A Fintech Titan In Community Banker’s Clothing

Already a force to be reckoned with in Silicon Valley, once-and-future billionaire Jackie Reses is out to disrupt financial services with a 95-year-old Missouri bank—without disturbing federal regulators.

_{By Jeff Kauflin, Forbes Staff}

In March 2020, while Covid lockdowns were in full swing and small businesses’ sales had fallen off a cliff, Jackie Reses called Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. As the head of Square Capital, the lending arm of Jack Dorsey’s payment processing company Square, Reses insisted that even though her company wasn’t a traditional bank, Mnuchin should make an exception and let Square help dole out the hundreds of billions of dollars in forgivable loans that the U.S. government had made available through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). She argued that Square’s relationships with millions of small businesses made it a good distribution channel.

After Mnuchin agreed to allow Square, Intuit, PayPal and other fintechs to become PPP lenders, Reses turned to her team and said, “We have three weeks to build a brand-new loan program from scratch, and it has to be mostly automated.” The 100-plus employees slated to work on it were exhilarated. “If we typed fast enough, these businesses could get saved. They wouldn’t lose their lease, they could make payroll,” says Audrey Kim, who worked under Reses as the head of product at Square Capital at the time.