Community-bank consolidation is usually drawn as a falling line. That hides the strategic question a board actually asks: not how many disappeared, but whose territory converted — and who is still independent on the ground. Scrub the timeline, or press play, and watch the terrain recolor.
Reading the absorbed count: it tallies every community bank that merged out of existence — including holding companies collapsing charters they already owned. Treat it as an upper bound on genuine competitive loss, not a clean count of outside acquisitions. See every bank behind these numbers →
Pulling every insured institution and failure record across the five states. This runs live in your browser against the FDIC BankFind API — no data is stored.
Raw exit counts fall over time — but so does the number of banks left to exit. A shrinking population produces fewer exits even at an unchanged hazard rate. This shows exits per era as a share of the banks alive at the start of that era, which is the figure that survives scrutiny.
Every absorbed or failed bank, bucketed by its asset size in the FDIC record at the moment its charter ended. This is the direct read on which size of institution consolidation actually removes — the shape of the trough itself.
Universe. FDIC-insured institutions headquartered in WI, MN, IA, IL, MI, filtered to community-scale banks (under $10B in assets, the standard definition). Markers are placed at each bank's main-office coordinates.
The one caveat that matters. "Absorbed" counts a bank that left by merger. It does not yet separate a genuine outside acquisition from an intra-holding-company charter consolidation — a company collapsing charters it already owned. The FDIC record doesn't split these in one clean field, so treat the absorbed count as an upper bound on true competitive loss until the change-code layer is verified against a pinned pull.
Not shown. Banks with missing coordinates are dropped (count reported below). Coordinate coverage is complete for recent exits but declines to roughly 88% for banks that exited in the early 1990s — meaning the map modestly understates absorption in its earliest years. The bias is conservative: consolidation was, if anything, slightly heavier than these dots show. The normalized exit-rate panel is computed from the full record set, so it is unaffected by this gap.
Every community bank counted as absorbed or failed, by year of exit — built from the same query and the same filters as the map above, so these totals reconcile with the counters by construction. Banks without coordinates are excluded here too, matching what the map plots.