Fishback Financial partners with SDSU to create fellowship program

It seems like a pretty simple equation: Take one financial institution with a need for analyzing data, add statistics students studying for their master’s degrees who want to tackle real-world business problems and it equals the partnership between Fishback Financial Corporation and South Dakota State University.

That partnership is working so well that it resulted in the creation of the Fishback Financial Corporation Fellowship, funded through FFC’s annual $20,000 gift to the SDSU Foundation. The program at Fishback is similar to fellowships for students seeking doctorates in statistics that have been created by CAPITAL Card Services and Meta Payments in Sioux Falls.

The relationship between the Brookings business and the SDSU Mathematics and Statistics Department goes back a few years, according to department head Kurt Cogswell. About the time the company was setting up an analytics division, statistics students started working there as part of their senior projects and in internships.

“They were very impressed with the young people they were working with and the types of problems they could solve,” Cogswell said.

In the financial world, trying to build a statistical model about how customers react to specific products can be difficult because there isn’t a single type of customer. They all have unique financial needs based on their income levels and ages.

“It can get pretty complicated, pretty quickly,” according to Ryan Schiller, senior manager information services/analytics for Fishback Financial.

Tackling some of those complicated problems is the first recipient of the Fishback Fellowship, statistics master’s degree student Gabrielle Baldwin of Brandon. In her role as the Fishback Fellow, Baldwin is a member of the staff, working on a variety of projects as well as tackling bigger analytical challenges.

Gabrielle Baldwin, an SDSU student studying for her master’s degree in statistics, is the first recipient of a fellowship from Fishback Financial Corporation of Brookings.

“I work on inter- and intra-departmental projects to analyze product success and customer transactional behavior,” Baldwin said. “My favorite work is in customer transactional behavior projects where I look at trends like the growing popularity of debit cards.”

One of the analytical challenges faced by Fishback Financial will become the subject for Baldwin’s master’s thesis.

“The problems students work on are sufficiently sophisticated to be worthy of a master’s thesis,” Cogswell said. “That’s our ideal model for how these sorts of fellowships should work.”

And that model is working, according to Schiller, Baldwin’s supervisor. “Some of the things she’s done already have been presented to the board of directors,” Schiller said. “They’ve been impressed.”

For her part, the fellowship has helped open Baldwin’s eyes to a career in the financial industry.

“Under the fellowship, I’ve been involved in more complex, interesting projects that I enjoy working on,” Baldwin said. “The financial world is a dynamic place, so I think I’ll stick around for a while.”

Fishback Financial Corporation is one of the largest, privately held bank holding companies in South Dakota with assets of $1.6 billion. It is comprised of 15 First Bank & Trust locations along the I-29 corridor in eastern South Dakota and southwestern Minnesota plus one location called First Bank of White.