The Customer Relations team for Federal Reserve Financial Services (FRFS) is on the front lines of engaging with more than 9,000 financial institutions across the country. Meet Stephanie Jorgensen, one of this team’s many “faces of the Fed.”
Q: When and why did you come to work for the Federal Reserve?
A:I am attracted to communicating new ideas and new products. The implementation of the FedNow® Service inspired me to join the Federal Reserve Bank in April 2023. I value customer-facing roles that allow me to bridge tools and resources to advance our customers’ goals and business initiatives together.
Early in my career, I worked in the consumer products industry as a district sales leader and national account manager. In my family-building years, I worked in leadership roles in K-12 education and communication roles in higher education. These work experiences rooted in communication, education and leadership translate nicely when working face-to-face or virtually with the financial institutions in my region.
Q: What do you do as a regional relationship manager?
A:I personally engage my customers to consider how payments will look in the future and help them prepare for and embrace change. My customer portfolio includes regional banks and credit unions headquartered in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Alaska with $400 million to $29 billion in assets.
I prioritize seeing my customers in person to build relationships and develop a support system. In 2025, these in-person meetings featured a business review of services and billing, an introduction to new FRFS services, and a leadership discussion to prepare for FedNow adoption and use cases. For additional customer support, I leveraged virtual meetings to support the Fedwire® Funds Service’s rollout of the ISO® 20022 messaging standard.
Listening to customer inquiries is paramount. The financial institutions I work with are pursuing greater insights into the FedNow Service and are asking specific questions about adoption in their markets and use cases for sending instant payments. Ensuring they are able to receive instant FEMA payments (Off-site) on behalf of their customers and members is also top of mind.
My customers are also asking about Nacha’s 2026 rule changes (Off-site) and FRFS tools to mitigate fraud, such as the FedPayments® Insights Service and risk monitoring tools for originators, and how these tools can layer into financial institutions’ systems. More recently, I’ve been working with a customer that is adopting FRFS APIs, such as the Real-time Account Balance API, which enables financial institutions to receive and integrate automated, real-time Federal Reserve account balance information into their core platforms.
Q: When you’re not working with your customers, what do you do for fun?
I appreciate time at our home located in Corvallis (Off-site), in the heart of Oregon’s Willamette Valley (Off-site) and home to Oregon State University (Off-site). We live near the McDonald-Dunn Research Forest (Off-site). At the end of the block, we can enter the forest and enjoy miles of hiking trails. My husband Damian and I are becoming “free birds” as our two children are in college, so we enjoy the novelty of “vacations for two” — most recently, New York and coming soon, Amsterdam and Oslo. I also appreciate cooking and recognize home cooking brings the kids home. Our favorite experience this year is a small-batch woodburning pizza oven in the backyard. Making pizza together creates a great afternoon of collaborative meal-making and family storytelling.
