For credit unions and community banks
Relationship banking needs tools built for the relationship
Being compliant and showing an examiner you're compliant are different jobs. Credit unions and community banks do both on lean staffing: suspicious activity reports, loan files, mortgage disclosures, exam prep. Much of that work follows patterns an agent can prepare. Very little of it fits the generic tools you're pitched.
The work changes with the institution. A $150 million credit union and a $5 billion community bank answer to different regulators, carry different exam loads, and serve members and customers in different ways. Mare & Oak knows how to scope automation, applications, and data foundations to your charter, your size, and your examiner, on top of the core and systems you already run.
Compliance doesn't scale down with your headcount
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11–15.5%
of payroll goes to compliance at the smallest community banks, versus 6–10% at the largest.
CSBS, “Too Small to Scale,” 2025. Ten years of CSBS Annual Survey of Community Banks data.
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730+
hours a year: what the median credit union spends on BSA filings.
America's Credit Unions, member survey, 2026.
A suspicious activity report isn't one task. It's an investigation, the supporting documents, a second review, the approvals, and a written record of how the decision was made. The same shape repeats in loan files, mortgage reporting, and exam prep. Gathering, drafting, and routing follow patterns, which is exactly the work agents handle well. Hand it off, and your BSA officer and lenders spend their hours on judgment instead of assembly.
Agents that prepare the compliance work
Agents gather the account history and supporting documents, draft the SAR narrative, loan file summary, or exam response, and route it for review. Your BSA officer and lenders own the decision, the filing, and the sign-off.
Book a Call →Generic tools are built for scale. Your advantage is the relationship.
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“…banks tell us that they hear a lot of sales pitches for algorithmic lending, outsourcing customer service, and the like, when what they are really looking for is an app that can enhance relationship banking: their natural advantage.”
Federal Reserve Governor Michael S. Barr, “Community Banking: The Cornerstone of Building Communities,” 2025.
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47%
of community bankers named AI for customer support an important focus in 2025, up from 31% a year earlier.
CSBS Annual Survey of Community Banks, as cited by Governor Barr, 2025.
Larger institutions standardize their processes to boost efficiency. Your edge is knowing the member or business owner across the desk, and the software you're pitched rarely protects it. We'd rather build the tool around your relationship model than ask your staff to work around a tool built for someone else's.
Smaller institutions feel this most, because so much of the compliance work runs through outside help. At the smallest community banks, between half and nearly two-thirds of consulting spend goes to compliance. The right tool brings that outside work into your record, tracked and ready for an examiner.
Applications shaped around relationship banking
Purpose-built workspaces for work generic tools handle poorly, such as a lending workbench that keeps the file, the full relationship, and the review history in one place.
Book a Call →Agents that bring you closer to the people you serve
Too much banking technology puts distance between an institution and the people it serves: a chatbot in place of a teller, a portal in place of a loan officer. Build for connection instead. Agents take the preparation off your staff's desks so they have more time across the desk, and purpose-built applications put the conversation in context for your team.
Book a Call →The data gap is a size gap
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“Large institutions are developing their own AI systems, while smaller institutions may be unable to do so because they lack the internal data resources required to train large models.”
U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Managing Artificial Intelligence-Specific Cybersecurity Risks in the Financial Services Sector,” 2024.
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“NCUA lacks the authority to examine technology service providers, despite credit unions' increasing reliance on them for AI-driven services.”
U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-25-107197, 2025.
You don't need a large bank's data science team to close that gap. You need to know where your data is and how it's being used, which is Treasury's own recommendation, and you need it connected under shared definitions so every agent reads the same member the same way. For credit unions especially, that governance is yours to own: the regulator can't examine your vendors for you. So every agent we build works with access scoped to its job, and every action it takes is logged against the account or file it touched, ready for an examiner to follow.
A data foundation agents can rely on
Core, lending, card, and service data connected under shared definitions and scoped access, so staff see the whole relationship and agents work from the same facts your team does.
See how we work →