KleinBank

KleinBank is a Minnesota-based bank owned by Klein Financial, Inc. KleinBank is headquartered in Chaska, Minnesota, which operates 23 bank branches. KleinBank is the largest family-owned state bank in Minnesota with assets over $1.4 billion.

The sons of German immigrant and Minnesota farmer, George Klein, purchased controlling shares in The First National Bank of Chaska in 1907. Until that time, the two men, C.H. Klein and C.P. Klein, had been operating their father's brickyard. Klein had acquired the brickyard following a severe depression in 1893. It was the only remaining brickyard in Chaska which at one point had 11 individual brickyards in operation between 1857 and 1895.

C.H. Klein was elected to the Chaska School Board in 1900, to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 1902, and to the Minnesota Senate in 1910.

The bank expanded west along the railroad as the Klein's helped organize banks in Victoria, Waconia, Montevideo, and Madison. Banks were also acquired in nearby Cologne and Young America during C.H. Klein's time as Bank President.

C.P. Klein's son, George, took over controlling interest in the Klein-owned banks after the deaths of C.H. Klein in 1961 and C.P. Klein in 1962. Under George Klein's direction, the Klein Bancorporation, Inc., (KBI) was created to manage and supervise the Klein-owned banks.

George's son, Dan, became Chairman and President of KBI in 1979 after George's death in 1979. George's other two sons, Alan and Jim, became Senior Vice Presidents of KBI.

In 1997, KBI was renamed Klein Financial as the company began to take steps toward consolidating their nine chartered banks. In 2005, the nine charted banks were successfully merged into a single charter and the banks renamed, KleinBank.

On January 13, 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against KleinBank for alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act and Equal Credit Opportunity Act by structuring its home mortgage lending business to avoid serving neighborhoods where a majority of residents were racial and ethnic minorities. The lawsuit asserted that the bank's service area was in a horseshoe shape that carved out the urban areas of Minneapolis and St. Paul (which had higher minority populations) and targeted its marketing and advertising solely toward white neighborhoods. The lawsuit also claimed that from 2010 to 2015, other lenders generated loan applications in minority neighborhoods at four to five times the rate of KleinBank. The banks’s website at the time indicated that it had 21 branches in suburbs west of Minneapolis and St. Paul and in western Minnesota—regions which, according to census data, were predominantly white.

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