community-banking
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Old National Bank
Old National has spent nearly two centuries turning local relationships into regional scale. Now the question is whether a $74 billion bank can keep the community-bank feel that made it valuable in the first place.
SouthState Bank
It grew from a single 1933 South Carolina bank into a $65-billion Southeastern lender - and its biggest business is one most of its own customers have never heard of.
Renasant Bank
It started in a Tupelo bakery in 1904 with $100,000 and a promise to know its customers by name. A century and a $1.2 billion merger later, Renasant is still betting that relationships scale better than everyone assumes.
Bank OZK
From two branches and $28 million in assets, Bank OZK built a $41.7 billion institution by pairing community banking with a national construction-lending machine. Now the Little Rock bank is trying to keep that edge while making its balance sheet less dependent on real estate.
Deanna Capel
At Busey, Deanna Capel turned a first job in communications into a career shaping how a regional bank sounds, serves and shows up. Her path runs through brand systems, merger moments and the unglamorous work of being present in Champaign.
Steve Gogolak
At Rockland Trust, Steve Gogolak is bringing a product builder's discipline and a storyteller's eye to an old banking question: how do you make a relationship feel local when the front door is a screen?
Wendy Schenker
Wendy Schenker turned a bank’s marketing brief into a Chicago invitation - pairing sponsorships, public rituals and community work so the brand is experienced before it is advertised.
Valley Bank
Valley Bank has spent nearly a century getting bigger without wanting to feel big. Now, with about $64 billion in assets and a push into partner banking, it is testing whether a regional lender can offer national-bank machinery with a relationship banker still attached.
Fifth Third Bank
The bank with America’s strangest fraction just became its ninth largest. Behind the 5/3 sign is a 168-year experiment in turning branches, payment rails and software into one sprawling financial utility.
Busey
A bank born in an Illinois town of 2,000 people now spans 10 states. Its wager is that local relationships can survive a $20 billion merger - and become more useful when banking, wealth and payments sit under one roof.
Umpqua Bank
A timber town built a bank so workers would not have to cash paychecks at the tavern. Seventy-two years later, the name disappeared - but Umpqua's experiment in making banking feel human still echoes through the West.
Rockland Trust
Rockland Trust began by taking deposits door to door in a Model T. More than a century later, its bet is still the same: technology gets you farther when a local banker comes along for the ride.
Wintrust Financial Corporation
Wintrust built a $74.7 billion banking group by keeping the storefront feel of a neighborhood lender. Its real trick is the machinery behind the counter - 16 charters, national specialty finance and a balance sheet that can compete with much larger banks.
Jacqueline Reses
Jacqueline 'Jackie' Reses is the Chair and CEO of Lead Bank, a Kansas City-based chartered bank she acquired in 2022 and transformed into a banking-as-a-service powerhouse serving fintech builders. Previously, she built Square Capital from zero into a multi-billion dollar lending business at Square (now Block), served as a board member at Alibaba through its historic 2014 IPO, led 41 transactions as Yahoo's Chief Development Officer, and spent seven years at Goldman Sachs in M&A. A Wharton-trained economist from Atlantic City, she co-authored 'Self-Made Boss' and holds patents in payments, credit, and cryptocurrency. Lead Bank closed a $70M Series B in September 2025 at a $1.47B valuation backed by a16z, Ribbit Capital, Coatue, and Khosla Ventures.
Heang Chan
Heang Chan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Prelim, a San Francisco-based fintech that builds the digital onboarding operating system for banks and credit unions. A Stanford MBA and former Goldman Sachs banker who also helped build the mortgage platform at Blend used by 3 of the top 10 U.S. banks, Chan founded Prelim in 2017 after Y Combinator to solve the friction-filled account-opening workflows he watched slow down banks from the inside. Prelim now orchestrates 50+ banking integrations for institutions managing more than $5 trillion in assets, turning weeks-long onboarding into minutes.
Larry Katz
Larry Katz is CEO and President of MeridianLink, a leading SaaS platform for digital lending and account opening used by banks and credit unions across the United States. A Harvard MBA and Yale graduate, Katz spent 15 years at JPMorgan Chase before leading finance and operations at Genesys and StubHub, then pivoting to private equity advisory before joining MeridianLink as CFO in 2024. Within 18 months he rose to President and then CEO, steering the company through a $2 billion acquisition by Centerbridge Partners in October 2025 and launching an AI-powered lending agent called Millie. His platform ethos — 'Lending Made Human' — sits at the intersection of algorithmic decisioning and community financial relationships.