I wish Stitch had existed when I was running a community bank

For years, I sat in the CEO’s chair at a community bank, watching a slow bleed we couldn’t stop. Not one dramatic event, but a thousand small losses. A customer who moved their deposits to an online bank because our app couldn’t do mobile check deposit reliably. A small business that took its lending relationship to a fintech because our underwriting took three weeks instead of three days. A long-time depositor who quietly opened a Chime account for their kid because we didn’t have anything that felt built for how people actually bank now.

None of it was because we didn’t care. It was because we didn’t have the tools, the talent, or the time to compete with institutions that had none of our constraints and all of our customers’ attention.

Looking back, here is what I wish someone had handed me, and why a bankers’ bank model like Stitch would have changed the trajectory of the institution I ran.

Our technology was quietly losing us customers

We weren’t running on anything embarrassing, just aging. Every year the gap between what our core could do and what a fintech competitor could do widened a little more. We’d hear about it secondhand: a customer mentioning they’d opened an account somewhere with real-time notifications, a better app, instant peer-to-peer transfers. By the time it showed up in our attrition numbers, the decision had already been made somewhere else.

We weren’t losing customers because they stopped trusting us. We were losing them because trust wasn’t enough anymore. They wanted a product experience too, and we couldn’t build one fast enough to matter.

We had no way to evaluate the flood of fintech options in front of us

Every vendor conference, every cold email, every board meeting brought another pitch: a new lending platform, a new card program, a new BNPL integration, a new digital account opening tool. Dozens of vendors, all claiming to be the answer, all wanting a meeting.

We had no internal process for vetting any of it. No one on staff had evaluated a fintech partnership before, let alone a dozen of them. We didn’t know which questions to ask about data security, about regulatory exposure, about integration complexity, about which vendors would still be solvent in three years. So mostly we did nothing, which meant staying still while the market moved.

Fee income was disappearing exactly when our margins couldn’t absorb it

Interchange, overdraft, treasury services: fee income that used to be reliable started migrating to fintechs offering the same functions with better interfaces and lower friction. At the same time, our net interest margin was under real pressure from the rate environment and deposit competition.

Losing fee income and watching net interest income compress at the same time is a brutal combination. It’s the kind of squeeze that shows up in board packets as a trend line pointing the wrong direction for quarters in a row, and there is no single lever to pull to fix it. You need new revenue sources, and we didn’t have the capacity to build any.

Our tech team was already at capacity just keeping the lights on

Our technology staff, and it wasn’t a large team, spent their days on patches, upgrades, vendor management for existing systems, and the never-ending list of maintenance tickets. There was no slack in that team’s schedule to stand up a new product, let alone vet the information security requirements that come with connecting to a new fintech partner’s API.

Every new product idea that came out of a strategy session eventually ran into the same wall: “we don’t have anyone who can build and secure that.” Not because leadership didn’t want to move, but because there was no bandwidth to move with.

Every other team was stretched just as thin

It wasn’t only technology. Product onboarding took too long because there was no dedicated team driving it. Compliance was already stretched managing existing regulatory obligations; asking them to also underwrite and monitor a new fintech partnership felt unreasonable. Marketing had their hands full with day-to-day campaigns and had no bandwidth to launch and promote a new offering, let alone position it well.

We simply didn’t have the in-house expertise to do any of this ourselves, across any of the functions that would need to be involved: tech, compliance, marketing, product, or risk.

What I wish we’d had: a partner built to carry this load

This is where a model like Stitch’s bankers’ bank approach would have changed everything for us.

Instead of trying to build modern lending, card, or deposit capabilities from scratch, or blindly picking from an overwhelming vendor landscape, we could have worked with a partner that had already done the vetting, already built the infrastructure, and already understood the regulatory terrain community banks operate in. A partner that could plug in new products behind the scenes while our customers kept banking with us, not with whichever fintech pulled them away next.

That’s the part that matters most. This is about protecting the relationship, not handing our customers off to someone else. Our customers wanted more: more convenient tools, more product options, a better digital experience. A bankers’ bank partner would have let us give it to them under our own brand, without asking my tiny tech team to become full-stack fintech engineers overnight, and without asking compliance to become fintech risk specialists on top of everything else on their plate.

Done right, that’s how you keep deposits from walking out the door. That’s how you protect fee income instead of watching it drift to competitors. That’s how a community bank stays a community bank, rooted in the relationships that make it valuable, while still meeting customers where they are.

I didn’t have that option. Banks today do. I’d take it in a heartbeat.