If you live in Meridian, you’ve probably already noticed that Citizen’s National Bank is growing. More and more of those blue-roofed bank branches seem to be popping up all over the place.

Citizen’s is happy about its growth, but it promises not to get carried away.

The bank, which recently became a billion dollar company, wants all of its growth to take place within the state of Mississippi. According to President and CEO Archie McDonnell, growth inside Mississippi isn’t just a goal, it’s destiny.

In the 1990’s, McDonnell said, there were about 15,000 banking organizations in the United States. Now there are 7,000. By the end of the decade, McDonnell believes that there may be only 4 or 5 thousand, and that there’s a strong likelihood that only two or three of those will be community banks run from, and within the state of Mississippi.

Citizen’s National Bank’s destiny, he said, is to be one of those two or three.

“We are staging ourselves to be one of the community banks that’s left,” he said.

The bank has been part of McDonnell’s life since 1960, when his father joined the organization. McDonnell himself has been working for Citizen’s National Bank for many decades, becoming president in the 1980’s, and CEO upon his father’s retirement in 1999. Since then, the bank has grown tremendously, both in terms of revenue and number of branches. It used to be difficult to find a branch outside of Meridian. Now it’s not.

The changes, McDonnell said, are “a function of the way the world has changed and the way the industry has consolidated.”

Part of the changes that have taken place include the lay-off of about 10 percent of the bank’s employees. McDonnell said the cuts occurred because of changes in the banking industry as a whole. Some jobs, he said, were outdated, or the bank had outgrown them.

The bank’s growth has been a big change, he said, and the lay-offs were necessary in order for the bank to survive that change. “What’s important to us as a company is that this bank survive,” he said, “There is a time where, if you don’t change, then you outdate yourself … and eventually slide and wilt out of existence.”

Wilting out of existence is certainly not what Citizen’s National Bank intends to do. Instead, McDonnell hopes that, with larger banks putting their centers of operation into more economically blessed areas, Citizen’s will be able to pick up some of Mississippi’s economic slack.

“If we (Mississippi) are going to break out of being disadvantaged economically,” he said, “We have to do it ourselves.”

McDonnell is proud that his company has chosen to keep its center of operations in Meridian. “The fact that there can be a billion dollar bank headquartered in Meridian, Mississippi … That means something to us,” he said.

The growth of the bank during an economic climate in which most banks are shrinking into nothingness has brought national attention. McDonnell was recently featured in American Executive magazine, where he was praised for helping the bank to “break a billion.”

But despite the national recognition, McDonnell says the bank has no plans whatever to expand outside of Mississippi, even into neighboring states. Mississippi has been the home of Citizen’s National Bank since 1888, and home is where it plans to stay.