When Patty Gates thinks back over the crisis that befell her industry in recent years, what bothers her most is the thought of those banks that didn't survive and friends who lost their jobs as the institutions they loved crumbled.

A 28-year veteran of the banking industry, Gates is market manager at FMS Bank, which opened as a loan production office in Greeley last spring and then expanded into a full-service branch of FMS Bank, formerly Fort Morgan State Bank, headquartered in Morgan County.

Gates has seen a lot in her years in the business including the loss of 20,000 jobs in Colorado in the financial services sector between August 2006 and 2011. She also witnessed the closure of a number of banks over the same period, with six banks shuttered by regulators and sold in 2011 alone. Two of those banks, Signature Bank and Bank of Choice, were headquartered in Northern Colorado.

A former executive VP at Bank of Choice, Gates knew many of the bankers affected by the purchase of the bank by Kansas City, Mo.- based Bank Midwest.

"The people who worked at those banks, they're different people now," she said.

She was working to launch the FMS Bank branch just as her former employer was sold