Busey’s $18 billion test of local banking

In January 1868, when Urbana, Illinois, held roughly 2,000 people, Samuel T. Busey reportedly announced what the town needed: a bank. He opened one with his brother Simeon and physician W. R. Earhart. The first day’s deposits came to $9,555.60 - precise enough to feel less like legend than an entry still waiting in an old ledger.

One hundred and fifty-eight years later, the descendant of that bank has 80 banking centers in 10 states, $18.19 billion in assets and a map that stretches from Chicago to Dallas, Denver, Phoenix and southwest Florida. First Busey Corporation is now based in Leawood, Kansas, while Busey Bank remains headquartered in Champaign. The arrangement captures the whole company: broader than its Illinois roots, but still deliberately attached to them.

Busey’s pitch is not complicated. It takes deposits, makes loans and helps people move and manage money. But three operations sit behind that sentence. The bank serves households and businesses. Busey Wealth Management advises families, companies and foundations. FirsTech, its payment-technology unit, helps organizations collect bills through online, mobile, phone, ACH, card, retail-agent and lockbox channels. Together they give Busey more ways to earn a customer’s business than a conventional branch franchise.

One relationship, more rooms

The most useful way to understand Busey is through a business owner. She may start with an operating account and a line of credit. As the company grows, she needs payroll, fraud controls, treasury management and a faster way to collect from customers. Later, the questions become personal: succession, retirement, taxes, investments and an estate plan. Busey can follow that arc without handing the relationship to a different institution.

That connection is Busey’s economic flywheel. Deposits provide funding for loans. Commercial relationships create treasury and payment opportunities. A company sale or generational transfer can create a wealth-management client. The broad product shelf also produces fee income, reducing - though not eliminating - dependence on the difference between what a bank earns on assets and pays on deposits.

In 2025, noninterest income represented 20.8 percent of Busey’s total revenue. Wealth-management fees reached $69.4 million, up 9.1 percent from 2024, while payment-technology income was $20 million. Traditional spread income remains the main engine, but the other two matter when interest-rate cycles turn or loan demand softens.

“Our product is service.”Busey’s description of its customer promise

A bank that walks the fields

The cleanest evidence of Busey’s local expertise is found outside a branch. Its agricultural group says it manages more than 90,000 acres of prime Illinois farmland. The work includes crop production, tenant relations, grain marketing, financial monitoring, environmental questions and advice on wind, solar and renewable-energy agreements. Its brokers also handle farmland sales and acquisitions.

This is not a mass-market feature that can be copied with a nicer interface. It depends on people who understand both a farm’s operating decisions and its role as an intergenerational asset. A landowner may need credit, management, brokerage, trust administration and tax-aware investment advice. Busey’s advantage is its ability to assemble those capabilities around one complicated piece of ground.

At the other end of the spectrum, Busey Digital Banking offers the expected table stakes: mobile check deposit, transfers, bill payment, Zelle, online account opening and support inside the app. The bank’s challenge is to make those tools feel as competent as the specialist on the phone. It competes with national banks that spend more on technology, direct banks that pay aggressively for deposits and fintechs designed around a single elegant task.

The CrossFirst hinge

Busey’s present scale arrived quickly. In March 2025, it completed the $925.5 million acquisition of CrossFirst Bankshares. CrossFirst brought a commercially oriented franchise in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. Its bank merged into Busey Bank that June, after which the CrossFirst locations took the Busey name.

The deal changed the company’s center of gravity. Busey gained entry to high-growth metropolitan markets and a larger commercial loan engine. CrossFirst customers, in turn, became prospects for Busey’s wealth and payment services. Management projected scale benefits and cross-selling opportunities; customers experienced the more mundane reality of new systems, cards, signs and account routines. Mergers are won in spreadsheets and retained in thousands of ordinary interactions.

By June 2026, the combined company had $18.19 billion in assets. Second-quarter net income was $63.2 million, or $0.69 per diluted share, and adjusted net income was $63.7 million. Wealth assets under care reached a record $16.51 billion. Deposit growth ran at an 11 percent annualized pace during the quarter, while net charge-offs were 0.19 percent. These numbers describe a bank that is larger after integration but still focused on credit quality and deposit costs.

The leadership question also became clearer. In July 2026, Busey extended Chairman, President and CEO Van Dukeman’s agreement through July 2029. Dukeman has led the organization since the 2007 Main Street merger and has overseen nine acquisitions, taking Busey from about $4 billion to more than $18 billion in assets. His stated objective is to keep earning the company’s independence - a notable phrase in an industry that continually consolidates.

Where Busey sits

Busey is too large to be merely a hometown bank and too small to win by imitating the country’s largest institutions. Its competitive set changes by customer: UMB, Commerce, BOK Financial and other regional banks for middle-market companies; national banks for broad capability; community banks and credit unions for local trust; RIAs and brokerages for wealth; software companies for payments.

The market pressures arrive from several directions at once. When interest rates move, deposit customers become more price-sensitive and funding can leave quickly. Commercial real estate can concentrate risk in a loan portfolio. Cybersecurity and fraud defenses must keep pace with faster digital payments. Every acquisition adds technology, policies and customer habits that have to be reconciled without creating friction. A larger footprint diversifies local economic exposure, but it also makes consistent execution more difficult.

Busey’s response is unusually legible. It prioritizes balance-sheet strength, profitability and then growth, in that order. In practice, this means preserving capital and credit quality while trying to replace expensive, transactional funding with durable customer deposits. It also means treating wealth and payments as more than revenue accessories. Both can increase the number of reasons a customer stays, creating information and introductions that a stand-alone lender would miss.

For an individual, the practical menu ranges from a first checking account to mortgages, home-equity credit, retirement planning and trust administration. For a company, it stretches from an SBA loan to complex commercial finance, cash management, card acceptance, fraud controls and employee retirement plans. Foundations can use investment and fiduciary services. Highly regulated enterprises and financial institutions can use FirsTech to collect and reconcile payments across channels. This breadth is the product; the individual accounts are its components.

Its answer is a regional operating model. Local bankers are meant to retain market knowledge and decision-making proximity, while the parent supplies capital, risk systems, specialist expertise and a larger suite of products. The phrase “relationship banking” is common enough to become wallpaper. At Busey, it has operational meaning only if a customer in Phoenix or Dallas can get the responsiveness once promised in Urbana - and can also reach an estate adviser, a payments expert or a treasury team when the problem expands.

Culture is part of that machinery. Busey organizes its language around four pillars: associates, clients, communities and shareholders. Its stated values include ethics, relationships, excellence and purpose-driven results. The company emphasizes internal development and volunteerism, and it has appeared on American Banker’s Best Banks to Work For list every year from 2016 through 2025. Awards do not prove culture, but repetition over a decade is harder to dismiss than a slogan in a lobby.

A regional bank does not need to be the biggest institution in the market. It needs to be the one that understands the whole problem.

For customers, Busey is most compelling when the need crosses categories: an entrepreneur buying a building while installing payment collection; a family selling a business and planning its estate; a farmer balancing operating credit with land stewardship. For investors, the case rests on disciplined credit, durable deposits, integration gains and fee businesses that deepen relationships. For competitors, the difficult piece to copy is not any individual account. It is the handoff between them.

The bank Samuel Busey imagined was built for a place. The modern Busey is being built for a network of places. Its success will depend on whether size makes those relationships richer or merely more numerous. That is a less dramatic test than opening a bank in 1868, but no less consequential to the people trusting it with their money.