Insights from the AFT Fall Summit // Sarah Fankhauser, Melissa Kopp, Jacob Bouer

Hello out there. This is Sam Kilmer, managing director of Cornerstone Advisors and your host of the Fintech Hustle podcast.

I’m here in the halls, oh wait, let me take these sunglasses off.

I’m in the halls here at the AFT Fall Summit in balmy 104-degree Palm Springs, California.

This was going to be outdoors. I hope you understand why we didn’t do that.

My co-host with the most pocket squares, although not pocket squares now, Al Dominick, joins me.

We have three rock-star guests I’d like to tell you a little bit about, and we’re just going to get into a lively conversation around fintech, what we’re seeing here at the AFT conference, and lots of other things.

I hope you don’t mind if I wear my DCI commemorative swag specs to go with my Neural Payments socks, which you probably can’t see because I need work on my flexibility and yoga and all that.

But we are going to have some fun today.

Let me introduce these rock-star guests to you.

To Al’s left, we have Melissa Kopp, who’s executive director at Neural Payments.

We have Sarah Fankhauser, who is the CEO of DCI.

And we have Jacob Bouer here from Array, who’s a director and also brand-new, brand-spanking-new board member of the Association for Financial Technology.

Woo!

We’re not worthy.

We’re not worthy.

So these guys are having fun, and we thought we’d just have a nice little chat while we’re all here together in Palm Springs, in the lovely air conditioning.

I thought maybe we’d just start off the conversation by asking these nice people a little bit about the day in the life of their day-to-day plight in fintech.

Why don’t we start with you, Melissa?

Tell us a little bit about the day in the life of Melissa.

A day in the life of Melissa, it’s a loaded question.

Neural Payments is a money movement engine.

What we aim to do is clear up all the noise and all the confusion and all the complexity with moving money.

There are all these rails out there.

There are all these tracks, but there’s not one train that really picks everyone up and enables you to move money easily and quickly to friends and family.

A day in the life, I am a storyteller.

I’m talking to clients.

I’m participating in marketing activities.

I mean, there are only 25 of us, so here we go, another hat.

But I love it.

I absolutely love it.

I love what the team has built here.

Our esteemed leader, Mick Oppy, we’ve all spent our entire careers in payments.

So it was just such an easy choice to join this awesome company.

That’s what we do.

That’s what I do.

Sounds like a busy day.

A little bit.

A little bit.

Sarah, tell us a little about the day in the life of Sarah at DCI.

Okay.

Well, DCI is a core processor.

We’ve been around for 61 years and have a lot of traditional core, but we’ve really pivoted into the fintech world the last several years.

So we think we’re pretty unique and have some great advantages.

We don’t need middleware.

We have direct connections.

We can brand at the branch level.

But the most important thing about DCI is our relationships.

We have great customers.

We have great employees.

We have great retention.

That all comes down to relationships.

Every single thing we do at DCI is around our relationships.

So I spend a lot of time with customers.

I spend a lot of time at conferences.

I spend a lot of time with employees.

But I just thoroughly enjoy it.

Fantastic.

Again, congrats, Jacob.

Tell us a little about your day in the life.

It’s about ready to change.

You’ll be spending more time in board text streams and things like that, right?

At Array, we’re a financial wellness platform.

There are a number of different features that we can embed inside the digital banking applications of our bank customers.

On one side, it’s truly a partnership model.

So working with folks like DCI to embed these tools inside the applications that community banks are using.

On the other hand, there’s a pretty large direct business where we go direct to many of the larger financial institutions that build their own applications.

My job is to work with those larger financial institutions directly.

So while my day could be going to a conference, doing an on-site, or just spending hours in the 400-question RFP, it could be any of the three.

So it’s exciting, and I’m very happy to be on the board of AFT.

Yeah.

Good man.

I want to start off, I guess, since I ended with you, maybe we’ll just start with you, Jacob.

What have you heard or seen here at the AFT conference that gives you pause or makes you excited about the business?

You and I both just came from Finovate, and that was a few weeks ago.

You see a lot of companies on stage talking about AI, AI, AI.

Then we come here, and I was sort of wondering, would that transition as much into the AFT community?

Just because I think we’re dealing with a lot more mature companies in this audience.

While you do hear a lot about AI, I don’t know if it’s anyone’s entire business, per se, while we’re here.

So that was something I was curious about.

I think I sort of answered the question myself, but it’s just something that I’m taking away from AFT this week.

Interesting.

Sarah, anything pop out at you from the event?

First of all, one of the things I love most about AFT, outside of the relationships and the ability to meet with all the different vendors and partners here, is the incredible content.

Incredible sessions, incredible keynote speakers.

I love getting the books and learning from those things and then moving forward.

But beyond that, the individual meetings we’ve had and the brainstorming sessions, all of us sitting together and talking about how we’re going to solve problems, that’s just invaluable, I think, to every single one of us here at AFT.

So that’s probably my favorite thing.

As far as what we’re all worrying about, of course, compliance and keeping everything real and making sure we’re keeping our banks where they need to be as far as compliance-wise.

I think that’s something we’re all working on.

Melissa?

I was just blown away by April.

It was so timely for me because we’re in kind of a transition period at Neural right now.

We’re evolving the products.

We need to change our messaging.

We really need to step back and say, are we telling the story the right way?

So I was looking around.

I was like, is everybody as excited about this as I am?

And yes, they were because it was standing room only in that room.

I really hope she comes to Thanksgiving.

I’m waiting.

But yeah, that to me was, and it went into not just messaging, but here’s how you sell.

Here’s how you’re going to engage with clients to get them to hear you.

Now I’m trying to figure out how I translate her toilet story into selling Neural Payments.

I’ll get there.

But that for me was one of the best sessions I’ve been to in a long time.

Well, you know, I’m lucky to work with Sam on a fairly regular basis.

As we prepared to come into the desert, there were a few things that we were talking about.

First thing, I had a little point of contention because this is like a second home to me.

I’ve been coming out to the desert since I was like 10.

So we’re technically in La Quinta, which is about a 40-minute ride from Palm Springs.

A little truth in advertising would be appropriate.

But in terms of the truth in advertising, it is 106 degrees outside.

So we are in.

What strikes me as really important for an event like this, and I’ve been coming for years, as has I think most of the group, is you can’t substitute somebody else’s ideas for your own.

Critical thinking right now is so important.

I feel this is a venue that allows people to get out of their normal day-to-day routine, see folks that they might compete with but I think they have a healthy respect for.

When you think about the industry and all the challenges that are impacting your customers, regional and community banks, credit unions, other tech companies, the chance to be able to really let your guard down and be honest about what you’re excited about, but also struggling with, is one of the few places I see on the calendar year where you can basically set your clock and say, I know I can be honest and I don’t have to be as bold with my comments.

So just to reflect what everyone’s saying, industry challenges, they come and they go.

You get into cycles where people are optimistic or pessimistic.

But the chance to be with your peers and folks that you respect, I think that’s just such a cool thing.

Yeah.

I’ll second Melissa’s point around April.

I apologize, I’ve forgotten April’s last name.

Do you guys happen to remember off the top?

We’ll put it in the comments, folks.

Gosh, I feel so awful because she was so awesome.

One of the things I loved about April, something I didn’t see in the techniques of presentations at Finovate, was she was with us.

I felt like everybody was having a conversation with her.

It was like a circle as opposed to a binary person on stage talking over people in the crowd.

I loved that about our first two speakers.

I think the first one was the format.

Yeah, it was a little bit more of a fireside chat, so it made it a little bit easier for that.

But I thought April just did wonderful.

And a breakout session too on the external growth that she led was fantastic.

She walked right out of there and actually played with my dog after.

She’s really just getting all the points.

You know what, I should have mentioned this before.

Now I feel so ashamed because my wife Charlotte and I are big dog lovers.

Jacob, you actually, as I understand it, hashtag dogs arrived here in La Quinta.

Thank you, Al.

With your puppy dog, right?

First AFT-attending puppy.

We need specifics.

Name of the puppy dog.

His name is Remy.

He’s a 22-pound dachshund.

And we’ll send a picture.

We’ll have it thrown up during the editing phase.

I think that’d be an excellent idea.

I think our good friend Tom Shen will appreciate that because Tom, as I understand it, travels with his pup.

The gauntlet’s been thrown down.

Now Tom’s going to have to show up like you do with the dog.

That’s right.

I totally agree with you, Melissa, about the session.

I think the point you made about Thanksgiving was the ability to start a conversation when the room gets awkward.

Let’s face it, in all of our perfectly fine families that have no dysfunction at all, it never gets awkwardly silent when Uncle What’s-His-Name goes off the rails or whatever.

Right.

So yeah, I think it’s a good takeaway.

One question I always like to ask folks, and I think this is a good forum for it, is we heard a lot about, and I think it was from April, mapping to very specific pains and mapping to very specific differences of how you stand out competitively.

If we start with the problem or the pains, maybe we can start with, give me the ability as a consultant here to, shocker, go negative a little bit.

If you had to identify one pain in the butt of this industry or just a problem that needs to be solved, if you had to point to one thing or a couple things, feel free to throw some things out.

I would love your perspectives on that.

I think April’s session was so well sought after because we all need to do a better job of marketing and branding.

We’re in an industry that’s not necessarily the most fun, let’s call it, right?

I mean, it’s banking.

It’s serious.

It has a lot of risk in it.

So for us to step outside our comfort zone and think about things differently is something that I think we’re all after.

It’s why we get to hang out with cool guys like you, Sam, because you bring a creative edge to something that the average person on the street isn’t thinking is cool, per se.

Well, I’m vested.

I’ve been in this business so long I have to have fun with it.

That’s my only option.

What about you guys?

Yeah.

Jacob mentioned it earlier.

One thing I wish would go away are the 400-page RFPs.

Sorry, Cornerstone business, but don’t like them.

Another thing is, can we get our feet unstuck from these legacy applications and solutions and thinking?

Can we just unstick ourselves here?

That’s the biggest challenge.

Also, I asked April yesterday, help me get these folks over this FOMO of using a provider that clearly they’re not happy with.

We’re getting there.

But we’re all here because we’re fintechs.

We’re doing something new, cool, different.

So I think we’re all pretty successful at it.

It’s just refining that and really getting that message out to help get their feet out of the sand.

Yep.

I think it comes down to transparency too.

I think if we’re all willing to be vulnerable and transparent, including the people that we’re selling to as well, then we can all sit down and consultatively come up with answers.

What’s tough out there is when the message isn’t transparent and the customers have to dig through that and figure out where the truth is.

So I think that’s part of the issue too.

Let’s all work together.

I loved your comment about all the competitors being here too.

But I think we can work with our competitors and figure out every deal is not going to be a fit for me.

It may fit somebody else.

I think that’s just so important, just being consultative.

One thing, I was up in Huntington Beach yesterday with a number of bank executives.

Totally different from here.

But one of the challenges that I think both sides of the table are trying to solve for is, what’s the return on the relationship?

In banks, it’s what’s the return on tech?

In a strategic sense, executive teams and boards are saying, we’ve made investments.

We may or may not be getting what we thought we were going to.

How do we figure that out?

Then you take it another step.

What are the gaps in our strategy?

Whatever we decided we were going to do a few years ago might be obsolete now given market conditions and how people have changed.

But it’s a little bit of opacity when it comes to having the confidence to change.

Then on the flip side, you’re talking about tech companies that are doing cool things.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of strategic planning this year.

The number of conversations around APIs and integration are phenomenally exciting on the bank side, but I don’t know that message always trickles into the tech space.

So there does have to be that meeting of the cool factor where people say it’s okay to look at the hype and dig in a little deeper to figure out, is this going to impact my business?

Because again, if I’m representing a bank or a credit union’s mindset today, it’s, I need to diversify opportunities.

I need to differentiate my message.

I have to stay relevant and competitive without losing my identity.

I think the only way they can do that is if they bring in outside perspectives that are grounded in the reality of the industry, which ties back into compliance and regulation and privacy, authentication, identification, all the things that sound boring but are actually pretty fun when you start to work on them in a group setting.

I’d like to comment on that.

I think in my role, I’m in sales, and it’s my job to pull that out of the banking leaders and figure out, okay, what do you think about your customer?

What have your customers told you they want?

What do you think they need to reach their financial goals?

At Array, there are eight different features.

But if I came and said, “Okay, here are all eight features. Pick it off like a menu,” it would never work.

But if you allow the financial institution to sort of come to that answer on their own based on what they’ve just told you about their customers or strategy, it becomes a lot easier to sort of thread the needle and say, okay, here are the one or two things that actually make sense to then offer a more personalized experience.

And solve their problem.

And solve their problem.

That’s right.

The bank’s problem and the consumer’s problem.

In this case, we’re like tennis players back and forth.

But the other issue that I think all organizations face is talent.

So this is another opportunity to say, you can run your business and you can complement your team with outside perspectives.

You’re talking about payments as a line of business.

Payment strategies within financial service companies are so important.

But again, unless you’re exposing yourself to different ways of thinking, then you’re most likely just going to be making incremental changes as opposed to realistic, move-the-business-forward changes.

So I’m just kind of curious, how do you move from, “I’m curious,” to, “Let’s talk shop”?

Oh, that is not an easy thing to do.

We took a step back and did much of what April pointed out this week relative to setting the stage from an industry perspective.

Then, here are the competitors.

Here are your choices.

Here’s who you’re using.

That’s before we start going into any type of demo or any type of product discussion.

But we have one slide that I love that actually has four bullets on it and puts the problems in real-life examples.

Because getting them to think about these things in terms of how it affects their cardholders, their members, that’s how it clicks.

“Oh yeah, I can see I can solve that piece for Mary and make this easier in her life.”

So I love that.

I love taking that approach because then they can kind of wrap their mind around it.

Then we can go into, okay, here’s the widget that does this, and here’s where we’re going to take it from there.

It is kind of taking somebody on a journey to say, if we started here, here are some of the challenges that you have to naturally account for.

But if you can do that, you start to go down a path where you start to see results.

Now you’re talking outcomes.

Again, Sam and I talk outcome-oriented behavior on a fairly regular basis.

It’s one thing to say you get an RFP.

It’s another thing to say, why is the RFP being sent out?

How does that tie into the business overall?

Is it going to be integrated into the culture?

Is the team going to accept it?

Or is this just another exercise in trying to do something that looks good but may not actually work?

It’s become tough.

At least our initial product out in the market doesn’t really have an ROI wrapped around it.

There’s no number I can put on a piece of paper and slide across the table.

“Here’s what you can expect.”

But we can quantify it in those four bullets and those pain points I was talking about.

Because I can back into all kinds of times when they’ve lost money or they’re spending too much on checks.

How in the world?

Then there’s all the fraud surrounding that as well.

So we’ve had to weave that into our messaging because you don’t want to get to a point, “Okay, where’s my ROI on this?”

Well, there’s not a hard one.

But there are different ROIs than just funds as well.

It’s efficiencies.

I love how you started it too.

It is about what’s the problem at hand?

Let’s start there and then go from there to figure out how to help each other.

Okay.

So I went negative.

Given that we’re hearing the cackle come up of people who are starting to come back in the sessions, definitely want to come back and close on some higher notes.

What would be something, and I’ll start, something that has either inspired you in the industry or maybe even inspired you here at AFT?

I’ll just quickly give you an example of something that’s inspired me today.

That is something I saw from Dan Holt this morning when he shared a lot of vulnerabilities.

It reminded me, Stephen Bohanon presented in a prior AFT and he showed an email of a client that had pulled the plug on one of their deployments.

They sent him an email in the middle of the night.

He shared the email and then talked about what he learned from almost losing a client.

It was very meaningful because it was specific.

It wasn’t chest-pounding, self-promotional.

It was really taking something that was a very real thing.

Dan did that in a big way.

I just love seeing the heart in that.

To your point, we can have fun.

We can be human beings.

We can mess up a little bit.

And we do.

We’re going to do it anyway.

So we might as well have some fun while we’re doing it, and hopefully other people benefit from it.

What about you guys?

Anything inspire you in the industry right now?

Or did you hear anything that just really jazzed you about life in general or whatever?

I’d love to start.

Dan talked about taking a pause, taking a breather, sort of looking around.

What does it mean for me?

What does it mean for my company?

Al talked about taking a pause.

Look up from your laptop.

Talk to people.

Talk to your competitors.

Just people in your industry.

That to me has been really important.

As I’ve been running for the board, I’ve been able to basically talk to everybody in this room.

Maybe 5% of that conversation is, yes, I am running for board.

Ninety-five percent is, how are you?

What are you guys up to?

How’s the family?

That’s the pause.

Depending on what you need for you, the pause can mean a lot of different things.

But I think that’s been a really important piece of this conference for me.

I have to come back to the relationships.

I have to come back to the partnerships.

There are partners here that we were already doing business with.

There are partners here that we are in the process of doing business with and have just had some incredible conversations.

But I have to tell you, the biggest thing that I saw this time is a couple of vendors that we talked to a year ago that weren’t really where we wanted them to be.

Then I talked to them this year and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, what you’ve done in a year is just incredible.”

I love to see that.

I love to see that.

Honestly, when you first start coming to AFT, it’s a little bit scary to think about being around all of your competitors and sharing.

But I just love it.

I love the vulnerability and the willingness to share.

So I think that’s the biggest thing for me.

Yeah.

Dan was totally inspiring from the moment he started speaking.

But what really got to me is when he was talking about his relationship with Tom and his relationship with Wade and others who are friends outside of work and just willing to go the extra mile for each other.

It was just so inspiring.

Maybe a lot of those friendships started here.

Look what’s continued to be a part of his daily life.

That really struck me.

That’s what this place is all about.

I mean, I think the theme is really about the people.

I see Tom Shen yesterday morning.

He’s mentored so many folks that are here, and they’re so proud of that and they’re paying it forward.

So even people he hasn’t mentored, he’s impacted.

You just see that collective spirit of, we want you to do well.

We want you to be welcome.

I see Tom.

I see Kera Parkey, who’s always got a smile on her face.

Matt Dean, again, including people in ways that he doesn’t have to do.

It’s just a good reflection on the industry as a whole that there are great people doing some great things, but they also, to Sam’s point, don’t take themselves so seriously that they can’t have some fun with folks, even when it’s this hot.

Yeah.

Another quick shout-out to Tom on that.

He was on a prior episode, and one of the things I love that he talks about is he calls it meat-and-potatoes fintech.

Stuff that’s maybe not AI or real fancy stuff, but just things that get the job done.

I think, what does he call it, a flight to quality?

Whenever the market gets shaky and they feel like there’s been just a little bit too much froth, some of the stuff that our teams do all the time, you might call it the basics.

Basics are hard work.

Integrating systems is no joke.

APIs are not there.

It’s still hard.

So shout-out to Tom.

Actually, also to my colleague, our colleague Mary Wisniewski, who we have a profile coming out that Mary wrote up on Tom.

It includes, he went through all of the people that mentored him and that he has mentored.

It’s really pretty staggering, the sheer volume of impact that someone can have on people’s lives.

With that, Al, could I ask a favor?

You see those three double-album sets?

Could you grab those for me real quick because I neglected to grab them earlier?

I appreciate that.

Could you hand those to our guests?

I would really appreciate it.

That is a limited-edition Fintech Hustle double-album set.

You cannot play those.

If you have a record player, you will damage your needle.

It is to set a bourbon or club soda or coffee on, whatever your speed is.

No pressure.

Just wanted to say thank you guys for joining us and also just for your contributions to the industry and the entrepreneurship and the vulnerability and all the good stuff.

Al, before we wrap this up, any other closing thoughts?

Just keep doing your thing, Sam.

New hat today and everything.

So no bucket hat for you, Ron Shevlin.

It’s the real deal.

All right, Fintech Hustle, we’re out.

Back to you, and see you out there on the road.