Wednesday, April 8

8:15am  Registration

9:00am Opening Keynote Speaker

• Culture by Design: Aligning for Success
  Lynsey Mulder
  
  • In this powerful keynote, participants are guided through the essentials of creating a culture that thrives on shared values, clear behaviors, and actionable agreements. Through thought-provoking insights and real-world examples, Lynsey demonstrates how to build a foundation of trust, transparency, and purpose. Attendees will walk away with practical strategies to foster a positive and collaborative work environment, equipped to create a “team compass” that drives success and empowers each member to bring their best to the table. You will be inspired to design a culture of connection and high performance, setting the stage for long-term success.

10:20am Break with Exhibitors

10:45am Breakout Session

• HR Breakout: Understanding the AI Landscape for HR Professionals
  Chris Porter, Drake University
  
  • In this presentation, Chris will discuss the basics of generative AI, its applications for HR professionals, practical tips and tricks, including prompting techniques and more advanced tools, and its potential impact on the future workforce.
• Marketing Breakout: From Reels to Relationships: Multigenerational Social Media for Community Banks
  Chris Snider, Drake University
  • Gen Z scrolls. Boomers read. Millennials share. Each group engages with banks on social media in its own way. This session will show how to create content that sparks interest from younger generations while reinforcing trust with long-time customers. Learn how to blend short-form video, storytelling, education, and community-focused posts into a strategy that works for every age group. Expect real examples, creative prompts, and simple frameworks that help your bank stay relevant across generations.

Noon   Lunch

1:00pm Breakout Session

• HR Breakout: Iced Coffee + Connections Round Table
  • Join your peers for a round table networking session designed to spark fresh ideas and meaningful conversations. Attendees will rotate through small-group discussions focused on practical HR practices, employee engagement strategies, talent development, and shared workforce challenges in today’s banking landscape. This interactive session is the perfect opportunity to exchange insights, build new relationships, and gather inspiration from peers—all while enjoying an iced coffee!

• Marketing Breakout: Community Involvement Panel
  • Discover how Iowa banks are strengthening their communities—and their brands—through meaningful engagement. Together, the panelists will share real-world examples of how intentional community involvement can elevate your bank’s visibility, deepen customer relationships, and open doors to future business opportunities. Attendees will gain practical insights and inspiration for leveraging local partnerships to enhance marketing impact and drive long-term community success.

2:00pm  Break with Exhibitors

2:20pm Breakout Session

• HR Breakout: Trust, Verify, and Document: HR’s Legal Obligations when Hiring Goes Wrong
  Matt Mauntel-Medici, Attorney, BrownWinick Law Firm
  Danielle Smid, Member, BrownWinick Law Firm
  
  • What happens when a senior hire looks perfect on paper, but critical vetting steps are missed? Recent events in Iowa underscore how failures in background checks, credential verification, and immigration compliance can quickly escalate into legal and reputational crisis.
    In this interactive, two-hour session, Employment Law Partner, Dani Smid, and Immigration Law Partner, Matt Mauntel-Medici, examine HR’s legal responsibilities when working with executive search firms and overseeing high-stakes hires. The first hour will unpack the legal landscape, including employment law duties, oversight of third-party recruiters, and key immigration considerations that are often overlooked. The second hour will focus on lessons learned, anticipated changes in employer expectations, and practical best practices HR professionals can adopt to protect their organizations.
    Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of where liability can arise, and a concrete framework for building stronger, more defensible hiring and onboarding processes going forward.
• Marketing Breakout: Iced Coffee + Connections Round Table
  
  • Join your peers for a round table networking session designed to spark fresh ideas and meaningful conversations. Attendees will rotate through small-group discussions focused on practical marketing tactics, creative strategies, and shared challenges in today’s banking landscape. This interactive session is the perfect opportunity to exchange insights, build new relationships, and gather inspiration from peers—all while enjoying an iced coffee!

3:20pm Break with Exhibitors

3:40pm Breakout Session

• HR Breakout: Trust, Verify, and Document: HR’s Legal Obligations when Hiring Goes Wrong Con’t
  Matt Mauntel-Medici, Attorney, BrownWinick Law Firm
  Danielle Smid, Member, BrownWinick Law Firm
• Marketing Breakout: The Massive Impact of Customer Reviews & How to Get to 5 Stars
  Jordyn Swanson & Jess Doerr, Social Assurance
  
  • Customer reviews are incredibly powerful. Consistent, positive reviews can increase online visibility, surfacing your branch locations to the top of user search results on search engines like Google and AI tools like ChatGPT. What’s more, a large quantity of 5-star ratings signals credibility, making customers more likely to reach out and to refer your bank to family, friends, and colleagues. Negative reviews and low star ratings, on the other hand, can have an outsized negative impact on your visibility and credibility. In fact, a single low star rating at the branch level can overshadow strong in-branch service and negatively impact how a bank is discovered and perceived online. In this session, we’ll do a deep dive on customer reviews–the good, the bad, and the ugly. We’ll talk about how poor or outdated reviews suppress local search performance, erode trust before a customer ever walks through the door, and directly impact account, deposit, and loan growth. Attendees will learn why reviews matter more than most banks realize, how to identify and fix review gaps at the branch level, and practical, compliant ways to generate more 5-star reviews that accurately represent the customer experience.

4:40pm Reception

6:00pm Adjourn

Thursday, April 9

8:00am Breakfast

9:00am Breakout Session

• HR Breakout: Strategic Succession Planning: Building Leadership Continuity in Community Banks
  Tom Weishan, Senior Consultant – Organizational Performance, Wipfli LLP
  • This session provides community bank leaders with practical strategies to design and implement a robust succession planning process that ensures organizational stability and compliance. Participants will explore the critical components of succession planning, from identifying key roles and assessing talent to developing a structured strategy aligned with long-term goals. Through interactive discussion and real-world examples, attendees will learn how to engage stakeholders, maintain transparency, and keep succession plans dynamic in response to changing business needs.
    • Learning Objectives:
      • A clear understanding of why succession planning is vital for community banks
      • Practical tools and frameworks to begin or enhance a succession plan
      • Insights into aligning succession efforts with organizational strategy
      • Increased confidence in identifying and developing future leaders
      • Actionable next steps to take back to their institutions
• Marketing Breakout: Staying Ahead in an Evolving Fraud Landscape
  Patrick Smith, SVP, Fraud Operations, American Bankers Association
  • As fraud schemes grow more sophisticated, banks face an ever-changing mix of persistent threats and emerging risks. This session provides a comprehensive look at today’s most pressing fraud challenges – from traditional scams fueled by social engineering to the rise of AI-driven schemes and the resurgence of check fraud. Attendees will gain practical insights into evolving prevention strategies, innovative industry tools, and best practices to strengthen defenses. Together, these topics offer a comprehensive view of the tactics reshaping the modern fraud environment and the tools needed to combat them.
    
    

10:15am Break

10:30am Closing Keynote Speaker

• The Updside
  Jack Stahlmann
  
  • The post-covidian era has created unique problems like staffing shortages, burnout and the increasing creep of a workplace staple: negativity. Inspired by a certification from Yale on the Psychology of Well-Being, this session will show you how to navigate negativity in the workplace as Jack examines how challenging times can bring big things to anyone, if you look in the right place. But as the GI Joe Fallacy (yes, that GI Joe) demonstrates, simply seeing the silver lining is not enough. It’s the doers who find the upside. Because in a world with so much downside, you can always find a way to.. up yours.

11:45am Adjourn