Not that it has been easy. First International Bank & Trust’s 115-year history has been marked by economic depression, drought and flood as well as opportunity and oil booms.

With his sons and daughters now guiding the bank, recently retired CEO Steve Stenehjem said he can’t help but be proud and confident.

“I’m very confident that they’re going to take the bank forward into the next generation of growth,” he said. “Peter and Eric and Kira, along with the assistance of their sister Kristen, are going to be a great owners group that have the kind of values that Gretchen and I have had and a sense of pride in not only the bank but the communities that we have banks in.”

Peter Stenehjem, based at the Edina, Minnesota, bank, became chief executive officer for First International Bank & Trust (FIBT) on Jan. 1. His brother, Erik, a certified public accountant, works with the bank’s Arizona operations, and their sister, Kira Noll, works at the Watford City bank. Another sister, Dr. Kristen Stenehjem, a pediatric allergy immunologist in Chicago, followed in the footsteps of a great-grandfather, who had been a physician in McKenzie County.

Submitted Photo Former CEO Steve Stenehjem and his wife, Gretchen, oversaw nearly 35 years of tremendous growth at First International Bank & Trust before their son, Peter, took on the CEO role on Jan. 1.

Steve Stenehjem’s wife, Gretchen, a former school teacher, also remains actively involved with the bank.

Having led operations in Fargo and Minnesota for FIBT, Peter Stenehjem welcomes the opportunity to carry on for the family as CEO.

“I’m a business banker at heart, so I love the growth and development of meeting new clients,” he said. “As bankers, we’re naturally optimistic, and that’s the fun part for us is either getting to meet new individuals or learning and understanding about a new business. I think that’s probably what my dad and I would view as some of the most fun.

“If you think about what a community bank is all about, we are only as good as our clients. Strong communities typically have some pretty strong community banks, and it’s a little bit of ‘a rising tide raises all boats.’ And it’s been really fun to get to network and get to know people and just find various facets where we can potentially help them and either protect their legacy or continue to grow their legacy,” he added.

Steve Stenehjem had led the bank for nearly 35 years, following in the footsteps of his father, Leland, who also led the bank for about 35 years.

Submitted Photo Peter Stenehjem, Kira Noll and Erik Stenehjem stand in the boardroom at First International Bank & Trust in Watford City. The siblings have taken active roles as the fourth generation in the family banking business.

It was during those years that the bank opened its first branch location in Alexander in 1966.

“I grew up mainly working on the farm in junior high and high school and intermittently during college, but I’d help out at the bank when needed as well,” Steve Stenehjem said. “We had a gentleman named Al Melby that ran our bank in Alexander, and he’d always want to take a two week vacation in the summer. So, dad would put me over into Alexander to run that station for a couple of weeks, which I loved, because I got to run it on my own, and Alexander had a bunch of cute girls working and living over there and I had a charge account at Marge’s cafe. She was a great cook.”

He attended the University of North Dakota because of its strong business program. After graduation, he moved to Arizona, where he took a job with a restaurant because of his interest in the hospitality industry. The manager took him under his wing to teach him the business.

“What I learned was, when everybody else was out having fun, I had to work because the best times at the restaurants were holidays and weekends,” Stenehjem said. “I decided, ‘Well, maybe this isn’t the life for me after all.'”

He returned to North Dakota and worked for Norwest Bank in Bismarck and in Mankato, Minnesota, where he met Gretchen. Then one Christmas his uncle, who had been reluctant to bring him into the family business right out of college, asked him to come back and work for the Watford City bank.

Odin Stenehjem stands in the Farmers State Bank in Arnegard, which he founded in 1910 with his brother and cousin. Now named First International Bank & Trust, with locations in four states, the bank is operated by the fourth generation of Stenehjem’s family.

In 1982, Steve relocated to Watford City, and he and Gretchen were married.

“A couple of years later, I pushed my dad to buy the bank in Fessenden,” Stenehjem said. “We started acquiring banks, and then the next year, I was able to buy out my relatives – my uncle and my aunt, my cousins – and consolidate that ownership.”

After buying the Fessenden bank in 1984, FIBT acquired all the former Midwest Federal banks in 1990, including one in Minot.

Today, FIBT has at least one location in Fargo, Minot, Alexander, Fessenden, Harvey, Killdeer, Elgin, Grand Forks, Bismarck, Mandan, Rugby, Williston, West Fargo and Watford City in North Dakota. Its Minnesota locations are in Moorhead, Edina, Motley and Staples. In Arizona, it has locations in Scottsdale, Phoenix, Chandler and Gilbert, and its most recent purchase in 2021 was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

FIBT’s bank in the Arrowhead neighborhood in Minot was impacted during the devastating 2011 flood.

The original Farmers State Bank in Arnegard was the forerunner of today’s First International Bank & Trust, headquartered in Watford City.

“Steve was gone, and I got a call from our president over there who said, ‘This is really bad. Can you bring any help?’ So, I loaded a bunch of help the next day and drove there and could not believe my eyes when I walked in,” Gretchen Stenehjem said.

She called in reinforcements from FIBT’s other banks to help move the contents in light of worsening flood forecasts.

“We were literally shoving things into bags and trying to get moved out, and our poor bank employees were busy trying to get their own homes buttoned up and figured out. So, we had to use all of our mostly outside staff to come in and help out,” she said.

Despite efforts to save the building, the bank required major reconstruction once flood waters receded.

“We built the big sand wall up above the bank,” Gretchen Stenehjem recalled, “and it blew through that in 20 minutes when the flood water came.”

While that was a challenging chapter in FIBT’s history, thriving oil boom years brought their own challenges.

Gretchen Stenehjem remembers busy Fridays when customer lines extended out the door as she handed out coffee and sought to keep waiting customers happy.

Steve Stenehjem said it made for a competitive job market in terms of finding and keeping employees, but they learned new ways to become efficient and use more technology.

“To see the oil boom come back was very fun and great for our community and great for our whole state, great for our whole country,” he said.

For many years, Gretchen Stenehjem oversaw the bank’s building projects, helping with design and meeting with contractors. FIBT completed construction on a new Watford City bank in 2006.

All four siblings who make up the fourth generation had worked in the bank as teenagers.

“I started working in our teller line for $6 an hour back in June of 2000 and so had the chance to kind of learn some of the early aspects of the bank, especially client interactions,” Peter Stenehjem said. “I’ve essentially worked in about every single area of the bank, starting off as a teller, working in the bookkeeping area, computer room, for a little bit, and then I started helping some of the lenders from a loan associate perspective.”

When he entered UND, he had debated going into a medical field or staying with finance.

“When I was working one of the summers I started going on business development and customer calls with my dad and a few of the other lenders. And I started really to enjoy that. So I got to see customers growing and expanding their businesses, having opportunities to purchase new businesses or build buildings,” he said. “Throughout that period, I had a chance to start working closer with my dad and our CFO (chief finance officer) at the time, to learn and understand more of the general ledger side of the bank, how we made our corporate investments and just how we thought of running an organization as a whole. So, that was kind of invaluable.”

After earning a degree in banking and financial economics, he joined the Fargo bank in January of 2008. He said his father gave him the opportunity to work on some of the more challenging loans.

“I probably crammed 10 years worth of banking experience into about a two to three year period. To my dad’s credit, growing up, anytime he was going to have a challenging conversation, whether it was with an employee or with a client, he would often times bring me along. And so, I got to witness, firsthand, what it was like to have crucial conversations pretty early in life,” he said. “Looking back, obviously that was some invaluable experience.”

After 15 years in Fargo, working in credit analysis, consumer and commercial lending, Peter Stenehjem became market president in Fargo, overseeing five offices, including the Moorhead startup.

He was part of the due diligence team when FIBT took over the failed banks in Minnesota. His experience broadened to include retail, wealth services, insurance and investments, which helped prepare him for his current role as CEO.

Other major lessons learned from his parents were work ethic and the importance of being a community supporter and leader.

“It seems to me, the more involved we’ve been, probably the more successful we’ve been in a variety of different facets. That comes from both my mom and my dad being very active community participants. Growing up in that household, it can’t help but rub off,” Peter Stenehjem said.

He served on the board of Sanford Health in Fargo and worked his way up in the West Fargo Chamber to become board chair as well as serving in a variety of capacities on various nonprofit boards. In his current community of Wayzata, Minnesota, he is involved with Stand Together Ventures, a peer-to-peer organization that embraces personal, professional and philanthropic transformation to advance principled entrepreneurship and solutions to society challenges.

Throughout his involvement with FIBT, Peter Stenehjem has pushed for continued bank growth and advancement of its services to its customers.

“We also have a few niches that I think are very unique to us as a community bank and where we probably punch above our weight class, and that’s in the payment space,” he said.

FIBT purchased KotaPay, a financial company, which now moves more than $103 billion in total transactions, with more than 107,000 clients through the United States, according to the Stenehjems.

Mineral land services has been another key area, advanced by the bank’s acquisition of Mineral Tracker, with its management software.

When it comes to technology, the banking industry has evolved far beyond even the advent of ATM machines, which eliminated the late night calls from customers who needed immediate cash for family emergencies. Gretchen Stenehjem said the bank vault couldn’t be opened at night so they would arrange for people to pick up cash in establishments such as bars, which were open late and had cash on hand.

What hasn’t changed is the focus on customers.

“At the end of the day, that’s what really matters to us is having great relationships with customers throughout our footprint,” Peter Stenehjem said.

To operate a business that has been held in the family for 115 years, with the growth it has seen, is a blessing the family doesn’t take for granted.

“It’s very rare and very special,” Gretchen Stenehjem said.

“Obviously, there’s a deep family history, without a doubt, that we’re all very proud of,” Peter Stenehjem added.

Stenehjem story: From homesteading to pioneer banking

The Stenehjem story began in the late 1800s when family members began coming to western North Dakota to homestead.

Odin Stenehjem was among nine brothers and two sisters who came from Spring Grove, Minnesota, where available farmland had become scarce. They eventually were joined by their mother.

The Stenehjems decided the area needed a bank, so Odin Stenehjem, along with a brother and cousin, formed Farmers State Bank in Arnegard. Odin’s father-in-law gave an initial loan of $10,000 and later added another $5,000 to help get the bank going.

“By the early 1920s, it was up to $300,000 in size,” said recently retired CEO Steve Stenehjem of Watford City. “My grandfather’s first salary was $75 a month for running the bank. And by the ’20s, his salary was up to $150 a month. And then the Great Depression came along.”

Odin Stenehjem cut his salary back to $75 a month, and the bank’s assets dropped to $150,000 due to farmers going bankrupt and leaving. The bank was the only bank in McKenzie County to survive the depression. It was the only bank allowed to reopen following a federal bank holiday in which regulators determined which banks were sound enough to resume business.

As the only remaining bank, it relocated its office to Watford City, the county seat, in 1934, when the name changed to First International Bank.

Leland Stenehjem, born in 1918, grew up helping at the bank and took over as CEO just before his father’s death in 1964. Odin Stenehjem had led the bank for more than 50 years.