If the consolidation of American community banking continues at its current pace, and the 4,100 small banks left in this country are absorbed, one by one, by the four or five megabanks that already dominate the system, you will wake up in 2040 in a country where the entire concept of a bank as a place that knows you, that lends to you because of who you are rather than because of a credit score generated by an algorithm in New Jersey, that has a lobby and a teller and a cookie and a person whose name you can remember, has ceased to exist, and you will not have noticed it happening, because the disappearance will have been gradual, and gradual disappearances are the only kind humans cannot see. The lobby cookie will be the first thing to go. It is already going. The cookies are stale at most banks now, set out by a corporate mandate from a regional manager in Charlotte who has never met the customers and considers the cookie a line item in a budget that needs to be reduced. After the cookies, the tellers. The tellers will be replaced by a kiosk, then by an app, then by nothing at all, because the megabank will have decided that anyone who needs to deposit a check in person is a customer they do not want anyway. After the tellers, the branch. The branch will close, the building will become a vape shop, and the only physical evidence that there was ever a bank in your town will be the carved stone above the door of the building, which the new tenants will, at some point, paint over. After the branch, the phone number. The phone number will route to a call center in Bangalore, where a polite man named Rajesh, who has been given a script and a 12-week training program, will pick up after a 47-minute hold and address you by a first name that he has been trained to mispronounce in a way that maximizes warmth-per-second-of-call as measured by an internal metric. Rajesh will not be able to help you. Rajesh has no authority. Rajesh's authority has been deliberately removed because authority distributed across thousands of call center employees is a compliance risk that the megabank's general counsel has spent fifteen years systematically eliminating. You will hang up. You will call back. You will sit on hold again. This will be your relationship with your bank. The CEO of your bank will be a man named Brian who lives in Manhattan and earns $32 million a year and has never set foot in your town and never will. The board of your bank will consist of nine other men named Brian who all sit on each other's boards and who collectively decide, every quarter, that the priorities of the institution are, in this order, regulatory compliance, dividend stability, share buybacks, and last, somewhere far down the list, the actual customer experience, which has been outsourced to a subsidiary that has been outsourced to a vendor that has been outsourced to Rajesh. None of them will ever meet you. None of them will ever know you exist. You will be a number in a database, and the number will be optimized, every quarter, by an algorithm whose objective function is the bank's net interest margin and not, in any way, your wellbeing. This is the future being constructed, in real time, by every acquisition that takes a community bank off the public markets and folds it into a regional that will, in turn, be folded into a megabank in the next cycle. The future is not inevitable. There are 4,100 small banks left. They are being acquired at 1.7x book. Every one that is acquired is a town that loses the last institution that knew its name, and a country that loses one more node of the relational economy that used to be the entire foundation of American commerce. You can own these banks before they are acquired. You can collect the premium when they sell. You can also, if you choose, refuse to bank at the megabanks and keep your deposits at the small ones for as long as they exist, which, at the current rate, will be roughly another 25 years. After that, you will be banking with Brian. Rajesh will pick up the phone. The cookie will be a memory. And you will, on some quiet Tuesday afternoon in 2049, remember the teller at the branch in your hometown who knew your name, and you will understand, too late, what the consolidation actually cost.