-person startup team–but the only one with experience starting a bank from scratch. And, from her perspective, the startup spark was the same in 1997 and 2007.“A group of community shareholders, not one family, but a group of community owners, felt it was important to maintain a community-owned bank within small towns,” she said. “If you lose the grocery store and the bank, you lose the town. And there’s also the desire to support those small businesses that are trying to get started but get lost in the shuffle of big organizations.”Hallmark momentsBy the end of 2007, Reliance Bank reported total assets of about $25 million. Today, Lubrant said total assets hover between $350 million and $360 million.While still a single-location community bank, Reliance now has one loan production office and is well established compared to the days “when we were building a building, we had no furniture, we sat on the floor,” Lubrant said fondly. “It was the kind of thing that makes you go, am I really making good life-choices?” How to keep a bank competitive and independent amid a wave of consolidation is still a big consideration. But Lubrant also sees a parallel in the modern technology environment.“We’ve been hearing for two decades that brick and mortar is going to be a thing of the past, it’s going to fall by the wayside,” she said. “But when customers want a face-to-face encounter, brick and mortar matters more than ever.”Notwithstanding that most U.S. mortgages are generated online, Lubrant said face-to-face mortgage service still matters, particularly to first-time homebuyers. It’s a hallmark moment to win customers who are craving trustworthy guidance. “When you do someone's mortgage, you very often gain their total relationship,” she said. “For a community bank of our size, we have a very large mortgage portfolio that we keep, service and retain.”Wealth transfer is another moment when relationships matter more than ever, Lubrant said, emphasizing the importance not just of inter- but intra-generational transfers. “The piece I think is forgotten sometimes is the transfer of wealth between husbands and wives. Right now, a lot of those wives are of a generation where their husbands handled all the finances,” Lubrant said. “The conversations we have with those matriarchs and their children are irreplaceable.”High tech helps keep high touchFuel for these relational moments comes from the millions of transactional moments fostered by technology.“The technology piece is an expectation. If you don’t have it, you will die,” Lubrant said. That reality drives Reliance to the leading (but not bleeding) edge of technology, she said. On AI, Lubrant rates the bank as a fast adopter. It runs about a dozen AI agents in its operations, for things such as quality control in loan presentations and operational questions on the retail side. Reliance is also partnering with SBS CyberSecurity, piloting a virtual chief AI officer to ensure AI is used intentionally, effectively and safely.But the underlying ambition is for digital to enable traditional. For instance, Lubrant said Reliance has to be very deliberate about its efficiency ratio, because the bank is so high-touch. “It's the nature of the beast,” she said. “But it's something that, rightfully so, our board pushes back on.” So, in AI as in other technology adoption, Reliance is looking for ways to give employees even more time for customers.“We have worked tirelessly to try to figure out how we can automate things, how we can create more efficiency in processes, because we want to put our staff to work in more valuable ways,” Lubrant said. “We want to maintain our relationships and that high touch.”
