A Full Circle Banker
After a detour through ministry, Gay Dempsey came back to banking and then some.
Gay Dempsey started her banking career when she was in high school. She’d leave class early each day to be an afternoon teller at the bank where her father worked. Soon, she was tasked with making calls about past-due collections, and from there, her responsibilities grew.
“It was a full-service bank on Saturdays, so I was trained to do a lot,” said Dempsey, who is CEO of the Bank of Lincoln County in Fayetteville and was installed this summer as the new Board Chairman of the Tennessee Bankers Association.
The Long Way Around
Dempsey’s was not a straight path to the top. After college at Auburn University, she married her high school sweetheart, Michael. The pair moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where Dempsey took a job as a credit analyst at a local bank. Soon she was training as a lender.
The Dempseys moved back to Fayetteville, where Gay continued to work at the bank; however, when they started a family, she felt herself called in a different direction and spent the next 13 years serving her church in ways that had nothing to do with interest rates or loan portfolios. But the detour, it turned out, was more like a foundation. The patience, listening and trust-building she practiced in ministry would prove to serve her well.
In 2000, the Fayetteville bank where she got her first paycheck had just been sold, and the loss of the town’s only community bank was felt immediately.
“My dad thought he was ready to retire, but instead he came to me talking about starting a new bank,” she recalled. “The community rallied around it, and we raised the money very quickly for a de novo.”
Once the non-compete had expired, the Bank of Lincoln County was born. Today the bank operates three branches with 44 employees and approximately $230 million in assets.
Dempsey has served on the board since the beginning, but she didn’t return to a full-time career in banking until 2008. “I fought the Lord hard for two years,” she said. “Honestly, it was time, and I just missed it so much.”
Dempsey got her second start in credit risk management during one of the most turbulent periods in modern banking history. But her understanding of banking ran much deeper: Over the full course of her career, she had worked her way through virtually every corner of a bank, from operations and compliance to customer service. That breadth of experience would prove essential as her responsibilities grew. She became executive vice president before ultimately stepping into the role she holds today—chief executive officer of the bank she and her father helped build.
Servant First
All of her experience, even her years spent in ministry, informs her leadership style today. “My goal is to be a servant leader—to come alongside our staff,” she said. “I’m never going to ask someone to do something I’m not willing to do myself.”
The bank’s first core value is that faith is its guiding principle, and Dempsey doesn’t separate that from how she leads. One of her touchstones is Colossians 3:23: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord.”
That conviction shapes the culture she’s trying to build—one where employees feel safe, encouraged and invested in their own growth. And having worked in every department herself, she brings a hands-on understanding of how the pieces fit together.
“I’ve literally worked in every department in the bank and that gives me a respect of how everything flows and works together,” she said. “We’re all part of the team, we all have a role to play, and everyone is responsible for the bank’s success.”
That same philosophy extends to how the bank thinks about its customers. Lincoln County sits in the rolling hills of southern Tennessee, a rural community where cattle farming anchors the local economy. Unemployment is low, though many residents cross the state line daily for work in northern Alabama. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows everyone—and where a community bank isn’t just a financial institution.
“We want our customers to succeed because we love seeing our community do well,” Dempsey said. “We’re generous with our volunteer hours and financial donations, because as a community leader, we’re encouraging others to give generously too.”
It also means finding ways to say yes when other institutions might not bother. A loan request that doesn’t fit neatly in the box isn’t a dead end—it’s a conversation.
“It’s easy to say no,” she said. “We try to figure out how we can say yes.”
That might mean structuring seasonal payments to match a farmer’s cash flow, or helping a small business owner understand their receivables for the first time. Many customers, she noted, have her cell phone number.
Closer Than It Looks
In 2015, Dempsey began pressing deeper into her involvement with the Tennessee Bankers Association and, eventually, the Independent Community Bankers of America.
She served on ICBA committees before becoming the organization’s federal delegate, a role she has held for almost six years. In March, Dempsey took the perspective of a community bank to Washington, D.C., when she testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Financial Institutions on the growing threat of payments fraud.
Experiences like these give her a firsthand appreciation for how much is at stake in Washington. Regulations that seem abstract at the federal level often land directly on Main Street.
One example she cites is Section 1071, a small-business data-collection rule that would require banks to collect more than 70 data points for every small-business loan. For a large institution with dedicated compliance staff, that burden is manageable. For a community bank with 44 employees, it’s a different story.
“It has the ability to have a huge impact on small business lending,” said Dempsey, who
has served on a task force working to reform or repeal it. “There is bipartisan support right now, and if we get it pulled back, that will be a huge win and proof that it’s important for bankers to keep having their voices heard.”
Digital assets and stablecoins round out her list of concerns—a fast-moving landscape she sees reshaping how banks compete.
“We are the primary small business and agriculture lenders in our communities, and it’s our deposits that allow us to do that,” she said. “The real risk isn’t that community banks become obsolete. The risk is that the communities we serve lose the one institution that was willing to say yes to them.”
The Work Ahead
As TBA Board Chair, Dempsey’s priorities will look familiar: fraud prevention, digital asset policy and a regulatory framework that doesn’t treat a small community bank like a Wall Street institution. The TBA already has an exceptional staff driving this advocacy work, and Dempsey is glad to let them continue leading the charge.
“I just want to do what I can to support them in the amazing work they’re already doing for Tennessee banks,” she said.
Dempsey is equally focused on something less legislative—fostering and developing relationships with bankers across the state.
“I know bankers all across Tennessee, and I am so thankful for all of the friends I have made, but I recognize there’s something different about sitting across from someone in their hometown, meeting their team and seeing what they’ve built,” she said. “I am truly looking forward to those opportunities.”