Kicking off 2025 with Lee Farabaugh, Brendan Tansill and Hank Seale

Well, hello out there, and welcome to this episode of the Fintech Hustle podcast.

I am your host, Sam Kilmer, managing director of Cornerstone Advisors. I’m joined by my co-host with the most, Stacy Bryant, director of Cornerstone Advisors.

We come to you today not only with a couple of red hats, thank you very much, but with three fantastic rock-star guests from the halls of fintech. Really excited about this.

Without any further ado, let me just jump into some quick introductions.

For starters, we have Lee Farabaugh, who’s the president of Monarch, which I believe, and hopefully I’m going to get this right, Lee, but I know you’ll correct me if I don’t, is a division of or a new company hatched out of Core10.

Monarch is the company hatched out of Core10, which you’re the president of, and you’ve been long associated with Core10, focused around integration and professional services and a variety of different things, which I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit more about.

Did I get that almost right?

Bingo.

Monarch is a division of Core10, but you’re hired.

Right on.

That’s a good start.

It’s a good start.

One for one, buddy.

I know.

I’m one for one.

It’s all downhill from here, Hank.

We’ll see how it goes.

My next guest is Brendan Tansill, who is the CEO of Candescent.

If you’ve never heard of Candescent before, that’s okay.

Just like you may not have ever heard of Monarch before because Candescent is a new brand, like Monarch is a new company.

Candescent is a new company that was hatched out of what I call the artist formerly known as NCR Voyix, NCR Digital Banking.

Welcome, Brendan.

Thanks, Sam.

Nice to be with you guys this morning, this afternoon.

Yeah, or whenever people are watching this.

Could be late at night at home in their jammies, who knows?

AM, PM, we’ll see how it goes.

Then our third guest that Stacy and I have the opportunity to have on today is Hank Seale, who is the CEO of Hapax, an AI company recently hatched.

So this is three new companies that you’re talking to here.

New year, new companies.

Picking up on that little theme here.

Hank, not only is the CEO of Hapax, but some of you may have heard his name before as being a founder of Q2 and CBANC and probably five or six other companies that you hatched as an entrepreneur over the years.

Did I get that roughly right, Hank?

Yes, sir.

Good stuff.

Glad that you guys could all be here.

Glad to be here.

Thanks for having us.

It’s good to start off the year with a bang.

As we’re taping this, it’s the seventh of January, and I think it’s going to be a good year.

What do you guys think?

I totally agree.

Yes.

We’ll see.

Totally agree.

First time optimistic in a long time.

Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Some of the early survey data that’s coming in from my colleague Ron Shevlin from the CEOs in banking, it looks like some pretty favorable outlooks on things.

We’ll see how that all shapes up.

More coming on that soon.

Why don’t we just start off by having each of you tell us a little bit about what it’s like to be you and a day in the life?

Fintech Hustle is all about your experiences in the halls and inside the boardrooms of fintech and banking.

I’d just love to hear about it.

Take a little bit of time and take us through a day in your life.

Lee, why don’t we start with you?

By the way, nice hat you’ve got rocking there.

Thank you.

This is a complimentary podcast to yours.

Excellent.

Listen, for fintech lovers out there, Builder, Banker, Hacker, Chief, led by Nathan Baumeister.

Yeah, good stuff.

Okay, so a day in the life.

I sent an email to Sam ahead of this and I said, “Sam, I kind of wear two hats.”

We’ve got a hat theme going on.

Got to.

I missed it.

I’m co-founder of a company called Core10, and that’s a financial services company.

About a year ago, we created the Monarch division.

It was really to further service a part of our company that was thriving, but we weren’t giving it maybe the attention that it really deserved.

I love that part of our business and wanted to go lead it.

So about three-fourths of my day is related to Monarch, and about a fourth of my day tends to be related to Core10.

Interestingly, at the Christmas holidays, my sister asked me, “What do you do?”

Really, what I’m very fortunate to do, I think most of my day today is about strategy for our company.

Monarch is focused on private capital markets, and we manage and help private capital firms, that would be PE, investment banks, help them manage their technology stack.

A lot of times what we’re doing is implementing software for them, whether it be a CRM, portfolio monitoring or some other kind of software that helps them run that.

I do a lot of work with my team.

I do business development.

I work closely with our customers, negotiate our contracts.

I have a fantastic vice president who does a lot of the day-to-day.

I work very closely with him.

I’m planning some travel to some events.

I’m a board member of AFT, very excited about Spring Summit.

So yeah.

Am I getting at what you’re asking for?

Yeah, absolutely.

For starters, you’re doing a lot of different things.

We negotiate a lot of contracts too at Cornerstone.

You mentioned negotiating contracts.

One of the funner parts of the day, right?

Dealing with redlines aren’t fun.

Well, early in my career, I was probably in my early 20s, and one of my mentors said to me, “You need to know every single contract you sign inside and out.”

I took that to heart.

I read every single one.

So my team calls me the in-house counsel, even though I do not have a law degree.

But I’ve just read enough of them that I know, okay, that’s a hot point.

Don’t agree to that.

Nope, too long of a term.

Whatever.

That redline is way too red.

Right.

Not accepting that one.

Yeah, we hear you on that.

Interesting.

Shout-out, I know you mentioned being on the AFT board.

That’s good stuff.

Looking forward to seeing the whole AFT crew at the event coming up.

It’s going to be awesome in Miami.

Great.

Yeah, good stuff.

Well, Brendan, what about you, man?

For starters, I know all three of you have been really busy with your new ventures.

But Brendan, I’m almost wondering if I ask you what your day in the life is, if you’re going to give me a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week plan for all the stuff that you’ve been working on.

So what’s your day in the life been like, man?

You know, it’s funny, Sam.

When you asked me to do this, you sent me a clip of what a typical one of these is.

This is a typical answer, I guess, to this question, but there really is no typical day.

Every day is a bit different.

Actually, that’s kind of the way I like it.

I should start by saying thanks a bunch for having me on, and also thanks a bunch for the two GonzoBanker Awards.

I watched the show.

It was clear that you guys were having a good time.

Congratulations.

It was a fun thing for our group to be recognized.

We circulated that internally, and folks took great pride in the recognition.

My days start early.

I’m a morning person, so I like to get up and get at it.

I have functional responsibility for all areas of the company, and I’m pretty deliberate in trying to spend time with each of those different functional areas every day.

I want them to know that I care, that I’m interested in what they’re doing and what they’re working on.

But it’s also selfish in that I like to be in the details.

I like to know the inner workings of the company.

I like to know what’s going on.

That gives me some degree of comfort.

I’m totally non-hierarchical, so I use my downtime to make phone calls.

I do that both to employees at all ranks of the organization and also to customers.

I like passing folks at the water cooler or grabbing random folks and asking them to jump down to the Marche with me and grab a bite to eat.

I learn a lot from talking to folks at all levels of the organization.

I also find it informative as to the culture, kind of where we are today.

This whole change, you refer to us as a new company.

The guts of the business were founded in ’95, but we’re obviously kind of on a new journey now with a new company name and a new charter.

We do give a lot of thought to what we want to be.

We want to use this as an inflection point to think about what are the cultural pillars of the business, what do we want to prioritize and how do we want to spend time?

I give those topics a ton of thought.

I try and think about the company in terms of key strategic pillars.

What are going to be the most impactful things that we can do to transform the company in the most meaningful way?

Then I try and allocate as much of my time to those big strategic pillars as humanly possible.

I get as many people involved as possible.

I think getting a bunch of smart people in the room leads to really good decisions.

Part of that is also having a great team.

We have a great team as currently constituted, but that team is really growing in scale.

We’re spending a lot of time separating ourselves from our former parent company, NCR Voyix, and that means insourcing a bunch of talent and capabilities.

Again, we have this opportunity to think about what kind of talent or what sort of investments are going to be the most impactful on the company.

I think the final piece about my day is I tend to be incredibly customer-facing.

I spend a lot of time, again, I said it earlier, but I use breaks in the day just to talk to customers that I’ve established a rapport with over the last period of time.

We host customers all the time at GHQ down in Atlanta.

We’ve got what we call the Customer Experience Center.

It’s a really nice way for them to get indoctrinated into the things that we’re thinking about and working on.

Then, as in the case today where I’m in a truly freezing part of the United States, huddled up in a conference room at a customer location, I get on-site with customers all the time.

I use those customer interactions to ask a very basic question, which is, what problems are you facing and how do I help you solve them?

What could I be doing to help you accomplish your objectives?

Then, how do we deliver great experiences either through our technology or through our people?

So yeah, that’s it.

That’s the gig.

Hey, there’s a lot there.

There’s a lot to unpack there.

We’re going to have some fun today talking about it a little bit.

By the way, I can put in a shout-out for that Customer Experience Center.

I had a chance to visit your HQ.

It’s been a year or two ago.

Looking down on the freeway and Georgia Tech over there.

Yeah, that was it.

I was wondering as I was looking at it, you’re basically setting yourself up right there.

Somebody walks out with their degree, their tassel moves over to the other side of their head, and then boom, there are your recruiters ready to just walk them across the freeway.

Am I wrong?

NCR has always had traditionally a very vibrant intern program, and we’ve sustained that.

It’s been a really important talent pipeline for the company.

Obviously, technology and product, the level and the type of expertise that’s coming out of that institution is completely germane to what we do on a day-to-day basis.

We have an enormous amount of tech grads permeating the business.

So yeah, it’s not coincidental.

Interesting.

Well, Hank, what does your day look like?

Hapax is essentially six months old.

I retired from chairman of Q2 in June to come do this.

This is a continuation of a vision that was hatched a little over 20 years ago.

Q2 built out what was necessary, opening up data, eliminating the necessity to go to a branch to do your banking, and then produced a significant other revenue stream in Marketplace.

Once those things were built out and proven, then I could move on and start working on other pieces of that plan.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of a company called CBANC, but it was started not long after Q2.

It was a sister company to Q2 and was part of that plan.

Hapax is taking CBANC and we’ve developed an AI platform which will accomplish the goals that were set out for CBANC, which revolve around regulatory and scale.

Looking for ways, my passion’s always been about how do we help keep as many community and regional banks as possible.

I have nothing against the megabanks, but I am afraid the fewer banks we have, the fewer choices consumers have.

That’s what kind of my entire career has been about, helping community and regional banks be competitive.

I think we had an impact and I’m very proud of that.

Hopefully, where it took Q2 to accomplish its part of the plan in 20 years, I think we’ll accomplish it with Hapax in five or less.

This power of AI, you’re probably going to get tired of me saying AI.

I was going to say, it’s got to be the hashtag of 2024.

Maybe there was something else, but it seems like everybody, I don’t want to make too much of this, but to your point, you said you might say it too much.

I don’t necessarily know that I would say that people have been saying it too much, but it seems like a lot of people have been saying it associated with everything.

When something starts describing everything, then all of a sudden it starts describing nothing.

It seems like AI has been one of those things over the last year.

We’ve actually been spending a lot of time, I know we’re not alone in that, but Ron Shevlin, others on our team, John Meyer, but I know other folks out there, Jason Henrichs, other people out there in the community, have spent a lot of time just saying, all right, let’s get our definitions right here.

This is Gen AI.

This is all these different things.

Then just, I think, productive time has been spent on helping people with use cases.

Let’s just get this down into some real areas.

Well, I don’t want to get too far ahead of us, but there’s a combination of technologies out there that I think are really powerful.

When you take AI, no-code, AI connectivity tools, things of that nature, when you start combining those things together, the speed with which you can innovate is just absolutely incredible.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

It’s so transformative to a business, not just banking, any business.

I don’t think there’s any question that’s what you’re going to see happen over the next two to five years, adoption of that and erosion of some of our more traditional business.

That’s going to happen in banking too.

It’s already happening.

Just seeing the power of that in process is interesting.

Interesting.

Yeah, I agree with you.

I had a couple long plane flights over the Christmas holiday and I read a book about the impact of AI on exactly the constituency you’re describing, which is community and regional banks, credit unions.

The author in this case was referring to it as electricity, that it’ll be everywhere.

This whole notion of AI as this sort of complicated concept behind the curtain, it’s really far more straightforward than that.

It’s really the ability to ingest data in a much more scaled way and then manipulate it into sensible outcomes that drive informed decisions that deliver incredible business benefits.

So it is absolutely incredible.

You know what, I don’t want to get too far ahead of...

I don’t know where we’re going.

I’ll tell you where I was headed on this.

It could be use-case development, or use of data, which is obviously related.

I was just curious, when you all think about your travels, whether it’s on an airplane or hotels, conference rooms, wherever you’re at, when you look at the banking and fintech markets right now, I’m just curious what you see that you think is really working well.

We’ll come around to the negative stuff here in a little bit.

I would just love to get your sense for, maybe AI is part of that, what are you seeing out in fintech land right now that gives you a lot of hope, that you see is working really well?

I’m wide open on whoever wants to go first.

We can even talk over each other.

That’s fun.

I’m not running a Jerry Springer operation here, but on the other hand I also don’t want to make this too rigid.

I can start here just really quick.

I’d be curious to hear what Brendan has to say about this.

Brendan, you mentioned a day in the life, as far as you have your strategic pillars right now in your organization.

It makes me think, I’m usually on the road and I speak to a lot of community bankers, whether they are on the credit union side or on the community bank side.

Oftentimes a lot of these credit unions or community banks, they don’t know where to start when it comes to automation and AI.

These are buzzwords.

AI, AI, AI.

When we think about, oftentimes specifically for credit unions, they budget their initiatives for the following year.

Here we are, January 2025, and you mentioned your strategic pillars.

Oftentimes there are credit unions that operate as far as, this is what we have as an initiative for our implementation portfolio, so to speak, for 2025.

Then they have a wish list or discovery things that they may dip and dabble in.

Kevin Martin, he leads the business strategy over at SchoolsFirst, and he says it best.

He says that sometimes they look five to eight years out and they have pillars in place for the implementation part of 2025, and then they have a wish list or discovery things they may dip and dabble in.

What do you, I guess when we think about the good and we think about, Hank, everything that you’re doing over at Hapax with providing this data, so to speak, for financial services and all these verticals, Brendan, help me understand what that looks like when you’re speaking to a community bank or a credit union.

How can they begin when their 2025 initiatives have already been signed, sealed, delivered?

Yeah, so it’s a good question, Stacy.

When I talk to the credit unions and community banks, the theme is, first of all, deposits, deposits, deposits.

How do I grow deposits and I don’t want to pay for them?

How do I get more dollars that obviously get converted into profitable loans?

How do I grow my share of wallet with my customer base so that I’m not just a depository institution, but I’m also getting wealth access and participating in the payments ecosystem and all that kind of good stuff?

There are a lot of other business lines that they want to be in, and they’re looking to us to facilitate it.

What’s working, I would say, is a couple things.

One, digital banking broadly, coming out of COVID, continues to be incredibly germane.

The stats that I read say 91% of customer interactions between the financial institution and their customer base are through digital channels.

So we’re not a vendor anymore.

That’s not the lens through which we’re perceived.

We’re a strategic partner.

Then I think the second piece, Stacy, that I find fascinating is the community banks, the credit unions, their primary interest is a deep connectivity into their local community.

They do that through community interaction, but they do it through a very localized understanding of their constituency.

Digital at first blush is completely impersonal.

It’s through a phone.

It’s through a website.

How do we leverage technology, AI, all the things that Hank’s working on, to replicate the same degree of highly personalized experiences through what is otherwise a completely electronic channel?

We’re doing that through UI/UX.

We’re doing that through creating experience groups.

We’re doing that by leveraging AI to create highly targeted marketing programs for our customers.

We’re leveraging AI for transaction cleansing and distilling payment information.

So I think those are the challenges.

How do I replicate the highly personal feel that I get when I walk into a branch location?

How do I do that through a digital channel?

Then how do I grow deposits in a relatively seamless way, grow share of wallet, create stickier customer relationships, solve a broader swath of problems for my customers and grow the bottom line?

Stacy, I was going to say, as far as banks and looking at technology, you brought up AI specifically for 2025.

There are so many different ways, and Brendan, this thinking of it as electricity, it’s not like you’re going to decide to turn on electricity.

What’s going to happen is there’s going to be AI embedded in their staff system, or an agent, or something outside that they’re going to use for recruiting, or even a native system, which is what Hapax is.

But there are so many different ways that you’re going to be, whether you want a native system or not, there are so many different ways that you can use technology that has AI in it to help through jobs that I think it’s going to creep in.

I saw a survey, don’t remember where I saw it, fairly recently, within the last couple of months, that something like 100% of the CEOs that were asked, and these were typically mid-cap banks, said they hadn’t determined a plan for AI and they weren’t using it.

You drop down one or two layers and you find out they actually are.

So it’s creeping in.

It’s again just phenomenal to me, the transformative power that it has to take more menial tasks and be able to accomplish them very quickly, those mountains of data.

Those surveys that you mentioned, Hank, sometimes I’m a little bewildered by them too because it’s like, now wait a second.

Your fraud vendor has been using machine learning for quite some time now.

You may not have built something yourself internally at the bank, but you are.

Your call center has been using a shadowing or some type of chatbot that’s Gen AI-related.

So I think it’s interesting when you get down to the actual use cases where people are actually in that world.

I think one of the areas that, to Stacy’s point, would drive a lot of that, they’ve already got their 2025 baked.

One of the things we’ve been tracking, and I say we, royal we, our research under Ron Shevlin’s leadership, has been tracking is people that planned to deploy something but never did.

We’re still talking about what we call that, like planned-but-not-deployed ratio.

Just not very catchy.

Anyway, it seems like integration, and I know Lee, that’s an area where you’ve been, which is near and dear to your hearts, if somebody had something on their wish list for 2025, maybe not wish list, that was on their plan right now, in the near term, what seems to halt them in their tracks is either an inability or unwillingness to go through the pains that are necessary, and they’re very painful and always have been, to integrate those systems.

It seems to me like it’s one of the reasons why CRM systems, which have historically had among the highest gap between they’re planning to deploy a new one and they actually got it, it seems like integration of data, integration of systems, has been such a large barrier, even with all the focus on openness and APIs and all this good stuff.

Lee, I know you guys have been around that for a long time.

Any reactions to that or any thoughts on that?

Well, it’s funny you ask what’s working well.

In some ways that’s working well and in some ways, like you said, it’s very painful.

I think that integration and API connectivity, and the ability and the amount of data that can be connected and synced and distributed and aggregated, is overwhelming.

Maybe that’s good and maybe that’s bad.

That’s a lot of our business, both on the Core10 side.

We have an integration platform.

We help community banks and credit unions basically put a layer between their core and all the fintechs they want to work with, their digital banking provider, things like that, for security, but also to aggregate that data and get a single source of truth and make sure that the same piece of information that’s coming from two different places is actually so.

In that one way there is so much opportunity.

There is technology existing and being built.

We build these kinds of integrations every single day.

But it’s not for the faint of heart.

You can’t get your 10-year-old to build this integration.

I see that a lot with CRM too.

There’s so much promise.

Everyone thinks this is going to be so great.

Then the devil’s in the details.

Exactly how is it implemented?

Exactly how are my other data sources flowing in?

Is dial data, is my contact information flowing in?

My sales leads?

Is it all actually there and working well for me?

It’s hard to get that right.

Then I think, going back to what Hank was saying, the gift, really two gifts, in AI.

One is that it is giving people the opportunity to push drudge work to a computer system and work to their best.

In high school, so before we started recording we were talking about my background in health, and I remember one day sitting in a room.

We were piloting a new system and this one doctor stood up and he said, “I’m a surgeon, not a computer whiz.”

What he was basically trying to say is, don’t make me change my ways to your system.

I’m highly trained.

I’m a surgeon.

Let me go do surgery.

I think AI is giving a lot of people the chance to go do what they’re really good at and quit just keying in data or chair-swiveling from system to system.

The other gift is that it is accessible for free.

I can pull something up in my browser and start asking it questions and play with it.

There have been so many buzzwords in the past that you really couldn’t do that with.

It was like this thing out there.

It took a very expensive license.

You had to have some megacompany.

But I can just dial in to GPT.

Not dial, how old am I?

I can just key in to ChatGPT and start asking it questions and get so much amazing information back.

I want to dovetail in on what Lee said.

That crystallized as you were talking to me.

One thing it does is it lets people be people instead of some part of the process.

I think that’s going to be, and one of the good things I see in banking, maybe it’s because the people we’re talking to tend to be on the leading edge of looking at technology to solve their problems, but I’m seeing a willingness from banks to rethink how they perform their jobs, the people that they’re going to need in the future to perform those jobs.

I think it’s going to take a more personal, a more intelligent person to do the job of the future because it’s going to be more relationship-based.

It’ll be people being people.

Having been in banking for a long time, we don’t see change very quickly.

Those of us that are in the digital banking space have had to fight this battle because, as Brendan said, it’s online, it’s impersonal and all that.

But I think they’ve accepted that and they’ve worked around that.

I think we’re getting better.

That’s a trend that I hope continues.

I think it will.

I think that the financial institutions that do more of that will be the successful ones.

Hank, I think you hit the nail on the head.

I always think about the three pillars, going back to what Brendan mentioned.

When we think about innovation, people, process and technology.

Brendan, even at the Customer Experience Center, or all of us when we’re rubbing elbows with folks, whether it be at conferences or wherever we may be, oftentimes what I personally hear on the road is, “Hey, Stacy, I can’t.”

I was at a tech summit for a Community Bank Association.

You’re looking at community banks from $200 million to maybe $1.5 billion there in the room.

Half of those folks did not start any automation or even dabble in the AI piece because they said, “Hey, my folks are already doing a whole bunch of other things, so I cannot imagine bringing something else.”

Lee, you mentioned integration.

Brendan, you mentioned integration with the community.

How do we integrate with the community, understand what it is that’s being called as far as retention and account stickiness?

How do we make that easier and use AI as a tool for our team members, our employees, so that we can go ahead and be the change we wish to see and execute?

Oftentimes we think about this, but what about the execution piece of it?

Just wanted to add that as well.

What do you all think about that?

Lee, were you going to make a comment there?

I was just going to piggyback on Hank for a second because I think that’s a really fascinating paradox about AI.

It lets humans be more human.

We’re all so scared it’s going to come in and take over the world and we’re all going to turn to cyborgs and all that.

But I think he’s turning it on its head, and I think that’s so interesting to think about it that way.

Now, I don’t want to be insensitive to those people who maybe are doing a very routine job and AI could replace that.

But I love where you say it’s elevating the human to what we are truly good at, relationships.

It’s interesting, Brendan, you mentioned Georgia Tech because I got my master’s degree there, big fan.

What I studied was human-computer interaction.

It was this idea, what are humans good at and what are computers good at?

If you can give everybody the appropriate set of tasks, that’s where the magic happens.

Human beings are good at different things.

We should let the computer do the computery things.

We’re not good at it.

The two things that computers will never do better than us are exercise judgment.

How do I prioritize?

It helps me understand what the data says, but then what next?

To your point, Stacy, how do I act?

How do I create actions coming out of my learnings?

But it’s judgment and then it’s interpersonal skills, relationships.

Exactly as you guys have been saying.

A lot of what this industry, my industry, is about is developing interpersonal connectivity with the folks on the other side of the table.

Ultimately this is about trust.

Do they trust that we are going to make investments in the appropriate areas?

Do they trust that our ambitions are at the highest level possible?

Do they trust that we have their best interests at heart?

That their priorities are dictating our priorities?

A machine’s never going to be able to communicate that.

So I think there’s a huge role for it to play.

Hank, I think the opportunity set is absolutely spectacular.

But I think human beings are still relatively well positioned for gainful employment.

Well, you know...

Go ahead.

Another thing that just struck me that is going well, and this is going to be counterintuitive, is fraud.

If you think of digital banking in those channels, the expectation was that there was going to be massive amounts of fraud.

Banks were going to be going out of business.

Right now the subject is other kinds of fraud.

It is check washing.

It is scams.

It is that kind of thing, and not digital banking systems being hacked.

Kudos to the fintech group to have come up with that technology that has managed to stay ahead of the bad guys and prevented institutional fraud on a scale that is certainly possible, is conceivable in that environment, that hasn’t happened.

Yeah.

Look at the GonzoBanker Awards this year.

The Tech of the Year, account opening fraud prevention.

I think most of those companies aren’t but a handful of years old.

They’re relatively young.

So there’s just a lot of innovation going on.

I agree with you, Hank, around fraud mitigation.

Of course they have to stay on top of that and everything.

But I agree that is something.

Back in the ’90s and 2000s, it just hasn’t developed.

The people that are in digital banking have done a really good job of staying ahead of the really bad...

I know we only have a few minutes left, and I want to be mindful of your time because I know you have other commitments.

But if we could just take a minute and go around the horn here, I’d love to get your perspectives quickly on something that you see in the business that you think could be a lot better, or is, call it broken.

Or if you see something that is promising that could fix it, that’s great.

We’d just love your take on something out there that you see as less than ideal that you think could be better off right now in the business.

Anybody want to take a first stab at that?

I’ll go ahead and kick it off.

We keep mentioning the GonzoBanker Awards.

It’s where Cornerstone highlights the who’s who, who’s really trailblazing innovation and really making a difference in the market that we serve.

It makes me think about, quite honestly, you mentioned, Sam, a couple of minutes ago, the folks that won were younger companies.

So it took me to the younger generation.

The younger generation will be attracted to technology that is attractive to them.

High speed.

Nimble.

Becoming much more nimble.

Something that will take a matter of seconds.

I think that when we think about all these fintechs really trying to hone into community banks in those verticals, or credit unions in that vertical, or even both, I think we have to make mention of, going back to Lee, the integration piece of it.

Being able to execute that.

I sound like a broken record now, but making sure that your technology is attractive to the younger folks in order for us to drive those deposits.

I think something that should be better, perhaps, Lee, you kicked off by saying that your sister asked during the holidays, “What is it that you do?”

I think as a family game during the holidays, I think everyone should do a one-minute PowerPoint in the living room.

Just, “Hey, this is what I do.”

Because my daughters still have no idea what it is that I do.

They just think I go out of town all the time.

But I think that’s...

Dress really snappy.

There we go.

There we go.

I just love the innovative idea of a one-minute PowerPoint.

Listen.

Elevator pitch at home.

There we go.

What about the rest of you folks?

Anything you think could be better?

Well, I mean, Stacy, reacting to one thing that you just said.

The numbers that I read are something like $70 trillion are about to change hands over the next 20 years from the baby boomers to the next generation.

Those are big numbers.

Finding the underbanked, finding the younger generation and compelling them to manage funds through safer, more traditional channels, that’s going to be critical.

I think attracting that audience, there are interesting companies out there doing, I think, some exciting things.

Just because I’ve spent a lot of time in Atlanta, I’ve gotten to know the Greenlight guys, and I think they’re an example of a company that’s done some creative things.

I use their technology with my 12-year-old to control how he’s spending the money I give him.

I think there are areas of fraud where we could be doing a better job.

I agree with Hank for the most part.

I think I still hear a lot about friendly fraud, which is unfortunately probably the hardest to control.

What you can’t control for is someone that willingly gives up their username and password.

That’s a hard one to navigate, but unfortunately it happens all the time.

On the check side, check fraud continues to be a bit of a thing.

It’s somewhere that is definitely one of the first two or three things that FIs bring up with me in my travels.

It’s somewhere that we continue to think about.

How do we offer a more fulsome solution?

Is it something that we should be building?

We obviously do a ton through partnership.

I know, Hank, your old organization Q2 does as well.

But we’re not overly prideful.

We don’t have the view that we need to be all things for all.

What I do think we need to do is create technology that allows for ease of integration, have an open architecture, and then either offer it in-house or go out and curate the absolute best partners possible to deliver the best outcomes for our customers.

I don’t know.

Those are some of the things that I think.

Yeah.

Lee or Hank, anything else before we wrap this up and let you guys get on with the rest of your busy days?

Yeah.

I mean, I agree with Brendan.

I think that there’s so much positive about integration and there’s still so much.

Talking about young-stage companies, I would love to see more larger companies making data, making APIs more open and accessible rather than charging you to use it, charging you when you use it.

I know everybody has to make money, but some of these guys are these behemoths and it takes a year to get their attention.

I just want to connect to your API.

I think there’s a lot to be done there.

That’s a great point, Lee.

I’ll go in a different direction and say regulatory.

I think that the regulatory load on the financial institution is, in often cases, misplaced and does not have the desired effect for which it was originally created.

It’s sad to me that many of the conversations I have are of an $800 million bank trying to get over a billion, an $8 billion bank trying to get over $10 billion, and managing their size and trying to spend as little time in certain ranges as they can.

That’s not what we should be doing.

One of the reasons I’m focused on one of the areas I am is, how do you eliminate regulatory overhead as an expense for community and regional banks?

I want them to be on par with Bank of America, with floors and floors of attorneys, and not have to have that.

That really chapped me.

The 2008 financial crisis and all that, that was not community regionals doing.

Wasn’t the idea.

Bad way.

Yeah.

Brendan, were you going to make a point there?

Yeah.

I was just going to say, Hank, you said earlier about the optimism that’s sort of out there in the market.

I agree with you, but I think the sentiment is that a lot of that’s likely to reverse itself out over the coming months.

I think there’s going to be an ebbing of the tides here.

To your point about the community and regional banks versus the kind of too-big-to-fail guys, what does that mean vis-à-vis FDIC reform?

Is there a need to look at that and level the playing field there?

Some of the rules in place there have been in place for a very, very long time without much modification.

Is that appropriate?

We’ll see.

Time will tell.

There’s so much regulation around technology by people that it doesn’t feel like really understand technology.

No.

Never had that happen.

So I think some better understanding, some better expertise to help regulate.

Know what you’re talking about.

To Brendan’s point, the expectations are high and the ability to achieve those is low.

But at least we’ve got some folks that are coming in, I think, that have that.

Yeah.

Well, listen, you guys have all been so generous with your time.

I really appreciate it.

Without any further ado, I’ll just close it out by thanking Lee Farabaugh, who is the president of Monarch and co-founder of Core10, Brendan Tansill, who’s the CEO of Candescent, Hank Seale, who’s the CEO of Hapax, and of course my co-host with the most, Stacy Bryant.

Thanks so much for joining us today, guys.

I look forward to seeing you all in the future and out on the road, and I look forward to seeing all of our listeners on the next episode of Fintech Hustle.