Regulators closed Interbank on Friday, April 27, after years of struggle for the Maple Grove-based thrift. Interbank's four branches in Lakeville, Roseville, Edina and its home base will reopen Monday as branches of Great Southern Bank, which is based in Reed Springs, Mo.

With about $482 million in total assets and $473 million in deposits, Interbank is among the largest financial institutions to fail in Minnesota. Great Southern Bank assumed all the deposits of the failed bank and essentially all the assets, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said in a news release.

The closure was not unexpected. Interbank was hit hard by the housing slump and had been losing money for years - nearly $6 million last year. The Office of Thrift Supervision, Interbank's regulator, had warned Interbank two years ago that it needed to raise its capital levels or find a merger partner. Neither happened. At the end of 2011, Interbank's core capital ratio was 1.54 percent, far below the 5 percent regulators asked for.

As a thrift, Interbank was required to have 70 percent of its assets in residential real estate.

"We stuck true to the federal savings bank charter and saw it as our mission to invest in residential," Fred Stelter, the bank's chief executive, told the Pioneer Press in 2009. "Unfortunately, that was the first piece of the economy to start to fall apart. We started to see it as early as January 2006."

Depositors of Interbank can access their money over the

Interbank is the third financial institution to fail in Minnesota this year, and the 20th in the nation. The FDIC estimated that the cost to its Deposit Insurance Fund will be $117.5 million.

Ann Harrington can be reached at 651-228-5556. Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/AnnHarringtonMN.