Bluff View Bank: A bank with a 142-year view

Lori Kaye Lodes

Contributor

January 20, 2025

GALESVILLE – For multiple generations, Scott Kopp – chairman of the board and investment officer – said Bluff View Bank has delivered financial products and services to Trempealeau County families and businesses.

Originally chartered in 1883, Kopp said Bluff View Bank – which has its home office at 16893 S. Main St. in Galesville – has endured through the Great Depression, several economic downturns, pandemics and other changes – remaining a steadfast presence in Trempealeau County.

“It’s really no different than the hardware store or feed store – you need a service, and if people are happy with the service, they keep coming back,” he said. “We’re fortunate to have such loyal customers.”

Not the first, but the longest standing

Though Bluff View Bank wasn’t the first bank to set up shop in town, Lindsay Spitzer, president and CEO said its manner of doing business has ensured it is the longest standing.

Today, it has locations in Galesville, Trempealeau and Holmen to serve customers throughout the area – however, until 2018, Spitzer said many people didn’t realize the connection between the three banks as they went by different names.

That changed, she said, when the banks adopted the unified name and brand of Bluff View Bank.

“We put it out to employees to come up with a new name, and Bluff View Bank came up multiple times,” she said. “We liked its descriptiveness and the flexibility it offers if we branch out a little further up and down the Mississippi River.”

Growth, Spitzer said, has been stable and ongoing for the bank.

When Isaac Clark and Walter C. Brooks opened the privately-owned Bank of Galesville, as it was originally called, she said its opening assets were $10,000.

By 1919, Spitzer said the bank became the county’s first million-dollar bank.

When she took over as president and CEO in 2022, Spitzer said assets were $126 million.

2024, she said, ended with bank assets of $145 million.

Spitzer said she and Kopp credit many factors for the bank’s cornerstone presence in the community, from a strong and vested board of directors, strategic planning and focus on the customer, to deep industry and institutional knowledge and a great team.

“Taking good care of our customers is our main goal, as well as providing solid business and personal advice,” Spitzer said. “We are not always the cheapest game in town, but we know our customers by name when they walk in the door, and that’s important to us. We’re not so large that we don’t know the community – we are in a sweet spot of being small enough to know most of our customers and (large enough to) deliver the banking services they need.”

Remaining an independent community bank, Kopp said, has been goal No. 1 at the bank, and supporting that with lived values of integrity, trust, relationships and knowledge has gone a long way in allowing for that.

“If you ask yourself, ‘Why do so many banks merge or become acquired?’” he said. “The answer is that the larger you are, the more efficient you can be. But at the same time, you have a larger number of shareholders to create growth and value for. Shareholder value is important but we’re driven to (serve our customers) and remain independent, because it’s an important part of our culture.”

Team focus first

Spitzer said she credits an “amazing team” and its longevity as a key element in the bank’s ongoing success.

It’s not unusual, she said, to have several family members working at the bank, and for employees to hit key milestones in their tenure.

Of the 26 staff members, 11 have been with the bank for more than 10 years and six have been with the bank for more than 20 years, Spitzer said.

Maintaining a strong culture among the locations, she said, is intentional, and the bank provides a mix of professional development and fun to team members.

Every month, Spitzer said the entire team has breakfast together before opening the branches for the day, highlighting a training topic and then playing games.

In addition, she said the bank offers paid lunchtime for team members to get together around tables to play board games and socialize.

“It’s really important to us to have fun together and socialize,” she said. 

Because the three locations are within seven to nine miles apart, Spitzer said it’s an easy drive for executive management to take turns visiting all the branches.

She said they rotate locations every month to walk through the Monthly Scorecard with the team, share growth, profitability and return on assets and address where things stand in relation to budget. 

“It’s been good for the staff to understand where we are financially; we don’t hide that,” she said. “They understand the profitability and their role in it.”

Employee growth is front and center, Spitzer said.

If a frontline employee is interested in learning bookkeeping or loan processing, she said the bank strives to offer opportunities for shadowing and learning.

In addition, Spitzer said there’s intentional cross-training as well – to allow people different perspectives and avoid siloed departments and thinking.

“It’s very valuable for employees to learn about other areas of the bank than where they work and to understand the overall picture and not just their part of it,” she said. “We wear a lot of hats as community bankers, and we stay humble. Nobody is above doing anything needed.”

Spitzer said her mindset is that a happy team means happy customers, and their vast and varied knowledge is irreplaceable. 

“We make succession planning really important,” she said. “We had a succession plan for many years during which (the previous CEO/president) was grooming me for this role. I had 10 years to learn from him. When we have retirements, we aim to have people work alongside people for six months to a year and then have them stay on part-time to continue that mentorship and support.”

Customers are the bottom line

Spitzer said the bank’s focus over the past 142 years has paid off for customers, whether they’re seeking personal banking, business banking or brokerage services.

Today, she said the bank’s lending customers are about one-third residential, one-third agricultural and one-third other business.

That diversification is an asset because the industries are so varied, Spitzer said. 

“If any one of the (industries) experiences issues, it’s not typical that it will impact all three,” she said.

Spitzer said the bank established its brokerage business slowly and incrementally starting in 1998, and it has almost doubled its size in the past four years.

“We attribute that to COVID-19 – people came into money with stimulus checks and weren’t spending like they were before, and they wanted to put it into something safe,” she said. 

The counterpart to the right products and services, Spitzer said, is adapting to the changing needs of the world.

Over the years, she said Bluff View Bank has added a full suite of digital services, including mobile banking with mobile deposit, bill pay, instant-issue debit cards and person-to-person payments.

The bank’s goal, Spitzer said, is to offer what it calls “big bank tech” with a community feel.

“It’s important for us to keep up, and we are a pretty quick adopter of technology as it makes sense for our customers,” she said.

Kopp said it’s crucial to keep tabs on customers’ needs and wants to ensure the bank remains relevant and is able to deliver what they need, as well as to comply with regulatory requirements.

He said the bank is catering not only to customers who are in their 80s, 90s or even 100 years old, but also to teenagers, and that requires intentional versatility.

“What someone at 100 years old requires for banking services is far different from teens, and we need to grow with our customer base,” he said. “Over the past 10 years or so, we have tried to master being all things to all people, so we can serve multiple generations at the same time. It requires ongoing assessment – do we keep phone banking alive for another year, for example? We do the research.”

When the pandemic hit, Kopp said the bank had no choice but to evolve, and that it did so beautifully.

“(We) had to adapt very quickly,” he said. “I never thought we’d live through such a huge pandemic and come out of it better than before, but we did. We saw a significant adoption of electronic transactions, and that was a positive thing to come out of it.”

A not-so-desirable shift over the past 18 months, Kopp said, is the rapid rise in rates.

But Spitzer said the bank’s employees do their due diligence with customers to ensure that just because someone qualifies for a particular loan doesn’t mean it’s the right move.

“We always look at someone’s ability to repay, and if they can’t – even with great collateral – we have placed a higher value on the customer’s financial future and (not extended the loan),” she said. “We don’t make decisions at the expense of the customer’s future – we’re talking about trust and doing what’s right for them.”

It’s a mindset that Kopp said has carried the bank through many ups and downs through the decades.

He said he recalls the agricultural crisis of the 1980s when many banks exited the agriculture market because so much had changed.

Bluff View Bank, however, Kopp said, stayed the course – though it was with changes to cash flow lending being more important than asset-based lending, for example.

“Our lenders have evolved and had to sharpen their tools,” he said.

Kopp said those same tactics were applied during the mortgage crisis as well.

He said Bluff View Bank is proud that they did not have a single foreclosure due to nonpayment during that.

“We make good quality mortgage loans, and we know our underwriting stands up, and we stayed true to our mission through that,” he said.

Successfully living through every potential financial environment, Spitzer said, has made the bank older and wiser.

“We have seen just about every economic event since we’ve been around so long, rates up, rates down,” she said. “And with the long tenure of employees, they’ve lived and learned from it, too.”

The next generation of leadership

Spitzer said she joined Bluff View Bank in 2012 and worked alongside Kopp as the bank’s chief operations officer until 2022 when she assumed the role of president and CEO.

And, like her predecessor, Spitzer said she sets a tone for community orientation and involvement, serving as treasurer for the Galesville Chamber of Commerce and participating in other nonprofit work in the community. 

“Most of us sit on one or more boards or (volunteer) with local organizations,” she said. Sponsorships and volunteer support for local festivals, such as Apple Affair and the Trempealeau Catfish Days Annual Festival, are ongoing commitments, and Spitzer said the bank has committed $25,000 toward a new Trempealeau park.

“We definitely punch above our weight when you think of the donations we provide for an organization our size,” she said. 

Kopp said as far as he is concerned, focusing on customers and community is business as usual and has been for his 40 years with the bank.

“Banking is a mature industry,” he said. “How do you decide which bank to do business with? We aren’t interested in being flashy or corny or phony. We are who we have always been: focused on the customer and making sure they feel valued. We’ll just keep the training going and chugging down the tracks.”