Main Street Banking: A Podcast for Community Bankers

The college in your market is probably one of the largest employers on your commercial list, and most community banks have no relationship with it. T. Ramon Stuart, president of WVU Tech, and Bill Loving at Pendleton Community Bank built one anyway, out of a lunch for three that came to about sixteen dollars. They call it Communiversity — the community is the university, the university is the community.

Key Points

Start with the payroll:

309 full-time employees at WVU Tech

roughly 849 across a year, counting part-time and contract work

"Imagine if the majority of your deposits from payroll went into a community bank."

Stuart calls colleges "the modern-day factories of town." Most of his own profession dislikes the comparison. He makes it anyway.

Why the community bank is the right partner: It can look under the hood. A loan without clean comps still gets made, because the bank knows the borrower and knows the employer. And students who bank locally come back for the first mortgage — the cheers effect, where you go because somebody knows your name.

Financial literacy is the way in: Most people learn about money after the mistakes, once credit is damaged and the rate is higher. First-generation students are the clearest case. On the credit card tables that used to line campus walkways — hand someone three thousand dollars who has never had a dollar and call it a free line — "I think that's very predatory."

The co-branded card, and what it did: A Tech employee was checking out at a local business when the cashier recognized the card. She was a Tech graduate with an engineering degree working retail, because she had never managed to navigate the job market. They exchanged information. Less than a month later she had an engineering job.

What holds it up: "Nobody really wants to talk finances." And inertia is the real competitor — if you open the app and the money is there, you do not go looking for a new bank.

What To Do Monday

Call the campus and offer to teach a class. Byron: "It's like asking a teacher or a professor, hey, can I come talk to a class? Absolutely, that's one time I don't have to lecture." Stuart's own reaction is puzzlement that this is not already everywhere: "It just fits, it flows."

More on the initiative: [CONFIRM URL — wvutech.edu/communiversity]

About the Guest

T. Ramon Stuart, Ph.D. is president of the West Virginia University Institute of Technology in Beckley, where he has led the campus since January 2023. He is from McDowell County, holds degrees from West Virginia University and a doctorate from Ohio University, and became a college professor at 23. He previously served as president of Clayton State University and provost at Fort Valley State University, both in Georgia.

The FDIC and OCC have a CRA proposal out. The Federal Reserve hasn't signed on. Shaun Harms joins the show to separate what's in the text from what's circulating on LinkedIn.

Harms is a principal and regional sector leader over the consulting practice at Forvis Mazars, concentrated in compliance and BSA. He's about 20 years out of the graduate school and now sits on the Barret banking faculty. He also runs the quarterly compliance roundtable.

His read: this is a threshold rewrite, not a rebuild. The deposit-based assessment area that drove most of the angst in the rescinded rule is gone — it's the ordinary assessment area again. What's left is a tiering change. As Harms describes the proposal, banks under $1 billion fall under the small bank test, banks from $1 to $10 billion get an easier test with no reporting, and banks above $10 billion carry on as they do now. The lending test stays the core of it.

The piece he expects to cause real work is the community development side. The proposal would cap the share of a CD activity that can go to administrative and overhead costs at 15%, which means banks need documentation to prove they're under it. He calls that the politically charged part of the rule and the one thing he'd flag as genuinely new effort. Everything else on the CD test, he thinks, gets less subjective — more examples, tighter parameters, easier to support a qualification.

Two things he pushes back on. First, "majority of your lending" has never meant a 50/50 ratio. He walks through Delta banks running 40% in-area ratios and examining out satisfactory, because the loan demand simply wasn't there and the data showed it. Second, the argument that relief will pull community banks out of their communities. Banks don't sponsor the Little League team for the credit; they take the credit because they were going to sponsor it anyway.

Where he's honest about not knowing: what the Fed does. He'd spoken with an FDIC member the day before recording, and the answer there was the same — everyone's waiting. His advice to banks in the meantime is status quo. Nothing has changed yet, and the last time two agencies moved without the third, the industry got an unequal playing field and a do-over.

I really like getting to tell the stories of interesting banks I find along the way. Sonata Bank is one of those banks that's just a cool story. The CEO, Wendell Bontrager, is an interesting guy and I really enjoyed our chat. I think you will to.

There's a lot of "meat and potatoes" on today's episode. A lot of points made and shifts in how to think. It's a lot for one episode if I'm being honest. But, that's ok. It's the start of a new way of thinking in my opinion. I hope you enjoy listening to Laura and Cory discussing their new initiative https://www.communitybankers.ai/ and their new perspectives on AI and treasury management. I hope it'll make you think new thoughts because it's been changing my opinion on quite a few things.

Any chance to chat with Eric Alexander is going to be a good one but when he told me he had written a book about Steward Leadership, I knew we had to get him on. I don't want to spend too much time talking because the episode is that full of great insights from Eric.

Go ahead and pre-order the book here on his website: https://sixarrowsconsulting.com/book/

With Barret Grad School around the corner, the economy still continues to turn. A lot of news in the markets over the past week and when that happens...you already know...we bring in Jim Reber to break it down for us!

This past week, we put on a webinar about Practical AI for Community Banks. The engagement from the industry was amazing and it definitely won't be the last one we do. This episode is the AI summary of the webinar that I thought was absolutely amazing itself.

If you want to view the webinar and get the handouts, check out https://barretbanking.org/practical-ai-for-community-banks/

In this episode of the Main Street Banking podcast, we sit down with industry veterans Brian Bauer, CEO of Revio Insight, and Randy Goggins, CEO of Banker Bounty. The trio discusses an innovative new partnership that combines Revio’s advanced AI data analytics with Banker Bounty’s robust referral tracking systems. By leveraging real-time customer data and actionable insights, community banks can now identify untapped opportunities in their existing portfolios and empower their staff to convert those leads into meaningful new accounts.

The conversation dives deep into the challenges community banks face from larger institutions and fintech competitors like Chime and SoFi. Bauer and Goggins explain how their integrated solution levels the playing field, moving beyond mere "propensity" to deliver factual, high-quality leads directly to relationship bankers. For more information, you can reach Brian Bauer at [email protected] or visit revioinsight.com. Randy Goggins can be reached at [email protected] or via phone at 205-705-2716, and more information is available at bankerbounty.com.

As always, many thanks to ICBA Securities and the Barret School of Banking

As we expand our ag lending curriculum here at Barret and seek to grow the knowledge base for a new generation of ag lenders, we have to understand the role of government programs and crop insurance (among a whole lot of other things!)

Matthew Farrell is the Director of Ag Services for Arthur J. Gallagher and has a great deal of insight and expertise into this area. OBBB changed a the risk profile for a lot of our farming customers. That shifts our underwriting...and it's also a good time to start educating ourselves as to what/how these programs impact our credit decisioning.

Be sure to follow Matthew on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-farrell-9b933221/

and many thanks to ICBA Securities which you can find out more at https://www.icba.org/icba-securities

To learn more about Arthur J Gallagher's Crop Insurance and Consulting line of business go to https://www.ajg.com/insurance/crop-insurance/

Main Street Banking Economic Update: December 12, 2025 by Barret School of Banking