For community banks · $500M–$10B in assets
Every employee, using AI to its fullest. Your governance, already examiner-ready.
Your credit analysts, BSA investigators, and deposit team shouldn't be figuring AI out alone. We give your bank the tools, the training, and the guidance for every employee to use AI well — with SR 11-7 documentation built in from week one. Four to eight weeks. Fixed scope. Fixed duration.
The world you recognize
The work your people do versus the work they could do.
Your five credit analysts each spend 25 hours building a single commercial credit memo. At a national bank, the same memo takes two hours. The difference is not talent. It is tooling.
Your BSA team burns 60% of its time adjudicating false-positive alerts. Real fraud gets less attention than it should. SAR filings rose 18.5% between 2023 and 2024. Your team did not get 18.5% larger.
Your deposit team has no systematic way to see which top-decile customers are about to move half their balance to a national bank or a neobank. They find out on Friday. The customer left on Tuesday.
Your loan officers close slower than their counterparts at banks with AI-assisted workflows. Not because they are less capable. Because every step — spreading, memo drafting, documentation assembly — takes three times as long.
Your efficiency ratio tells part of the story. The rest is in the hours your people spend on work that a national bank automated two years ago.
Your people are excellent. Their tooling is a decade behind. That gap is closing — but not because vendors are solving it. It is closing because community banks are starting to build.
What each employee can do after
Not "the bank gets faster." Specific people doing specific work in less time.
Credit analysts
Your analysts produce commercial credit memos in 15 hours instead of 25. They spend the recovered time on underwriting judgment — the work that actually protects the bank — not formatting. They understand the AI tools. They adapt the workflow when needs change. They run the system without calling us.
BSA investigators
Your BSA team works the 5% of alerts that matter. The system filters the 95% that do not. False positives drop by 60%. Your BSA officer understands how the tuning works and can adjust thresholds herself. The team focuses on the fraud that actually threatens the bank.
Deposit team
Your deposit team identifies at-risk top-decile customers before they leave. They trigger the right intervention at the right time. They measure the result. They own the system and the data. The bank retains the relationships that protect NIM and defend cost of funds.
Loan officers
Your loan officers close faster without cutting corners on documentation. Faster decisions. Better documentation. More capacity from the same team. The efficiency ratio improves because your people are more productive, not because you cut headcount.
Your team, not ours.
Every system we build, your people learn to run. We train credit analysts in their 50s and BSA officers who have never used AI. The tools fit into the workflows your people already know. We teach in their language, not ours. When we leave, the capability stays because your team has it.
How an engagement works
An engagement you can stop after any stage.
01
Diagnostic
Four to eight weeks
A specific assessment of where AI will make your team most productive — and where it will not. You leave with a prioritized roadmap, a governance practice sized to your bank, and a board-ready summary. Within your personal authority. No board vote required.
See the full diagnostic →02
Build and teach
Three to six months
We build one working system — credit memo workflow, BSA triage, or deposit retention — and train your team to run it. Fixed scope. Fixed duration. Your analysts, investigators, or bankers use the system on Monday. They understand the tools. They can adapt the workflow.
Every build includes the governance layer and examiner-ready documentation as standard.
03
Expand
As needed
The architecture from Stage 2 extends to additional use cases at lower cost. Your team is trained. The governance framework is in place. Each additional system is faster to build because the foundation exists.
What does not happen. No auto-renewal. No implied second engagement. If the diagnostic shows AI is not the right answer for your situation, we say so.
The governance layer
Built in from the start. Not an add-on. Not a separate engagement.
Model inventory and validation. Every AI system is documented in your model inventory with proportional validation — sized to your bank's actual risk profile, not a $50B bank's governance practice. OCC Bulletin 2025-26 explicitly permits community banks to scope validation to materiality. We build to that standard.
Examiner-ready documentation. Effective-challenge framework, model documentation, ongoing monitoring plan. When the examiner asks — and the next exam cycle will include AI-related questions — your team hands them the documentation. It is designed for that moment.
Third-party risk management. Planning, due diligence, contract, monitoring, and termination provisions are documented per OCC Bulletin 2023-17 and the community-bank supplement OCC Bulletin 2024-11. We pre-complete the vendor-risk questionnaire before your CRO asks for it.
SR 11-7 alignment. Every build maps to the effective-challenge requirements of SR 11-7. Your team is trained to maintain the documentation — not just the system. The governance survives staff turnover because your people understand it.
Your CRO should not have to do extra work because you adopted AI. The documentation is ready. The questionnaire is complete. The alignment brief exists before she asks for it.
Three ways AI is making bank teams more productive
Pick the use case that matters most to your bank.
Credit memo workflow
BSA/AML alert triage
Deposit retention
Common questions
What community-bank executives ask before the working session.
What does an AI consultant cost a community bank?
An entry diagnostic for a community bank typically runs $25K–$60K for a four-to-eight-week fixed-scope engagement. The engagement produces a written assessment, a prioritized roadmap, a governance practice sized to the bank, and a board-ready summary — within the CEO's or CFO's personal authority, no board vote required.
See what an AI consultant actually costs a community bank for the full pricing breakdown including build-stage ranges and what each line item buys.
What does SR 11-7 require for AI in a community bank?
SR 11-7 requires that any quantitative model — including AI/ML models — used for bank decisions be subject to model-risk-management discipline: model inventory, validation, ongoing monitoring, change control, and effective challenge by independent reviewers with the authority to alter or restrict the model. OCC Bulletin 2025-26 (October 2025) clarifies that these expectations scale with bank size and complexity, but the underlying SR 11-7 standard is not relaxed for community banks.
See AI governance for community banks: what SR 11-7 requires and the glossary entry on SR 11-7.
How does OCC Bulletin 2023-17 apply to AI vendors?
OCC Bulletin 2023-17 (the joint OCC / Federal Reserve / FDIC third-party risk-management guidance) treats AI vendors the same way it treats any other third-party relationship: planning, due diligence, contract negotiation, ongoing monitoring, and termination must each be documented. For community banks, OCC Bulletin 2024-11 (May 2024) adds specific expectations for fintech partnerships, including embedded-banking and BaaS arrangements that frequently carry AI components.
See AI vendor diligence: the OCC 2023-17 and 2024-11 checklist.
How long does an AI diagnostic take for a community bank?
Four to eight weeks, fixed-scope, fixed-fee. The schedule is set before the work begins; there are no hourly overruns or change orders without written approval. The engagement produces four deliverables: an AI readiness assessment specific to the bank, a prioritized implementation roadmap, a governance practice sized to the institution, and a board-ready summary the CEO can hand to the risk committee without editing.
Do community banks need to inventory AI tools differently than large banks?
The inventory format and rigor follow SR 11-7 and OCC 2025-26 expectations regardless of bank size. What differs is materiality scoping: community banks may scope validation depth to the materiality of each tool, but every AI tool that touches a bank decision (credit, BSA/AML, deposit, capital) must be in the inventory with a documented model description, validation status, and monitoring plan. The most common gap is the long tail of vendor products that have quietly added AI features — those are inventory-eligible whether or not the bank "deployed AI."
How can a community bank cut BSA false positives without missing real alerts?
The reduction comes from an audited rule-engine baseline, a documented governance protocol for threshold changes, and an SR 21-8-aligned overlay tuned only after the rule engine is well understood. Community banks running this discipline have cut false-positive rates by roughly 60% while preserving SAR-quality scores. The mistake to avoid is deploying an AI overlay first; rules tuning under governance solves most of the problem and produces the documentation an examiner expects.
See how to cut BSA false positives by 60% without missing alerts and the BSA/AML alert triage playbook.
What does AI-assisted credit memo workflow look like in practice?
The pattern is unchanged at the supervision layer (analyst writes, credit officer reviews, lending authority approves) but compressed at the production layer: AI drafts the narrative from structured borrower data, the analyst edits and exercises judgment on the underwriting questions, and the recovered hours go to deeper analytical work. Community banks running this workflow have moved from ~25 analyst hours per memo to ~15 hours, with SR 11-7 documentation built into every memo as standard.
See how banks compressed credit-memo time from 25 to 15 hours.
A decision your successor will thank you for
A 90-minute working session. You leave with a written assessment specific to your bank.
You describe the problem. We describe how we would solve it. The deliverable arrives within 24 hours. No second meeting implied. We build working systems your team uses every day. We teach your people to run them. The governance is built in.
For community banks $500M to $10B in assets.
SR 11-7 documentation built into every engagement.