SPONSORED BY While the business of community banking is ongoing, a new year is always a good time to take stock of the challenges and opportunities ahead. We surveyed community bank presidents and CEOs about their plans for 2025-and found that those plans look very different from our last survey in 2022. By Don Sadler * Illustrated by Jonny Wan In 2022, as the financial industry was emerging from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, 56% of community bank leaders who responded to Independent Banker's Community Bank CEO Outlook survey said their biggest business challenge was making more loans to offset a flood of deposits. Just 4% said it was growing deposits. This year, these results have been flipped: More than half (54%) of community bank executives say their biggest challenge in 2025 is growing deposits. Just 17% said making more loans is their top priority. The shift in focus from making loans to growing deposits is mainly due to the temporary effects the pandemic had on the financial marketplace three years ago. The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) injected short-term cash into business coffers and bank deposit accounts, lessening customers' need to take out traditional bank loans. " We will be emphasizing deposits more than we have the past few years because the pandemic created such an influx of