Running a community bank is getting costlier by the year – and with compliance and technology expenses rising, competition heated and margins narrowing, once-unlikely coping strategies are getting a second look.

In particular: teaming up with other mutual banks to combine holding companies and share back-office expenses. The idea has been around for years – longer, for commercial banks – but banking consultants say they’re hearing more buzz these days from executives interested in dusting the idea off.

“It is a very, very common conversation at the CEO level,” said Thomas W. Grottke, president of Connecticut-based Northeastern Banking Services Group, which does business in the Bay State. Most executives he meets with discuss major changes to their banks as a survival strategy – either through mergers, acquisitions, or mutual holding company alliances.

Bankers themselves aren’t eager to state that interest publicly, he said. But privately, they realize continued pressures are making it tough to continue on alone.

In a mutual holding company of this type, two or more banks’ management teams arrange to form a parent company. The banks can then share certain costs, such as human resources departments or high-tech operations such as online banking.

Who Is Running The Ship?

But “it begs the question: Who’s really going to be in charge?” said Stephen J. Coukos, a partner with Chu, Ring & Hazel in Boston.

The involved banks maintain their names and their own boards of directors, but they’ve become sibling institutions – there’s an umbrella company at the top that controls both of them, and the tough part is figuring out who controls that company. It’s a question of who really calls the shots, Coukos said.

The current business environment has lots of clients thinking long-term strategy right now, either to take advantage of a possible expansion opportunity or to survive troubled times, he said. For some, that includes forming a mutual holding company with a partnership in mind – for others, it means forming a holding company without a partnership for purely capital-raising purposes.

That’s the tactic at Cohasset’s Pilgrim Bank, said CEO Francis Campbell. Pilgrim is in the process of forming a mutual holding company to more easily raise capital and provide services, he said. But Campbell takes a dim view of forming partnerships with other banks.

Pro-partnership banks and consultants say these alliances are a way for banks to share costs but maintain their independence, but Campbell says independence is precisely the thing that gets lost. It may be the same name on the front of the building, he said, but that company is no longer its own.

A holding company could decide to just go ahead and merge the sibling banks, and the bank can’t stop it, he said.

Of the many bankers who are supposedly pondering the idea, only a few such partnerships actually exist in Massachusetts. In 2006, Lowell’s Butler Bank and Marlborough Co-Operative Bank announced their holding companies’ merger as a way to cut costs by combining resources. That – perhaps ominously, for banks considering a similar alliance – ended with the two banks themselves merging officially last year.

A perhaps happier example, by many merger-wary banks’ standards, is that of Mountain One Financial Partners in Western Massachusetts. Mountain One began with Hoosac Bank and Williamstown Savings Bank in 2002, and recently added Rockland’s South Coastal Bank on the eastern side of the state.

Stephen Crowe, the holding company’s CEO, says the member banks have a good relationship where everybody plays to their strengths: South Coastal, for example, has the most experienced commercial loan officers, so its president is in charge of commercial lending for the whole holding company. A North Adams’ location is in charge of compliance, and so on.

The original partnership was not taken on lightly, he said, and involved extensive road-mapping about the deal ahead of time. The company was originally headed up by the former president of Hoosac Bank, although he left the job six months into the alliance. Crowe, then-president of the Williamstown bank, stepped into the role.

To Crowe, the combination has run the way it was intended: costs are shared, but independence is maintained, even after seven years of partnership.

“The name continues, the charter continues,” he said.