Your loan book grew $94 million last year. Your core deposits grew $4 million.
A bank executing well, with one lever it has not pulled.
Waukesha State Bank is having an exceptional year. Loans and leases grew 8.44% against a peer group that grew 2.74%. Return on tangible assets of 2.03% sits in the 89th percentile. Credit is clean, the funding base is 99.3% relationship money, and cost of funding at 1.50% is better than peers. This is a bank executing well, and management has publicly committed capital to support the next decade of it.
The balance sheet shows that same growth from the funding side. Over the trailing year loans grew roughly $94 million while total deposits grew $25 million and core deposits grew $4 million. Loan-to-deposit has climbed from 90.0% to 95.6% against a peer group at 78.4%, and roughly $182 million of wholesale funding now sits on the balance sheet. The bank is close to fully loaned out, which means the next deposit dollar does not sit in securities. It funds a loan that is already waiting.
Deposit accounts stand at 58,865, down 6.6% over the year while the peer group moved down 2.2%. Average balance per account is $21,321. At the same time, mobile enrollment is 57.2% against a peer average of 37.8%, and online banking enrollment is 65.0% against 44.6%.
The customers are already in the digital channel at well above peer rates. What is missing is the intelligence layer that turns those sessions into captured paychecks, deeper balances and referrals.
Strong on every line except the one that funds the rest.
Call Report period ended 03.31.2026. Peer comparison is the FI Navigator strategic focus peer set (commercial real estate lending, high non-maturity funding, high off-balance-sheet fee income). Digital enrollment is compared against the asset-size peer group.
| Metric | Waukesha | Peers | What it signals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loan and lease growthPeriod growth rate | 8.44% | 2.74% | Loan demand is not the constraint. It is roughly three times the peer pace. |
| Loan-to-deposit ratioNet loans and leases to total deposits | 95.6% | 78.4% | Near fully loaned out, up from 90.0% a year ago. New deposits deploy at full margin. |
| Core deposit growthPeriod growth rate | 0.33% | 2.56% | The funding engine has flattened while the lending engine accelerated. |
| Deposit account growthPeriod growth rate, 58,865 accounts | -6.60% | -2.17% | Roughly 4,200 fewer accounts year over year. Household count is the lever with the most room. |
| Average deposit balanceTotal deposits to total accounts | $21,321 | $43,349 | Depth per relationship is the second lever, independent of adding households. |
| Net interest marginTax-equivalent, to average earning assets | 4.09% | 3.80% | Every incremental deposit dollar is worth more here than at the average peer. |
| Cost of fundingInterest expense to average funding | 1.50% | 1.66% | Funding is already cheap. The opportunity is volume, not repricing. |
| Return on tangible assets89th percentile | 2.03% | 1.27% | A high performer. Growth capital is being deployed well. |
| Mobile banking enrollmentApproximately 33,200 enrolled | 57.2% | 37.8% | The audience is already assembled and logging in. |
| Online banking enrollmentApproximately 37,800 enrolled | 65.0% | 44.6% | Digital reach is a genuine strength, and an unused distribution channel for growth. |
Wholesale borrowings and repurchase agreements now stand at roughly 11.2% of assets, and pledged assets have moved from 8.0% of assets in September 2025 to 16.2% in March 2026. That is the balance sheet substituting borrowed funding for core deposit funding. Every dollar of primary household deposit raised reduces the need to do so, and it does so at a better spread.
One data layer. Four engines. Three lines that move.
GROW is the discipline of turning enriched transaction data into the three growth lines a bank board actually tracks: deposits, loans and interchange. The four engines are the mechanism. Primacy is the intermediate outcome. The three lines are the result.
The diagnosis decides which line leads. At Waukesha the funding gap puts deposits first, with loans and interchange building on the same data layer at no additional integration.
Three lines, and what each one looks like here.
Each leg is anchored to a figure Waukesha State Bank reported, not to a generic capability claim.
What the numbers say. Loans grew roughly $94M last year against $4M of core deposit growth. Loan-to-deposit reached 95.6% against a peer group at 78.4%, and about $182M of wholesale funding is filling the difference.
What GROW does. Identifies which of the 33,200 mobile-enrolled customers have payroll landing elsewhere, then removes the punch-out that kills switch completion. Every captured paycheck is core funding that replaces a borrowed dollar.
What the numbers say. The funded book is still growing 8.44%, but forward commitments tell a different story: loan commitment growth has decelerated from 23.7% a year ago to 5.6%, now level with the peer group at 5.8%. Separately, personal loans are 0.61% of the loan book. Consumer lending is close to a blank page across 58,865 households.
What GROW does. When a customer connects an outside auto lender, card or mortgage, that is borrowing intent visible in real time. Instant Account Verification then removes friction at funding. The bank already runs a consumer origination platform, so the constraint is lead flow rather than infrastructure.
What the numbers say. The credit card program runs through Elan as an agent relationship, so debit is the interchange line the bank owns outright. Service charges are 8.43% of off-balance-sheet fee income. With deposit accounts down 6.6%, everyday card spend erodes alongside the household count.
What GROW does. Enriched data identifies which recurring payments (utilities, subscriptions, memberships) currently run as ACH, then targets those customers to move the payment onto the debit card. It lifts recurring interchange and reduces ACH cost at the same time.
Wealth management is 48% of the bank's off-balance-sheet fee income, in the 96th percentile against peers, and the bank has publicly said it is exploring an expansion of the Prairie Trust and Wealth Management facility. The same aggregation that reveals borrowing intent also reveals held-away investable assets. That is a Prairie Trust referral list generated by the digital channel rather than a branch conversation, running on the data layer already paid for by the deposit motion.
One assumption. One verified rate.
The model deliberately avoids stacked assumptions. It multiplies one number the bank chooses (new core deposits raised) by one number the bank reported (net interest margin). Nothing else.
Model Inputs
The model counts no fee income, no interchange, no wealth management referral revenue and no compounding from the additional lending capacity that funding unlocks. Those are upside, not inputs.
Annual incremental net interest income
The third row uses the bank's own reported figures. At $2.8 million it is roughly 8.6% of annualized net income. Subchapter S status means it is not diluted by a corporate tax line.
These are published results at institutions that deployed the capability. They are not an average across all clients, not a commitment, and not a projection for Waukesha State Bank.
Institutions that solved this exact problem.
Matched on mechanism rather than asset size. What matters is that the constraint was the same: strong lending, flat household growth, an already-enrolled digital base that was not being acted on.
Two ways in, and neither requires a core conversion.
Waukesha State Bank runs a Fiserv core and digital banking environment today. Nothing in this brief asks the bank to change that. Which of the two paths below fits best is a scoping question for discovery rather than an assumption to make in a brief.
MX delivers its own experience alongside the bank's existing channels. The core and the current digital banking platform are untouched, and there is no dependency on a third-party roadmap. This is the fastest way to prove the deposit motion against real Waukesha data.
Capabilities are delivered within the channel the 33,200 enrolled customers already use. This path depends on an integration approach agreed between the bank, its digital banking provider and MX, and would be scoped jointly before any commitment is made.
Waukesha State Bank has been with its current mobile banking vendor for 13 years, against a peer average of nine. That is a long, stable relationship and there is no argument here for disrupting it. It does mean the enrichment and intelligence layer above it has had a decade to fall behind what the same customers now see in the fintech apps they connect to.
Three ways to test this against your own numbers.
The fastest path to a decision is replacing the one adjustable input in the model with the bank's real onboarding and payroll data.
I put this together from your own call report rather than a template, because the funding gap in your numbers is specific and the answer to it is too. I would like 45 minutes to run these figures against your actuals.
Account Executive · MX Technologies · mx.com
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