Technology, Regulation Top of Mind at 2025 Community Banking Research Conference
Technology applications and the possibility of evolving banking regulations featured prominently at the 13th annual Community Banking Research Conference, hosted Oct. 7-8 at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Co-sponsored by the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS), the event brings together community bankers, academics, policymakers and bank regulators to discuss the latest research on community banking. St. Louis Fed Vice President Jim Fuchs emceed the event.
The 2025 conference featured several keynote speakers, including Federal Reserve Gov. Michael Barr and CSBS President and CEO Brandon Milhorn. Andrew Felton, director of the division of insurance and research at the FDIC, gave plenary remarks.
St. Louis Fed President and CEO Alberto Musalem gave welcoming remarks and talked about the important role community banks play in the banking system.
“My colleagues and I continuously look to community bankers for critical insights on the health of local economies across the Eighth District. As the primary federal supervisor for 131 state member banks in our District, the St. Louis Fed also observes the challenges that community banks face in navigating an ever-changing consumer marketplace for banking products and services,” Musalem said. “Nevertheless, community banks stay resilient and keenly focused on providing credit and other essential banking services to their customers.”
More than 150 people attended in person and another 1,772 viewed the proceedings via a livestream at www.communitybanking.org.
Speeches from Federal Reserve Governors, an FDIC Director and a CSBS Executive
Technology, AI and regulations were popular topics during speeches by key leaders at the Federal Reserve, CSBS and the FDIC during the 2025 Community Banking Research Conference.
In a video to deliver welcoming remarks on the first day, Federal Reserve Vice Chair of Supervision Michelle Bowman discussed efforts to build an effective banking supervision and regulatory framework for the future.
Milhorn then addressed attendees during the morning keynote. He examined the current state of the industry and said the community banking business model (PDF) is under stress due to rising costs, growing competition and regulatory burdens.
Felton gave the afternoon plenary that day and talked about the importance of research in the FDIC’s work and its mission to support community banks.
On the second day of the conference, Barr gave a morning keynote speech where he talked about how technology and artificial intelligence enhancements could help community bankers improve fraud prevention efforts in the industry.
2025 Annual Survey of Community Banks
The 2025 Annual Survey of Community Banks featured insights from bankers around the country on a variety of topics, including external risks, internal risks, technology, competition, and more.
For the 12th consecutive year, CSBS released the Annual Survey of Community Banks at the event. The survey is conducted by the CSBS and state banking supervisors, who gather responses from banks of all sizes across the country.
“This year’s survey comes at a time of both economic uncertainty and technological transformation,” Tony Salazar said in a foreword. Salazar is CSBS board chair and commissioner of the office of financial regulation for the Maryland Department of Labor. “Community bankers reported cautious optimism about regulatory conditions but, amid tariffs and high inflation, expressed ongoing concerns about business growth, net interest margins and deposit competition.”
U.S. community bankers are surveyed on a wide range of topics, such as external and internal risks, technology, competition, and mergers and acquisitions. The survey also includes a “Five Questions for Five Bankers” section that offers a firsthand perspective from five community bankers about the challenges and opportunities they are facing.
Conference Research
Jeffery Piao of the University of Missouri addresses the crowd at the 2025 Community Banking Research Conference during a research paper session. Piao’s paper was titled “U.S. Banks’ Artificial Intelligence and Small Business Lending: Evidence from the Census Bureau’s Technology Survey.”
At its core, the conference is about community banking research, with event organizers hosting three different research paper sessions during the event. For the 2025 conference, the sessions focused on three topics: deposit franchise value and market power, failed banks, and innovation and technology in small business lending.
Each of the research paper sessions included insights from academics who served as moderators and offered unique perspectives. In addition, the sessions featured community bank discussants who offered reflections on each of the papers.
Meet the authors and read the papers.
Community Banker Keynote
The conference also continued its tradition of highlighting a community banker who discusses the specifics of their market and the unique challenges they are facing. This year, Alexander Price, president and CEO of Citizens State Bank in Ouray, Colo., was the featured speaker and talked about how the institution has grown and transformed over the past decade since his family acquired the bank.
Community Banker Spotlight
In a video for the Community Banking Research Conference, Alexander Price, president and CEO of Citizens State Bank in Ouray, Colo., described how he and his family modernized the more than 100-year-old bank after acquiring it in 2016. Transcript follows.
Alexander Price: If you asked the bank 20 years ago, “Who’s your customer?” They would say, “Everybody’s our customer.” Well, if everybody is your customer, no one is your customer. Your solution doesn’t work perfectly for anyone.
I’m Alexander Price. I’m the CEO and president of Citizens State Bank. The bank was originally founded by 30 of the top business members in the community in 1913. My family and I took over in 2016 as part of a leadership change and acquisition. It did have all the hallmarks of a community bank, but technologically, it was not forward-thinking at all. They weren’t putting the money out into the community.
In 2016, I was working in San Francisco in tech startups. I was actually transitioning between two different jobs, so I had the opportunity to come out when we closed on the bank. And I spent half my time here for the next six months, consulting. And I learned every different role—tellering, bookkeeping, loan officer, loan admin—and just tried to understand, how did they do it? Not, what do we need to do? But, how did they do it? And then that learning over those six months informed what the next version of Citizens State Bank needed to be like.
Tamara Gulde: My name is Tamara Gulde. My husband and I own Mountain Fever Shirts and Gifts.
Darin Hill: My name is Darin Hill. I’m in the grocery, hardware and liquor business.
Robert Allison: My name is Robert Allison. I’m the owner of Allison Construction.
Ashley King-Grambley: My name is Ashley King-Grambley. I have been the executive director of Weehawken Creative Arts and the Ridgeway Chautauqua Society. And Citizens State Bank has always been involved in one way or another. Obviously, it’s a long-time bank in this area.
Allison: This is a 100-year-old building, a 100-plus-year-old building. It was dilapidated.
Gulde: There was an old lobby with bars and old desks.
Price: It’s the kind of place where you could have seen bank robbers.
Hill: It’s so nice to see how CSB has transitioned in such a positive way: systems that they brought in, the remodel of the building here that we’re in, being part of the community.
King-Grambley: We don’t really see Citizens State Bank as a bank. We see them as a partner.
Allison: Being in a small community, that relationship is very important.
Hill: They’ve helped us on several different deals because we know each other. It’s comfortable. It’s not starting fresh.
Price: For us, it was really about, all right, let’s rethink what kinds of products are needed for our customers.
Allison: Typically, in my industry, construction, you have ups and downs.
Gulde: Busy in the summer, but we still have a very weak winter business here.
Hill: And oftentimes, folks, in the summer when you’re making all this money, spend all this money, and they’ve got a note due.
Gulde: We, every summer, have to pay off the debt from the winter. And that’s a stress every year. And that’s what we have to factor in on our business plan in order to survive. And Citizens has made it really easy to do that.
Price: There’s a reason why you want to bank locally. It’s because your deposits become your neighbor’s loans. That’s not a small thing. Every grocery store that’s here, they’re trying to pitch that same thing. Every T-shirt shop, they’re pitching that same story. So you then pitch it to them to convince them to use you. You believe in shopping locally, well, you should believe in banking locally as well.
And so for us, thinking about the long-term vision, really oriented around the work that we did in 2016, around what are our core values, what are the meaningful things to us. In the end, we had five core values. We now have six. But it all came down to one core value, and that was true north. Do what is in the best long-term interest of the customer, the community, the bank and the employees. And all four of those things have to be aligned. And so you have to balance all of those things together.
And so we really prioritize, what are the things that we need to do initially? We needed to invest in the physical infrastructure because the buildings were falling down. We needed to invest in the digital infrastructure because we didn’t even have a mobile app. And we needed to invest in the people. And so for us, it was really about those three investment areas.
Gulde: But Citizens Bank has changed dramatically.
Hill: It’s great to see the growth of the bank and the vision for the future. And it’s cautious growth. And it’s planned growth, no different than how I do my business. But it’s nice to see there’s a future plan for all the people here.
King-Grambley: They also, I think, maybe are a little bit exceptional as a bank, or a lot exceptional as a bank, because they understand the value that nonprofits bring to a community and the livability of a community.
Gulde: Because the more people you have in the community, it thrives.
Allison: Being in a smaller community, you kind have to do a little bit of everything.
Hill: What I see is people that care, that have passion, that understand the community, that want to be involved, that want to give back.
Gulde: I really believe that because they’ve grown, they’ve been able to help more businesses here.
Price: I think whether you’re big or small—in our case, we’re very small—it all comes down to people. That’s whether that’s your people or your customers. That’s where the rubber meets the road. One of the things that we talk about is, it’s not about me. It’s about we. The miracle of compound interest happens through the miracle of compound effort. The way we do it is just good service, high touch, the ability to solve problems. That’s where you have the magic of any community bank. And for us, that’s where we’re able to really shine.
From technological improvements to the evolving characteristics of the market that have necessitated relationship-based lending, Price shared how Citizens State Bank and its leadership team has enhanced operations at the bank, which was founded in 1913.
“Our perseverance over the past 112 years really goes toward who we are as an organization and who we are as a community bank,” Price said.
Price brought the bank’s original ledger book from 1926 to 1930 that showed the beginnings of the Great Depression. By recounting the history of Citizens State Bank and the overall banking industry’s struggles during that period, he explained how community banks must always be forward-thinking, ready to adapt to any challenge while evolving for the future.
“You had to figure out how to survive, and then you figured out how to thrive,” Price said.
Learn More about the Conference
Other speakers at the event included Carl White, senior vice president of the St. Louis Fed Supervision, Credit and Learning Division, who gave reflections at the end of the first day, and Ken Heinecke, senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, who closed out the conference.
The conference also featured a presentation from this year’s CSBS Community Bank Case Study Competition winners. The annual competition for undergraduate students helps encourage more people to go into the field of banking.
Check out the Community Banking Research Conference website for videos and additional materials.
This blog explains everyday economics and the Fed, while also spotlighting St. Louis Fed people and programs. Views expressed are not necessarily those of the St. Louis Fed or Federal Reserve System.
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