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Welcome to Industry Focus, the podcast that dives into a different sector of the stock market each day.

It's Monday, February 11th, and that means we're talking financials.

I'm your host Jason Moser, and on today's show we're going to dig into the latest big bank merger. We'll answer a couple

of listener emails. We'll have as always one to watch. But we begin today with part

two of our Between Two Fool's interview with the Maris Bank Corp CEO Dennis Zember.

Our conversation picks up where we left off on last week's show.

This week, Dennis talks more about the opportunities with the Maris' big merger with Fidelity, where he sees the company in the next five years, and he even offers up a book recommendation for us as well.

You all are in a tough market, obviously, with some very big and very well endowed competitors.

I mean banking is just a challenging space and smaller banks have their fair share of challenges, but you also have your fair share of opportunities.

And I wondered if you could speak a little bit more to the opportunities and the challenges that you see

as a smaller but clearly growing regional bank in today's economy?

Yeah, I, challenges, I, probably the biggest challenge at a mayor's bank, I, Bank that I say it's probably been a

challenge since I started Valentine's Day 2005 so 14 years I think from that

and probably not that I brought the challenge with me, but the challenge being a small bank, but growing and you know, being a small bank with a bigger vision is you're you're

always kind of punching ahead of your class and you it's hard being if you're a $1 billion bank that's grown quickly to $5 billion bank to be a $5 billion,

a lot of times you still have $1 billion processes and $1 billion solutions. And so we are always one billion dollars

solutions and so we are always I would tell you for 14 years we have been almost

with great net speed reengineering pretty much everything we do, especially on the administrative side of the business, you know, to accommodate,

...