May Day arrives fresh and radiant in Noe Valley, and smiling couples who’ve swum upstream from the Mission to spawn are out enjoying the sun with their toddlers and their chocolate Labs. On my way to fetch the Times and deposit some checks at my Chase branch, I pass a hedge of green helium balloons tethered to the parking meters outside the just opened Circle Bank. A jeans-and-sneakers-clad attorney named Ben Holl is telling three-year-old Grace that this is where Daddy is thinking of opening a new account.

Holl has been a big-bank customer ever since he was a nine-year-old in Berkeley salting away his allowance. Three decades later, he’s fed up with the “unhelpful” customer service and the “disproportional” fees. “I’m sick of getting nickled and dimed,” he tells me, as Grace yanks impatiently at his arm. “When you’ve been with a place for over 30 years, you expect loyalty in response.”

But that’s nothing compared to the frustration he feels over too-big-to-fail institutions, financial WMDs, obscene bonuses, and taxpayer-subsidized bailouts. Holl doesn’t only want to pay less for a checking account; he wants to take the big banks down a peg by “decentralizing” their power. Circle’s arrival has given him the opportunity he’s been waiting for. “It’s akin to shopping locally but in a banking context. If enough people moved their money,” he adds, reeling his daughter up from the sidewalk, “it would, in aggregate, make a difference.”

A bank that makes a difference, right here on 24th Street? That’s certainly what the very smart people behind Circle Bank want you to think. Kim Kaselionis, Circle’s president, and her mother, Kit Cole, chairwoman of its parent corporation and the bank’s long-term strategist, are pioneers in the Bay Area banking business, with an impressive history of seizing the moment. The moment they’re seizing now involves a whole movement, led by the populist progressives at the Huffington Post and New Deal 2.0, who argue that to take back the financial system, consumers must ditch the megabanks in favor of smaller, more responsible, homegrown institutions. Back in April, at around the same time that Bank of America ($45 billion in TARP funds) was announcing booming profits and Goldman Sachs was denying SEC charges that it had suckered its investors into buying  collateralized debt obligations it knew were worthless, Kaselionis and her crew ran a full-page ad in the Noe Valley Voice, echoing the community-banking activists’ call to action: “Ready to Move Your Money?” “I don’t know a bank in San Francisco that’s as aligned with that movement as Circle Bank,” Cole says.

Step inside the branch, next to another recent arrival, Whole Foods, and it’s clear: The Circle folks have their new community nailed. There’s stroller parking, a Kids Corner with Legos and coloring books, and doggy biscuits for the furry members of the family. The coffee is freshly brewed, and the chocolate-chip cookies are baked onsite with dough whipped up by homeless job trainees at a Marin nonprofit that Circle has sponsored. See the conference room in the back? Local groups can reserve a time to meet there. But what appeals to me most are the Circle employees, who pull me aside to explain the offerings—free checking, no-fee ATMs at thousands of locations nationwide, paperless “green” accounts, branch hours on Saturday and Sunday. Even granted that the whole point of a grand opening is to impress, I’m struck by their friendliness, as if Noe Valley were a small town in Frank Capra’s America and not a bastion of $30-a-pound cheese and $2 million mortgages. “At big banks, you call a 1-800 number and you get a message system,” one employee says, grabbing his desk phone. “When you call here, you’re calling me.”

On my way out, I pass Carlos Rivera, the branch manager, explaining CD rates to another potential customer, who asks if he can have some coffee. “It’s from Bernie’s,” Rivera responds, plugging a café down the street. (When he first emigrated from Nicaragua, he lived in an apartment above the café with his sister, so the place is special to him.) Rivera left Citibank to take the Circle job and has been busy doing outreach, including sponsoring an Easter-egg hunt at nearby Douglass Playground. “I’ve done more community work in 60 days here than in two years at Citi,” he says.

Half a block away, my Chase branch seems even more impersonal than usual. No one greets me with a cookie and a smile. I think about how the bank took $25 bil­lion in bailout money but recently penalized me $35 on my credit-card bill, despite the fact that Chase’s website had assured me that my payment was on time, and I feel like a fool.

Yet I feel paralyzed, too. For all their homespun appeal, even community-minded banks are, let’s face it, businesses. The people who establish and run them are sometimes just as reckless and as unrepentant as the big-bank dealmakers whose misdeeds have made headlines for three years. At the end of the day, every banker’s objective is to make money, and when the oppor­tunity arises to gamble, they frequently do.

You have only to look at Circle Bank’s own little-known backstory to see how complicated all this can get. Yes, I’m convinced I should move my money. I’m just not sure where. 

Any resemblance between It's a Wonderful Life and the community-banking movement is strictly intentional. In Capra’s classic film about Depression-era anxiety over Wall Street greed and Main Street bank runs, the town of Bedford Falls, New York, is saved from every sort of dissolution by the Bailey Building and Loan Association, whose aw-shucks hero, George Bailey, sacrifices his personal ambitions and bottom line to extend credit to people he sees as his friends and neighbors, rather than as mere customers (or, even worse, as “profit centers”). Move Your Money’s most compelling piece of propaganda mashes up scenes of panicked, desperate townspeople and the villainous Mr. Potter from the movie with footage of the foreclosed homeowners of the Great Recession and unctuous bank CEOs being scolded by Congress. It’s a message that resonates far beyond YouTube; according to a recent Zogby poll, a third of Americans are seriously considering switching banks, and almost 10 percent have already followed through. (Analysts working with Move Your Money suggest that the shift in deposits has been much smaller.)

No doubt many of those people think they’re get­ting a Bedford Falls kind of institution, only with ATMs and a website: a neighborhood bank, savings and loan, or credit union that takes most of its deposits from, and makes most of its loans to, local residents and businesses. Kaselionis, who’s been at Circle’s helm since the mid-1990s, when it was called New West Thrift & Loan, has embraced this vision. With her dark, striking looks and self-assured air, she reminds me more of Nancy Pelosi than Jimmy Stewart; I’ve barely sat down for our interview when she begins peppering me with questions about my own values and whether I’d consider moving my money. I imagine this must be what it feels like to be a Democrat in Congress wavering on health reform or cap-and-trade. “Community banks are relationship oriented,” she says. “We live in the communities, we shop, we dine, we go to church, we are on the same nonprofit boards. It’s the whole circle of interdependence, of helping and supporting each other.” This isn’t just talk: Circle has been deeply involved in civic and philanthropic projects around Marin.

That said, “It doesn’t work just like It’s a Wonderful Life,” Kaselionis admits.

First of all, a “community bank” is a very squishy concept. As far as the Federal Reserve is concerned, it’s simply an institution with less than $1 billion in assets, no matter where it’s located or to whom it lends. But plenty of banking giants would argue that they, too, are community banks, including hometown Wells Fargo, number four in the United States, with $1.2 trillion in assets. A spokesperson there points out that Wells has more branches, lends more to small businesses, and donates more to local nonprofits than any other Bay Area financial institution, and he has a point.

Meanwhile, with five branches and $280 million in assets, Circle falls well within the Fed’s “community bank” definition—but that could change. Kaselionis, who thinks $3 billion is a fairer threshold, ultimately hopes to have enough branches to ring the entire Bay Area. “And then Circle would really come full circle!” she says giddily. (“So, Kim talked to you about her plans for world domination?” one insider half-jokes to me later.)

Another reality check: Institutions can’t afford to limit themselves to their immediate communities. Banking is a simple game: They take in deposits (and fees), make loans, and profit by charging borrowers much higher interest rates than they pay depositors. If a community bank is growing its funds and betting its holdings on high-interest, higher-risk loans, it can make a lot of money very quickly. For much of Circle’s history, for example, Kaselionis employed a common growth strat­egy known as “wholesale lending”—using middlemen brokers to aggressively seek borrowers from all over the Bay Area with zero day-to-day relationship with the bank. “You’ve got to reach a critical mass in order to generate sufficient revenues, because brick-and-mortar branches and people are expensive,” she explains.

Some of the biggest myths surround loan practices. In general, community banks’ two largest lending niches are commercial real estate and small businesses. (Although small banks control only a tenth of the total assets held by banks, they issue a third of all small-business loans, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. reports.) But not every bank hews to these norms. Different institutions favor an entirely different mix of loans, some much more speculative than others, some much more far-flung.

According to Foresight Analytics, Circle’s portfolio is on the radical side—almost 100 percent real estate, which puts it in a definite minority, since fewer than 10 percent of U.S. banks have portfolios that are more than 95 percent real estate. Even Circle’s small-business lending devotes most of its dollars to real estate. And some of its lending ideas during the bubble seemed guilty of irrational exuberance—for instance, the funding of “highly leveraged purchase loans for properties with negative cash flow,” as one of its wholesale brokers claimed, or giving some borrowers a two-year window during which they could make any size mortgage payment that they chose. These practices suggest a port­folio that remains highly vulnerable to the ongoing nightmare in commercial real estate—$1.4 trillion in loans nationwide, with nearly half underwater, will come due in the next four years. When I ask Kaselionis how she expects Circle to hold up, she admits she’s concerned, but “not to the point that it will prevent us from contin­uing to lend.”

So far, Circle has suffered few loan losses and has extended its profitability streak to 43 straight quarters. The bank avoided the boom-era binge of construction lending and the temptation to seek borrowers outside the Bay Area, and its overall portfolio rates an A+ from banking analysts who work with Move Your Money. Kaselionis says that Circle has managed its risk by knowing its customers better than other banks, by being careful about who gets its loans, and by making sure that the types of real-estate loans it offers are diversified.

“They’ve done an excellent job underwriting,” confirms Bumper Wagoner, president of Bay Commercial Advisors, who’s worked on problem loans at one of Circle’s rivals. “I don’t see their name come up on the distressed-asset side.”

Many other community banks can't say the same. Of the 249 banks that have failed nationwide in the past four years—including four in the Bay Area and 29 in California—three-quarters qualified as “community” under the Fed’s definition, and they got into trouble for many of the same reasons as the behemoths: chancy mortgages on crazily overvalued homes and speculative real-estate ventures, often nowhere near their commu­nities, that tanked. As William K. Black, a federal bank regulator in San Francisco during the 1980s and 1990s S&L crisis who is now an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, tells me, “You can be called a community banker and do wildly insane things.”

Case in point: Sausalito’s Casa Madrona Hotel and Spa, whose bankruptcy briefly cast a cloud over my wedding-rehearsal dinner last fall (after some panicked phone calls, we felt reassured, and the dinner went ahead as planned). Georgia-based Integrity Bank, a “community thrift” with the motto “In God We Trust,” had lent $30 million to a Miami developer with a misconceived plan to convert the Bay Area landmark to condos. When the thrift failed—one of three banks with “Integrity” in its name to go under in the past two years—banking regulators spent at least $250 million cleaning up the mess.

Stories like this remind Black of the bad old days of the S&L crisis, which he chronicled in his 2005 classic, The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. So does the lack of regulation of today’s community banks. Massive staff cuts during the Greenspan era and “streamlining” of the examination process weakened bank oversight to mid-1980s levels and caused regulators to “[lose] track of what was happening in the entire industry”—small banks as well as big ones, Black says. Oversight is still not what it should be, concedes Move Your Money cofounder Rob Johnson, director of the Project on Global Finance at the Roosevelt Institute, adding: “Just because you’re not a big bank doesn’t make you healthy or moral or a safe destination.”

Nor are smaller banks any more transparent to customers than the big boys. Current banking data doesn’t reveal the hidden risks in a bank’s numbers or how much of its real-estate lending is to shopping-mall dev­elopers in Manteca. Example: Tamalpais Bank of Marin went from an A+ from Move Your Money’s rating company at the start of 2009 to an F a mere six months later. Regulators shut it down this past April, on the same day they also closed one of California’s major small-business lenders, Oakland’s Innovative Bank. That institution had received two cease-and-desist orders for reckless lending and accounting improprieties: $11.6 mil­lion in transactions were improperly recorded. (When a bank goes under, businesses and borrowers can find their lines of credit frozen or their refinancing options cut off; depositors, on the other hand, are usually protected by FDIC insurance and experience little disruption.)

With banks effectively black boxes, therefore, con­sumers have to go with what they know about the trustworthiness and community-mindedness of the people in charge. “Management and board government are the big keys,” says Stan Ivie, who oversees the FDIC’s western region, which includes banks in 11 states, plus Guam. “I think that’s the most over­ridingly important thing.” I press him: How important are the top exec­utives and board of directors to a bank’s behavior? “Crit­ical,” he tells me.

Kim Kaselionis tells a story about how she came to be a bank president. She grew up hoping to be a flight attendant but majored in accounting at her mother’s urging—“She wanted all of her children to be financially independent and suggested, ‘This would be a very good skill for you to have.’” By the mid-1990s, the end of the anything-goes S&L era, Kaselionis went from working as the controller for her mother’s investment firm to serving on the board of New West, one of several banks Kit Cole had raised money for and/or helped found.

New West was sinking under the weight of several busted real-estate deals, the largest of which was arranged and guaranteed by Cole herself. The thrift sued Cole and Kaselionis, a brutal struggle for control of the bank ensued, and Kaselionis prevailed. When she approached regulators about becoming president, “[they] looked at me and said, ‘How do we know that your mother’s not going to control you?’” she recalls. “It was incredibly patronizing. I was young, female, and how could I possibly have the skill set necessary to bring an insolvent company out of the ashes? Fourteen years later, I think I’ve demonstrated that I have that skill set.”

Kaselionis’s success rests on several important traits, including toughness, loyalty (in the middle of our interview, she launches into an impromptu commercial for Rocco’s Cafe on Fillmore Street in San Francisco—“I was just there over the weekend with my family. A shout-out there for Rocco’s restaurant. He’s a full-relationship customer”), and a very clear sense of her bank’s brand. She locates her branches in downtowns on Main Street or its equivalent; inside, even the desks are round. “Sharp corners just remind me of a square,” Kaselionis says. “[The soft edges] reflect ‘thinking outside the box.’”

So does one of Circle’s most successful loan products, the “fractionalized” tenants-in-common (TIC) loan, which the bank pioneered in 2005 and which now accounts for 30 percent of its portfolio. In traditional TIC arrangements, all buyers of a multifamily property must be on the same mortgage; fractionalized TIC loans allow them to take out separate mortgages and remain financially independent, which effectively turns units into quasi-condominiums, increasing their value. The loans have been criticized by tenants’-rights groups for facilitating speculators (such as the Realtor who purchased a five-unit Mission building with a Circle loan, legally kicked out all the renters, including an 82-year-old woman, then renovated the apartments with a plan to sell them as fractionalized TICs for a reported 41 percent profit) and for getting around San Francisco’s tough condo conversion laws. But Kaselionis sees only the upside. Despite the loans’ seeming riskiness, only a handful have defaulted, while the TICs themselves “have really held their value” in a terrible housing market, she says. “Isn’t it wonderful that we can create affordable workforce housing for the community of San Francisco?”

Kaselionis’s business and marketing savvy bear a striking resemblance to those of her mother, a topic she resists discussing unless pushed. One of Marin’s best-known bankers and community leaders, Cole was Circle’s chairwoman for a time while running her own rival Tamalpais Bank. In 2008, Cole rejoined Circle’s parent company as chairwoman. But Kaselionis is adamant: Circle is her baby. “I’m her oldest child, so we have been in sisterhood for a long time,” Kaselionis says. “But we were competitors! Even to this day, it’s still the same compet­itive environment.”

I suspect that Kaselionis’s reluctance to talk about Cole is at least partly rooted in the older woman’s his­tory. As an exuberant risk taker with other people’s money, she epitomizes the duality of community banking as civically engaged yet keenly attuned to the profit potential around every corner. When I first meet her at a party at the Noe Valley branch, she is dressed in yellow and surrounded by male clients and employees, buzzing around like a queen bee, grabbing arms and chatting up associates with quick-witted flourishes. Introducing me to one lending executive, she quips, “His job is to say yes.” Talking to Cole, I recall how Al Parodi, New West’s former CFO, describes her: “She’s someone who could sell ice to an Eskimo.”

What makes Cole's story so appealing and so awkward is the way in which it spectacularly combines ’70s feminism, ’80s S&L tomfoolery, and 21st-century comeuppance. A Bay Area native, she married at 19, had five kids in quick succession, then found herself a divorced single mom with a teacher’s credential that couldn’t pay the bills. At a time when a woman needed a male relative’s permission to open a brokerage account, she landed a job as one of Dean Witter’s first female stockbrokers in 1970, soon marrying a fellow broker with five children of his own (they later divorced). Within a few years, she was turning her unique experience into a business advantage by helping the Feminine Mystique generation take control of its financial destiny. “Women advising women” became her trademark as she cofounded or invested in a series of S&Ls, as well as her own investment-advisory firm. One of her missions was to make banking less intimidating, more family friendly. “Whatever she did, there was a line of 10 little ducklings attached to her skirt,” Kaselionis says. “So it was like, ‘Can we create something that would help entertain the children while we’re trying to do our business?’”

Cole’s big banking success was the S&L she started in 1991 and ran for most of the next 16 years. Rebranded Tamalpais Bank in 1998, it originated many of the features that define Circle as customer focused—the Kids Corner, the complimentary treats, the televised financial tickers. (An example of Cole’s marketing genius: She turned the Native American legend of the maiden whose death created Mount Tamalpais into Princess Tamal, the bank’s feminist mascot.) By 2005, Tam Bank had grown to more than $400 million in assets, up from $300 million the previous year, and was traded on NASDAQ (going public netted Cole’s family trust $3.7 million). Cole envisioned that by 2010, the bank would expand to San Francisco and pass the $1 billion mark.

Many of Cole’s other businesses, including her investment-advisory company, were tied up with her banking life. Some of the S&L era’s biggest money flowed from real-estate transactions, and Cole was an eager investor for herself and her clients and sometimes used her bank connections to secure deals. She ran Marin Advisors, a real-estate company with projects throughout California, at least one of which got loans from New West. In 2000, she started the Kit Cole Strategic Growth Fund, a mutual fund heavily into high-tech companies (the all-female board included Debby Magowan, wife of former Giants president Peter Magowan). For a while, several of these ventures were housed in the faux-rustic Cole Building, in downtown San Rafael, named for Kit and owned by a Marin Advisors–managed partnership. The building also housed Tam Bank’s headquarters. Cole’s investment advisers had desks in the bank, and the bank and her investment company would refer clients to each other for fees.

Some of Cole’s investments scored big, others ran into legal and financial trouble. But her problems really began piling up around 2004, after the dot-com bust. A number of her clients sued, alleging fraud and breach of fiduciary duty. They claimed that Cole had promised to tailor their portfolios to their individual circumstances, only to put much of their money into volatile Internet and biotech stocks, even though, lawyers said, many of the plaintiffs were nearing retirement and should have been invested much more conservatively. Among those who lost as much as 80 percent of their savings was a longtime friend for whom Cole had served as matron of honor. The friend eventually won more than $1.2 million in arbitration, one of several awards against Cole. After Cole closed her investment-advisory firm in 2005, she was sued again, for allegedly transferring its clients to a newly created Tam Bank wealth-advisory branch and pocketing the transfer fees personally. That suit is still being fought in Marin Superior Court. One of its plaintiffs, Lavonne T. Santa, won a separate $243,000-plus arbitration award against Cole. Still, Cole remains friendly with Santa’s son, Don, owner of Kentfield’s Woodland Market and a former Tam Bank director and customer who appeared in one of the bank’s commercials. Cole “is one of the brightest businesswomen I’ve ever known,” he says. “She gets things done.”

Cole stepped down as Tam Bank’s head at the end of 2004, but she retained an active role on the board of its parent company. She finally left for good in 2007, the same year her health problems led to a successful kidney transplant. Soon enough, the bank was in trouble for gambling heavily on commercial real estate. Some risky lending programs—in the Central Valley, for example—started toward the end of Cole’s tenure as a director. But the most problematic loans were made after her departure, including $41 million to San Francisco’s highly leveraged and controversial Lembi family, even as their CitiApartments empire was about to implode. The Lembis defaulted, and this past April, the bank was seized by regulators, and its deposits and most of its assets were transferred to Japanese-owned Union Bank, headquartered in San Francisco. The collapse cost the FDIC an estimated $81 million.

Cole refuses to talk about her business troubles or Tam Bank’s collapse, saying through Circle’s spokesman, Gary Tobin, that she doesn’t want to get into a “he says, she says thing” and prefers “the past to remain the past.” (Tobin adds that she’s no longer working as an investment adviser.) Kaselionis also declines to speak about her mother’s troubles (“She’s a very pioneering, entrepreneurial, and smart businessperson—I’ll leave it at that”) or Cole’s role at Tam Bank (“It is very sad for any community to lose a community bank, notwithstanding they’re my competition”). Cole’s family and friends who were shareholders have also suffered, Kaselionis notes: “It is unfortunate for all of those involved. I had hoped for a different outcome for the family, let’s say that.”

The question is, how much has Kaselionis learned from her and her mother’s past? In the course of our conversations, the impression I get is: a great deal. “My first official act [at New West] was to sign a cease-and-desist order. So I have been there, done that, thank you very much—don’t need to experience that again.” Kaselionis says she approached the task of rebuilding the institution as a small-business person with serious problems to solve, not as a typical banker looking for the next big payoff. She says that Circle has no intention of going into the investment-advisory or wealth-management fields. “Banks get in trouble by growing too fast and getting out of their core compe­tencies,” she adds. Even as Tam Bank began lending more widely, Circle remained “a pretty vanilla bank,” Kaselionis insists.

However, not only has Cole landed on her feet, joining Circle, but Kaselionis has also recruited two of Tamalpais’s key executives, Circle’s new chief financial officer, Michael Moulton, and its senior vice president of business lending, Michael Rice. While mourning Tam Bank’s passing (“I’m heartbroken. It was a great franchise”), Cole exhibits nothing but enthusiasm about Circle and its prospects. In fact, she claims that she hasn’t seen such wonderful opportunity since nearly 20 years ago, when she founded Tam Bank in the midst of the S&L crisis. “It was like it is now,” Cole says. “It’s a great time to be in banking.”

Maybe it's a great time for bankers, but for the public, not so much. After years of inattention by regulators, politicians, and, yes, regular people, led to an unprecedented global meltdown, banks continue to fight regulation and reform as if nothing ever happened (in Circle’s June newsletter, Kaselionis made it clear that she’s among those who thinks President Obama’s banking bill goes too far). Meanwhile, many banks are latching onto the Move Your Money concept as if it were just a cool new marketing trend. Keith Leggett, senior economist at the American Bankers Association, says the movement “is part of a knee-jerk reaction. They’re engaged in populist arguments. You don’t just say, ‘I’m going to move my money to a community bank.’ Almost every bank will talk about itself as community-focused. You’ve got to ask, is this community bank offering you the products and services that you value?”

My wife and I met in New York four years ago, when both of us were leading the rootless lives of big-city journalists. When we moved to San Francisco last summer and got married, we did so in part to be closer to our family and friends—to become part of a community. We’re currently negotiating the merger of our finances, which means settling on a bank. In the past, the notion that a bank teller or merchant would call us by name and ask how we were would have struck us as weird. Now that we’ve gotten to know Sam, the newsstand guy, and Abby, the garden supplier, we think it’s not bad. We think our kids, when we have them, will agree.

Does that mean we’ll choose the bank that offers doggy biscuits and stroller parking? We’re certainly not going to base our decision on such trifles: to switch from a big bank to a community lender for superficial reasons would be just as lazy and as irresponsible as reflexively keeping our money in a badly behaving global giant because it happens to have convenient ATMs. In the past six months, I’ve pored over call reports, spread sheets, and court documents. I’ve flipped through glossy brochures, clicked through websites, and talked to countless people. I’ve come away impressed by Circle’s renewed commitment to small-business lending. But I’m not running my own company. I don’t share Kaselionis’s enthusiasm for TICs. (Also, I’m allergic to dogs.) Even if Kit Cole isn’t Mr. Potter, she’s no George Bailey, either—and she’s Circle’s long-term strategist. Kaselionis strikes me as a sharp, committed banker, but Circle’s probably not the bank for me.

However, I am sold on moving my money. Com­mu­nity banks may not be paragons of virtue, but to my mind, they’re better than the alternative. Says Move Your Money’s Rob Johnson, “There are shades of immoral everywhere, but the ones who had trillion-dollar impact were the big guys. Aggregations of power are politically dangerous, and I think we’ve gone beyond the threshold of danger when it comes to our financial system.” MIT professor Simon Johnson (no relation to Rob), former chief economist of the International Mon­etary Fund and coauthor of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, agrees: “Anything that takes our resources away from the big banks that have caused so much trouble can only help.”

Yet if Move Your Money is to be more than an empty slogan, then consumers need better guidance—from the movement itself, or Congress, or someone—about where to take our business. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that banking should be like medicine: The practice itself may be beyond our grasp, but we care enough about our health to spend time selecting the right doctors and the right hospitals. The same should hold true of our money. But at this point, choosing a doctor seems much easier.

Fortunately, my wife and I have started to see that we have many more options than we’d realized. We used to pass by Sterling Bank & Trust, also on 24th Street, as if it were the façade on a studio back lot. Now we’ve discovered that it’s a community bank owned by San Franciscans, though its headquarters are in Michigan. We’ve also begun noticing a plethora of other small, local banks around town. Any day now, we’re going to stop in, say hello, and start asking questions.

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David V. Johnson is San Francisco’s research editor.

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