Transcript
Hello out there. This is Sam Kilmer, managing director at Cornerstone Advisors, bringing you another episode of Fintech Hustle live in the hall, right here at lovely Tampa FinXTech at the JW.
We are in the hall.
I’m joined by my co-host, Mary Wisniewski, and we’ve got a couple of awesome leaders straight out of the industry.
We’ve got Derik Sutton, chief marketing officer at Autobooks.
We’ve got John Findlay, CEO of LemonadeLXP, and they’ve decided to join us.
Hopefully they won’t regret it.
We’re just going to do a nice little unscripted chat here about what’s going on in the industry, what you see working and not working, and what you’re hearing in the halls here.
We are fresh out of the halls.
I mean, guys, we just literally tumbled out of sessions.
I think one of yours was actually on cannabis, so maybe people literally rolled right out of the sessions, Mary.
Exactly.
So maybe just to get things rolling, let’s start with you, Derik.
Give us a little bit of a day in the life of Derik in fintech.
What’s your day look like, buddy?
What’s my day look like?
I wake up and just issue some fintech hot takes.
No.
Honestly, what I do is spend a lot of time talking to banks about small-business banking, then spend as much time as I can talking to their customers about what their needs are.
Then I try to reflect that and relate it back to the bankers so that our integration and partnership can flourish and thrive as best it can.
John, what’s a day in the life of John Findlay look like?
Well, it’s very complicated, as you can imagine.
I’m a busy guy.
No, a big part of my thing is figuring out how to help banks with digital fluency, digital adoption and growing their digital-banking business.
A big challenge they face is, in a lot of cases, their staff don’t have to bank with them, yet they’re meant to promote and support their technology.
That’s a tricky situation.
We’re trying to help reduce that stress for frontline staff so they can become ambassadors for digital.
Gotcha.
I know, Mary, you had a session today too.
I want to get all of your takes on some of the things you’re taking away from this event.
We’re only halfway, or a little bit past halfway through it.
Any key takeaways or bites you would point to in terms of things you’re hearing here at FinXTech, John?
Well, nobody’s interested in deposits.
So that’s what I’m hearing.
Yeah, deposits.
I mean, that’s all I hear about.
Deposits, deposits, deposits.
That’s a big thing.
It’s interesting from the smaller financial institutions that are not quite as far along in digital.
They’re earlier in that roadmap, so their needs are very different from midsize financial institutions.
The midsize ones are trying to figure out protecting market share with the competing technologies that are competing for financial services.
The smaller guys are trying to transform digitally, but they’re much earlier in their path.
So the conversations I’m having are all about digital transformation and adoption.
I see these two places where the small financial institutions are earlier and the middle ones are much further along.
Derik?
Yeah, I would echo what John said.
I think the divide is getting wider.
You hear more and more about the digital divide and smaller banks trying to catch up, but that’s been going on for a long time.
I just think the divide is getting wider and wider.
I think budgets are getting harder to manage.
With all this banking fallout and crisis, you can really see the distinct differences in the market.
You hear community banks talking about protecting customers and saying they’re solid and fine.
At the same time, you see survey after survey where their customers are like, “I trust you, but you also can’t keep up from a technology standpoint, so maybe I bank somewhere else.”
I think it’s a really strange reconciliation that’s going to come into play.
I’ve got some thoughts about it, but I’d love to hear Mary.
What are you hearing?
What are some of your takes?
To go off of that, I definitely see the digital divide.
It’s funny because you hear the same things year after year often.
Digital onboarding shouldn’t really feel like it’s a topic at a fintech event, but it’s a topic here.
The newer wrinkle, of course, is added scrutiny on who you’re working with because of all the bold, wild news that’s been going down.
I think people are afraid of that, especially with banking as a service.
Watch your vendors and watch your vendors’ vendors.
The pot session really brought it home for me too.
I was a little late.
They are passing out gummies approved for bankers, which means there’s no pot in it.
But they were describing, I think the vendor’s name was Shield Compliance.
You know, desperate for deposits, but he was framing it like, “Get into the pot-banking business.”
Big banks probably won’t do this, and a community banker could gather more deposits.
In fact, they had people bringing pillows of cash into branches, which is not safe, of course.
Now there are limitations on what a branch will accept.
I just thought, wow, this is actually the most interesting thing I’ve heard here.
So beat that, Sam.
I can’t beat it.
I will say I really liked the session and discussion you had with Cinzia from ConnectOne, just talking about, in their particular case, this idea of, “Can I partner? Can I be a builder? And can I not crush a creative culture?”
In their case, acquiring a fintech in BoeFly.
I liked the whole conversation around, “We’re able to do it because we keep it separate and try not to crush it,” or whatever the equivalent of that is.
I also liked, coming out of some of the afternoon sessions, John, I know you had one with PSCU and some others.
What I liked about it was pairing up a couple different people.
It wasn’t just the fintech pitching.
It was really the fintech talking with someone who was either deploying it or using it.
I found the interplay and the audience were much more engaged in that.
Not just because it was a smaller venue session, but anyway, those were some of my takeaways.
I’d like to get your take on what you see working and not working well in the industry right now.
We’re always looking for what you’re seeing in the halls or in your travels.
Maybe we start on the positive side of things.
What are you seeing that you think is working well, Derik?
When banks lean in and market to their customers, customers tend to respond.
We see it in the adoption of our products and services.
When a bank creates a goal, creates metrics and actually builds a program around, “How do we push this product and service from an educational standpoint?” things go well.
When they think of marketing as a four-letter word, and it’s like, “We can’t do marketing. It’s too pushy. We’re not salesy. We only send a certain amount of emails or types of emails based upon a calendar.”
“This is June. This is when we do auto loans.”
“August is when we do CDs.”
“We’ll talk about small business during Small Business Week only.”
Things tend to fall apart because, let’s face it, there’s a lot of noise and a lot of calls for people’s attention in the market.
If you’re not consistently there, you’re often forgotten.
Yeah.
John, what do you see working well?
I think what’s working well is, post-COVID, financial institutions are taking digital seriously.
I think there was a bit of lip service prior.
It was like, “We need to drive adoption,” but really they were still analog businesses.
COVID shut down the branches, sent everybody home, contact centers got slammed, and everybody’s banking digitally.
The banks go, “Oh no. What do we have to do?”
Now they’re really leaning in.
You can see it in their digital customer experience improving across the industry.
I think banks and credit unions are starting to do a great job of that, which in the long run will help them protect market share.
They’re not going to lose customers to the big guys who have a better digital customer experience.
I think that’s one thing that changed post-COVID.
Yeah.
Mary, what are you seeing that’s been working well?
No, that’s all right.
I always like the negative question, Sam.
I’ll give you a positive first.
I saw Jill Castilla tweeting from Citizens Bank of Edmond.
She extended her number so people can reach a human up to 11 p.m., if I’m remembering that tweet right.
That’s on my mind because I also heard someone here talk about how they’re a New York credit union or bank, I don’t remember, but they hired people in California to deal with the calls that come in later.
This is not efficient.
But something I’m learning by working with Cornerstone is the relationship matters so much for a lot of these customers that a phone call is actually a competitive advantage.
That’s not something a lot of fintech companies would ever consider.
What’s not working?
I think the undertone here is there’s missing development.
I’m not seeing anything that’s cutting edge to me.
I’m hoping that there are more products developed for entrepreneurs.
Good observation.
I know one thing, I don’t know if you’d call this a positive or a negative, but obviously chatbots and using AI in a chatbot capacity has been a raging topic for a while.
It seems like a lot of the providers, I was listening in on the Agent IQ session and some other sessions, are starting to really hit their stride.
They’re getting past their early pioneer clients and into what I would call more every-bank-type cases, and having more people jump on board.
One of the sessions, I can’t remember who it was from, had a really good conversation around how to use AI and then transfer to a live agent.
There was this interplay between not just fake person and real person, if you’re lucky, but a defined path to real human beings and then the AI interplay.
I thought that was well thought out.
That was something that captured me.
Anything you see that’s not working well that you’d like to point out, John?
I had the unfortunate experience of calling the helpline at my financial institution, which will remain nameless, last week.
The AI agent just wouldn’t listen.
It wouldn’t listen.
It was like my kids.
I’m like, “I want to do this,” and they’re like, “Please get one to do this.”
I’m like, come on.
Literally, I went around in a circle with this thing three or four times.
I finally hung up.
It was ridiculous.
Like my 14-year-old child.
I think while there is progress being made, there’s still a lot of room for improvement.
AI stuff that’s already in market is fairly old.
The new stuff coming out is going to improve that.
The rate of technological innovation is fast enough that I don’t think it’s a major concern, but that was my personal experience.
The other thing I think is that financial institutions, when trying to acquire new customers, are still missing a really key piece of the equation.
I’ll give you an example.
I had to get bank accounts for my kids.
I was like, “Okay, well, I should probably look at the new fancy digital banks,” and did all that.
Everyone I went to had a webpage with the marketing stuff.
I’m about to create a long-term relationship for my kids with this financial institution, but I can’t see their tech.
I can’t actually play with it.
The main way they’re going to interact with that financial institution for their entire lives is through the technology, but I can’t see it before I buy.
It’s interesting.
Where did I put my kids?
The bank I’m with because I understand the tech.
I didn’t want to be tech support for them in addition to being tech support for my parents.
That’s a missed opportunity.
This just makes me think of Dave, which originally launched not as a challenger bank, but let people use the app without having to sign up for a bank account.
There’s a lot to be said about Dave, but I do think that’s an interesting model.
“Hey, I’m actually loving this app, and now maybe I’ll get a bank account.”
So, to your point.
Yeah.
Derik, anything you see not working?
Everything’s too complex.
The banking industry will not let go of the past.
What that does is, to your point, you go to the website, you go to a product, and there are all these features and capabilities that are probably used by the minority of the customer base.
But there’s somebody in the back office that says, “We can’t let go of these features because we’ve got X, Y and Z on it.”
What that does is hold everything back.
It makes AI harder.
It makes change management harder.
It makes implementation of new technology harder.
Everything we hold onto that’s not readily used needs to go away.
The analogy I always give is banks are like The Cheesecake Factory.
You go to The Cheesecake Factory and they’ve got this menu.
Selection after selection after selection.
It’s overload.
Fintech is like In-N-Out Burger.
I’m going to get a burger, fries and a shake.
I know it’s going to be good.
I know exactly what it is.
It’s simple and easy, and you can pivot and innovate off that model.
I think it’s really hard to scale a Cheesecake Factory of features and capabilities from a marketing standpoint and from an innovation standpoint.
At some point, I think banks are going to have to say, “These things can go away, and that’s okay.”
If there are customers that are impacted, maybe we don’t want those types of customers.
Yeah.
This is the opposite of that, but it reminds me of Chime and Current.
I think it was Current.
It’s definitely Chime.
They started letting people deposit cash at retailers during the pandemic.
That’s an example where not a lot of their customers use it, but a regular amount of customers do.
It’s an interesting thing.
I’ll make my In-N-Out a little bit more appealing to a broader set.
It’s the opposite approach instead of, “Blah, here’s all this crap.”
I think the difference there, though, is that’s customer-led innovation and fulfilling a need.
You can’t possibly build the future holding onto the past.
If you’re holding onto all these things that you do, it burdens operations.
It burdens vendor relationship management.
You can’t possibly evaluate the new digital banking provider coming in because they don’t do all of these old things that maybe aren’t relevant anymore.
Then you’re sitting there screaming as a bank, “Why don’t you keep me up to date, vendor?”
And they say, “Well, I’m supporting all of these old things that you rarely use, but it’s holding you back from going to the new thing.”
It’s just a hard thing to reconcile.
But in your example, what I would say is let the customer win.
What are the customers using?
Go build toward that.
I just wanted to say I agree with you, but I think the challenge is the customer experience through that transition.
You could say, “If the customer is not willing to change, we don’t want that customer.”
But let’s face it, all the old people have the money.
You want that customer.
How do you transition them in a way that is seamless and not so disruptive for them so that you can transition off old systems or old processes and move to new ones?
I think that’s something you have to consider because otherwise you don’t want to erode your market share.
Good stuff.
I want to throw you guys a little bit of a compliment beyond what you do with your companies.
One of the things, when I was thinking about this, that you both have in common is you’re not only really interesting to listen to when you’re presenting, but you’re kind of content masters.
I’m thinking about the gamification, John, that you all do.
Then also, Derik, thinking through some of the education work that you do for small business.
To me, it’s just great content.
It’s a great song.
It’s great storytelling.
I think we have a Fintech Hustle first, Derik.
You actually issued us homework.
Can you tell us a little bit about it?
This was among the first homework assignments that I actually enjoyed doing, and candidly, that’s kind of a shocker right away.
Tell us a little bit more about it.
Sure.
You invited me to the podcast, and I happened to be listening to a singer-songwriter that I listened to a lot in college and growing up.
His name is Jack Ingram, a Texas singer-songwriter.
I was listening to this song that I always enjoy called “Blaine’s Ferris Wheel.”
There’s nothing in the lyrics of the song that’s pertinent to fintech necessarily.
But then I remembered that it’s a really authentic story.
I’m from West Texas, so I know the place he’s talking about, like San Angelo, Texas.
I know the type of people.
I understand the whole vibe.
He’s setting the mood and the scene in the song.
Then I remembered that he also tells a story about actually meeting Blaine.
You hear him give off his voice inflection and he starts to get deeper into the story.
Now you relisten to the song and the song is richer.
It got me thinking about bank marketing.
I’m obsessed with bank marketing these days.
I was looking for a good metaphor.
I’m like, banks have to be good authentic regional storytellers.
If that’s their genre of music, they need to be authentic regional storytellers because their customers understand the context, they understand the setting, and they’re just telling these authentic stories.
Then when Jack talks about writing the song, he’s basically telling you about his user research.
He’s telling you about the actual customer, and he goes into even greater detail.
I’m sitting there thinking, that’s what bank marketing should be.
You should just tell the stories of your customers in a very authentic, approachable, empathetic way.
You don’t need to try to be a pop star and pretend to be something you’re not, be sensational and over the top.
You just need to be an authentic storyteller.
It just hit me in that way.
Having listened to the song first like I said, then listening to the story, then relistening, was the song better?
Yeah.
Because of it.
Yeah.
Bank marketing should be that way.
The song then made me laugh a lot because the backstory is like a DUI and going on a Ferris wheel.
There’s this provocative story.
Oftentimes, that’s not what banking is.
It’s not relatable.
It’s not story-driven.
It’s very unapproachable, and you’re supposed to know everything before you adopt it, to your point.
You’ve got to figure out and do all the work instead of understanding the benefit from the perspective of the user.
Yeah.
I call that the “buy our stuff at buyourstuff.com because our stuff is cool” mode of marketing, versus, “Can I tell you a story about something that might help?”
You just unload a great story in very plain language.
And by the way, to Mary’s point, that wasn’t all roses.
There was some painful stuff in there.
By the way, guys, just to repeat, it was Jack Ingram and it was “Blaine’s Ferris Wheel,” right?
Check it out.
When you assigned me the homework, I thought maybe you’d hit the gummies because I was like, “How is this going to relate to banking?”
How is this going to relate to banking?
But now I realize you’re actually sober and making sense.
Seriously, stories are such a key element.
I tell a lot of stories in what we do.
I’ll tell you one quick story because you talked about the gamification piece.
When my son was three years old, I’m from Canada, so I was like, “He’s got to learn to skate and play hockey. It’s what we do. We’re Canadian.”
I took him to the rink, put him on the rink, and he sat on his ass and cried.
I was like, “Oh.”
Thirty minutes of trying to cajole this kid.
I’m like, “Jeez, he just won’t skate.”
Then I realized, ah, it’s the teacher’s fault.
I took my hat off and said, “Hey, Jackson, bet you can’t get my hat.”
What did he do?
Clambered to his feet, scampered over, fell on his face 20 times playing a game.
Thirty minutes later, the kid could skate because he wasn’t thinking about failing.
He wasn’t thinking about learning.
He was thinking about getting the hat.
There’s your story.
Yeah.
And also, you had a great moment.
Right.
That’s the other thing about it.
Well, hey, thanks for joining us today.
We really enjoyed it.
On another in-the-hall, unscripted episode of Fintech Hustle, have a good one out there.
Safe travels to all of you.
We’ll see you again.
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