Alloy Labs Welcomes 7 Members to Community Banking Consortium

Community/mid-size banking consortium Alloy Labs says seven new lenders have joined its ranks.

“As members, these banks join Alloy Labs’ Centers of Excellence and working groups, gaining shared intelligence, peer benchmarking, and a path to pilot and scale new products without adding headcount,” Alloy said in its announcement Monday (July 20).

According to the announcement, the group’s membership now exceeds 90 banks in 46 states with close to $500 billion in combined assets. The new members’ offerings include sponsor banking and embedded finance, as well as agricultural and Small Business Administration (SBA) lending, and mutual community banking.

The new members are:

BTC Bank, a community bank based serving customers in Missouri, Iowa and Arkansas

Carter Bank, a regional community bank serving customers in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina

First Bank of the Lake, a nationwide SBA lender operating in 38 states

Focus Bank, a community bank serving customers in Missouri and Arkansas

Hatch Bank, a “tech-forward” sponsor bank based in San Marcos, California

Rhinebeck Bank, a community bank serving New York’s Hudson Valley

StonehamBank a mutual community bank based in Massachusetts

“For community and mid-size banks, the biggest competitive threat is no longer the bank across the street,” the announcement said.

“Rising customer expectations, margin pressure, and technology decisions are difficult to navigate alone. Membership in Alloy Labs is not a service to buy; it expands each bank’s executive capacity, adding the equivalent of teammates across 90+ institutions.”

PYMNTS wrote earlier this year about some of the challenges facing community banks, including the “everyday test.”

“Here’s how the everyday test works, because a bank account isn’t really a primary account until it passes this test: the customer’s paycheck lands there, the account pays the rent and the utilities and the subscriptions, the debit card swipes at the grocery store and money moves in and out of it as easily as it moves in and out of a phone wallet,” the report said.

An account that fails that test becomes a “dormant placeholder, holding one stale deposit and generating no real engagement,” PYMNTS added.

A simple technology solution, the report continued, provides just part of the solution. Research from PYMNTS Intelligence found that 55% of community bank decision-makers say they’ve fully modernized their technology stacks, yet many of the accounts these banks open fail to become primary relationships.

“However, many community banks, while confident in their modernization efforts, lack the payments capabilities needed to support continuous engagement,” PYMNTS wrote.