Q&A: Bank exec Jenny Lurkins brings math aptitude, social attitude into leadership role

As a child, Jenny Lurkins was a social butterfly who was good at math. That combination led her to a banking career, which has taken her to St. Louis, Dallas and Indianapolis in various commercial and retail banking roles at both Bank of America and Regions Bank.

She’s been with Regions since 2011: first in Dallas and, since 2015, in Indianapolis. This spring, she was named greater Indianapolis market executive and commercial banking leader — a role in which she oversees the Birmingham, Alabama-based bank’s entire Indiana footprint.

Lurkins sat down with IBJ this week to talk about her career, what she’s learned from living in different parts of the country and how parenthood has changed her perspective.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You said you knew as a child that you wanted to be a banker. Why?

I was drawn to math. I love solving problems. I was the kid who was constantly running around the house trying to find coins to roll because I liked the organization of it. … I liked how what I knew of a bank at that point was, I saw these very personable people [working at the bank]. They would talk to you about your deposit. You’d get a sucker. I mean, it was all lovely in my opinion. …

In high school, I was very social. I was drawn to the student councils and the choirs and all of those types of activities. But I also had a very strong math [aptitude]. … [In college], I went the finance path, and I think a lot of people in my finance degree were really focused on more of the stocks side of things.

The class I remember absolutely loving is, we had a corporate finance class where everyone picked a company, and you evaluated that company based on their financial statements. … For me, it was the way that I could translate what a company does. I can remember evaluating — it was Gateway Computers. … I can remember evaluating their products, how they went to market. It was the story behind the numbers that really drove me.

After you graduated from college and got your first job at Bank of America, did the reality of banking match what you had envisioned?

They had a credit training program. … We would go get financial statements off the fax machine. You would look at the financial statements. You would plug them into the proprietary software to make everything look uniform. You would test their covenants. You would write up a summary. And it was boring. It bored me to tears.

I did meet lifelong friends in that role. We had a wonderful time getting to know each other, but probably 18 months after I started that role, they decentralized that credit team. So they got rid of that centralized group. They moved everything back into the markets, and I got a pink slip — 18 months into my first career [job] with a rental payment and a car payment and a strong desire to not move back home.

Fortunately, I think probably because I was pretty social, there were several people within the organization that were looking out for me, gave me the opportunity to move into a customer support role. So I moved into the commercial relationship support team.

All of a sudden, all of the numbers that I had been looking at started to make sense because, in that role, you’re working directly with customers on what’s happening in their business day to day. So if they have an overdraft, you’re the one hearing, “Why did the overdraft occur? What can we do about it?” And so you really get that relationship feel of, “I can help you solve issues with your company because you’re telling me the story behind what happened.”

It was a light-bulb moment of, “Oh, I do like this.” And it came back to: … How do we really understand what’s going on behind the business?

That then allowed me to move into another underwriting role. I had someone [at Bank of America] who had moved from that commercial world to lead consumer branches and said, “Hey, you would be a great branch manager.” I was 23 years old. I had no idea what I was doing, and they put me in a branch manager training program. And I was like, “Let’s go!”

That was eye-opening. I don’t think a lot of people get the opportunity to work in the retail world and see what that looks like on a daily basis. Those branch managers are, I think, the hardest-working people in the bank. … I did that role for a couple of years and said, “OK, I think I’m better designed for commercial [banking].” … I moved back into commercial. …

I was given the opportunity to move to Dallas or Chicago. And being a kid who grew up in Illinois and had lived in St. Louis, I was like, “Dallas sounds fun. Let’s go.” … I was with Bank of America in Dallas from 2005 to 2011 as a relationship manager. Navigated through the great financial crisis [of 2008-2009]. That was a huge learning moment. I think you really see the value of what a bank can offer from an advisory standpoint when you go through an economic crisis like that. …

Then I had someone that I knew at Bank of America who had left Bank of America to [join Regions Bank and develop its government and nonprofit business unit]. … After he left, about a year later, I came to follow him, and we were all over Texas trying to grow that business. It was a phenomenal experience. …

You’ve lived in four states. What have you gained from this experience?

When you start to really get to know people, it’s all the same. When … you start to ask about what’s important, it’s their family, it’s their faith, it’s their community. And so I think what you learn in going to all those different places [is] that at the end of the day, we’re a lot more alike than we are different. … I think there’s a degree of adaptability and a degree of tolerance that I probably have that maybe, if I had only been in one location, I wouldn’t have.

In my experience, going through relocations can boost your confidence. You move to an unfamiliar place, and you feel like, “Well, I can figure it out.”

Yeah. I can remember when I was moving to Indianapolis. There was someone in Dallas who said, “Oh, why would you do that?” I was very civically active in Dallas. I was a part of Leadership Dallas. I was very engaged, and I can remember them saying, “Well, why are you going to give up all those ties? And you’re just going to have to start over.” And I said, “Well, that doesn’t scare me.” …

When I moved from Dallas to Indianapolis was when I went back to get my MBA at Butler. Because I was missing that civically engaged component, and I thought I’d always wanted to go back and get my MBA. [I realized] this solves two problems: I can get my MBA, but I can also get to know the market, the community.

What have you learned from being a banker that is helpful to you in other parts of life?

Can I flip the question? One of the things that I think has been most helpful to me in my work life is understanding that there are some things that are uncontrollable in my home life.

Explain what you mean.

I can vividly remember having my first daughter. I am a very, very scheduled, regimented person, and I read all the [parenting] books. And I knew that there was a designated nap time, and there was a feeding time, and all of those things needed to happen. I can remember within a couple of weeks [being] about to pull my hair out because she wasn’t following all of the order of the book.

She didn’t read the book.

Right! She didn’t read the book. She was not interested in when I thought there was nap time, and I think that was eye-opening to say: No one wants to be controlled. This may be how you want to live your life, but it is not how everyone else wants to be around you.

And so, I think that taught me a lot about how I think about controlling things and being a little bit more open to other people’s opinions. And I also think that coming back to work after that, while I had these visions of, “I would be the perfect mom,” and, “I would be the perfect employee,” the reality of that is not possible. … This week, you might have a little bit more capacity to be Super Mom. And the next week you’re probably going to need to buckle down, and you’re going to have work things that are going to take priority.

I think getting away from being quite so rigid and being a little bit more flexible [on] the standards I hold myself to as well as others has been really helpful.

[As to the original question], what did I learn from working as a banker? … Everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time. …

I’m very drawn to the small-business and middle-market space, because I absolutely love hearing the origin stories of these businesses. And if you get a business owner talking, there’s so much pride in how they got to that point. And at the end of the day, we’re just two people talking about their business. And I think that you learn that a lot in banking. … I think there’s a part of being a banker that puts you more at ease with yourself.•

—Susan Orr