2026 Dynamic Dozen No. 3: OMB Bank

SBJ: What has been key to your recent growth?
Mark Harrington: Really good people in really good markets. Southwest Missouri and Springfield are thriving markets. We’re in Kansas City right now. Another opportunity is bank consolidation. Independent banks being purchased has led us to opportunities to hire people who want to work in a community bank and attract customers who want to work with a community bank.

SBJ: What have been your strategies for talent acquisition?
Harrington: A lot of our people are able to get in front of the young talent, talent that’s new to Springfield or talent that’s grown up and gone to school here. I consider us a very good culture. We invest in our people. We’re known as a good place to work. And when there is growth and innovation going on, that just seems to attract talent. Then, if we take care of the talent, just like if we take good care of our customers, the referral piece of that is just really a dynamic thing for us.

SBJ: How have your fintech partnerships propelled growth?
Harrington: We look at fintech as a different business, a different community, that’s nationwide. Instead of trying to compete and build interfaces and acquire customers that way, we’ve gone this partnership route. Fintechs need access to the banking system for FDIC insurance. We need the innovation to be able to operate outside the markets we’re in physically. We made a significant investment getting there. It’s the excitement of what we see as new and how people want to bank today mixed with the fear of becoming obsolete if we don’t innovate.

SBJ: What are your top issues when it comes to managing growth?
Harrington: You can’t outgrow your capital, and that’s for your own good. And the larger the bank gets the more sophisticated our systems have to be. You have to invest ahead of time, ahead of growth, which is what we did in the digital, for example, to make sure we had every tool possible. So, we do have to slow down on some things to make sure we have compliance and customer protections in place.

SBJ: What has OMB’s growth enabled you to do, and how do you stay sustainable?
Harrington: Banking is a business of scale. So, with increased scale comes better margins and better earnings. We’ve invested a fair amount into OMBX and banking as a service. The growth has produced the revenue to allow us to push into new lines of business and to do things like enter the Kansas City market. You just have to be careful because, as you scale up, your problems can scale with you. The technology is there to grow at this speed, it’s just the time it takes to make sure there’s not something we’re missing; that our policies, procedures, talent, controls are there for the next level of growth. We constantly monitor where that growth is relative to our capital base. There are a lot of things – interest rate cycle, credit cycle, national economy – that we can’t know for sure. Strategic plans are good, but if you live by your strategic plan, you’re going to be blinded to the things that come along that you should be adjusting to.