BACKGROUND ON Mark Jenkins President of the Bank of Billings As a fifth-generation banker, Mark Jenkins is proud to carry forward a long-held family tradition of caring for the community. Mark’s great-great-grandfather, Irving Jenkins, helped start the Citizens Bank of Sparta in 1919 as a primary investor. Mark’s great-grandfather, Harvey Jenkins, worked there as well, serving as the bank president and as a cashier. Mark’s grandfather, James I. Jenkins, started working at the bank in 1935. Mark’s father, James R. Jenkins, started working at the bank in 1970 after he got back from Vietnam. Mark was born in 1974 and was raised on a small farm in the close-knit community of Sparta. During the time he attended Sparta High School, he could often be seen mowing the lawn at the bank and doing odd jobs like shredding paper. Mark attended Southwest Baptist University, located only about an hour away from Sparta. During this time, Mark started working as a teller at the bank, then as a bookkeeper and then on to loan processing. Upon graduating with an accounting degree, he stepped into the role of a loan officer. “My path to banking was made easy for me. My parents never pressured me to go into banking. They simply told me if I wanted a job, the opportunity would be there,” Mark recalled. “At one point, I worked with my dad, my grandfather, my uncle, a great aunt and a couple of cousins. If you called the bank and asked for Mr. Jenkins, you could have gotten any one of many Mr. Jenkinses.” Mark has many fond memories of working with his father, but perhaps one of his favorites was from early on in his career. “My office was an old boardroom that had been partitioned off with glass windows that made a wall. My dad sat in the office next to me and our desks faced each other,” Mark recalled. “As I would be interviewing or talking to a customer, I could look over their shoulder and see my dad in the background giving me the thumbs up or thumbs down based on how I was doing.” The number one thing Mark’s father emphasized was integrity and honesty. “They are the pillars of what it means to be a banker; if you don’t have your integrity, you don’t have anything,” his father would say. When Mark’s grandfather passed away in 2002, the banks’ outside shareholders wanted to sell their shares. Efforts were made to form a holding company, but a few holdouts wouldn’t allow it to go through unless an agreement was signed guaranteeing that they would be paid two times book value. This forced the bank to be sold. “I ended up leaving the bank and went to work for Jack 10 | The Show-Me Banker Magazine
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