A tide of bank consolidations, hastened by legislative changes a decade ago, has rolled across the country unabated.

But amid it, new banks continue to spring up.

The latest in the region marks its official opening tomorrow, in Peters, with a visit from state Secretary of Banking William Schenck III.

The tiny new institution, Gateway Bank, informally opened its doors earlier this month.

Gateway's goal is to expand, eventually to other growing suburbs, by putting personal service back into an industry that's found efficiency over the years through mergers and by steering people toward self-service at automated tellers and online.

It's not that Gateway won't also offer the same electronic banking avenues as others.

However, its founders think they can capture a share of the market with what they call "high touch" community-style banking.

"We feel there's absolutely a need for high service, local management and local decision-making in the market place," said William Burt, a former Integra Financial executive who is Gateway's chief executive officer.

Integra, which remained a Pittsburgh-based institution after it was formed through the merger of Union National Bank and Oil City's Pennbancorp, has since been taken over by Cleveland-based National City Corp., which ranks as the nation's 25th largest bank.

It was mergers such as Integra's that helped cut the number of banks and thrifts across the country by half during the past 15 years. In the past decade, the number of banks and thrifts with headquarters in Pennsylvania dropped by a third, to 270, in large part due to mergers.

The pace of consolidation, which has been going on for 20 years, increased after 1994, when a new federal banking law paved the way for banks to branch across state lines, said David Barr, spokesman for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which regulates and insures state-chartered banks such as Gateway.

But a study the FDIC released earlier this month detected a counter trend: Enough new community banks have begun emerging that "an eventual balance" might develop between merger-driven bank demises and bank start-ups. FDIC figures show anywhere from 50 to 232 banks were created annually during the past 10 years. Although the number of mergers is far larger -- as many as 609 in 1995 -- many of those involved big banks that had separate operations in multiple states consolidating their own banks under a single charter, Barr said.

He said differences in consumers' tastes likely will provide a market for both the behemoths being created by mergers and the upstarts.

"There's a niche there [among] people who don't want to bank with that big of an organization."

Others, who want to find branches of their bank in other cities where they travel, are more inclined to bank with the industry giants.

Barr said it's common to see start-ups in regions where other local banks were recently lost to consolidation, as was the case when Mellon Bank sold its retail operations in the region to Rhode Island-based Citizens Financial Group.

Those mergers also unleashed hordes of "displaced" banking executives who are spearheading the start-up of new banks nationally, he added.

Gateway is Western Pennsylvania's first start-up bank since Enterprise Bank opened in 1998 in Hampton.

Burt, the new bank's CEO, said Gateway, whose directors also include former Integra president Leonard M. Carroll and another former Integra executive, Gayland B. Cook, has just about completed raising the $15 million it sought in a private stock offering to provide capital.

Burt said, "We felt with all of the mergers and market changes here there was certainly an opportunity for us to come in and start a new bank."