ICBA: Celebrating Independence Every Day

Like many of you, I got to enjoy our recent July 4th holiday with the essential ingredients for celebrating our Independence Day: family, friends, food and fireworks.

But recognizing the birth of our great nation is of course about more than cooking out and enjoying ourselves. It also offers us a moment to reflect on the self-evident rights laid out by our founders—liberty, equality and independence from tyranny.

And I think these values are particularly relevant to us as community bankers, because we act on them every day.

At ICBA—the Independent Community Bankers of America—we believe in local decision making and accessibility, not financial empires headquartered thousands of miles from their customers. We believe in fair and equitable competition instead of favorable treatment for monopolistic institutions, whether they are the East India Company or contemporary too-big-to-fail megabanks.

ICBA is committed to upholding a system of independent, community-based institutions that has served our nation from its earliest days and that represents what makes our nation great. God bless America, and God bless our nation’s community banks.