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KRISTINE WEISHALLASENIOR RELATIONSHIP BANKER Meet Kristine Weishalla, longtime senior relationship banker at the Saint Francis office of Village Bank. Community banking, Kristine says, is her calling. “I’m such a people person and I enjoy helping whenever I can.” Assisting customers these days means helping them achieve their financial goals through Certificates of Deposit, Money Market accounts or high-yield savings accounts. It also means protecting them, especially the most vulnerable, from increasingly aggressive and highly-sophisticated fraud. Kristine says that outcomes, better yield and safe transactions, are made easier through relationship banking. That means when a new customer comes to Village Bank, “I get to know them, ask what brought them to the area, and connect them to the services that fit their needs.” The community of Saint Francis represents the best of small-town living: “Everyone knows everyone else,” Kristine says. People often find their friends are already here when they come into the bank. It’s like coming into a coffee shop. Friends and neighbors alike sit and converse for the longest time. It’s great to see.” Kristine hails from Elk River, another great Minnesota small town. She learned the value of serving customers first in the retail industry and later as a flight attendant. Her nearly 18 years at Village Bank has shown Kristine the value of having her customers’ best interests at heart. Her enthusiasm for people simply bubbles to the surface. Kristine works hard to stay up-to-date on how fraudsters are using artificial intelligence to steal peoples’ identity and money. “I had a customer who thought her niece had called to get an emergency loan,” Kristine recounts. She advised that customer to call her niece to verify the request. “It turned out the call was a fake. The fraudsters had replicated the voice so it was impossible to recognize it as fraud.” With fraudsters growing more sophisticated, Kristine tells her customers to drop their personalized voicemail recording and use a generic recording instead. And, if someone calls asking you to send funds through Zelle or another P2P app, “even if you swear they sound like someone you know, hang up and call the business or person who’s phone number you have on file to verify.”
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