Deals, Data & the Digital Shift with Kelley Michalik & Stephen Baker

Well, hello out there. This is Sam Kilmer from Fintech Hustle, your host and managing director at Cornerstone Advisors.

I’m joined today by some real rock stars on this episode of Fintech Hustle.

Let me go ahead and introduce them a little bit to get going.

First of all, Kelly Mahalik, who is the chief commercial officer of Lumin Digital.

I think Kelly has been at Lumin Digital now for a couple years.

I know we’re not really here to talk too much about companies, but I think it’s been a really interesting journey for Kelly, which she’ll probably tell you a little bit more about.

They’ve had a really interesting last year or two, coming out of the initial seeding or startup from Velera into a couple of major funding rounds with Light Street and NewView Capital, a list of the who’s who of some major credit unions in the industry that have been investors in Lumin Digital.

I think something like 20 credit unions or whatever.

It’s been a really interesting route.

I think what’s another interesting thing about Kelly, coming to this industry, we tend to think of the fintech industry as an insular crowd.

I started out in banking and I’ve kind of been institutionalized in this business.

Kelly came from technology, but travel, HR, basically coming into fintech from outside.

So welcome, Kelly.

I appreciate it.

Now that I’m in this industry, I would never want to be anywhere else.

That’s for sure.

You hear others say that, but nothing compares.

So I’m so happy to be part of fintech, and I’m happy to be here today.

That happens to all of us, by the way.

We get sucked into the industry and we never leave.

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaking of which, let me also introduce my co-host with the most today, Kelly Schultz.

That’s right.

You just heard two Kellys.

Fifty percent of our group today is a Kelly.

Different spelling, different spelling, but we have Kelly and Kelly.

Kelly Schultz from Cornerstone Advisors.

Kelly’s background in fintech is also just very storied in the sense that some of you may have heard of the Association for Financial Technology.

At one point, Kelly was the president of AFT, but she was also the president of Allied Payment Network, which some of you may have heard recently, speaking of deals, was acquired by Autobooks, I think a month or two or so back.

Kelly was also a president at iPay, I think a co-founder as well, and also an executive there through the acquisition by Jack Henry way back when, kind of when the core providers were really getting into the payment space originally in a big way.

What did I miss in there, Kelly?

Other than you’re a principal at Cornerstone Advisors.

I’ve got three kids, four animals in the house.

You know.

But no, you’re spot on.

It’s just been a really fun ride, a great journey, and I love this industry.

Yeah, it shows.

Thanks for being the co-host today.

Our other guest, last but not least, certainly, is Stephen Baker, who’s the CEO of Kinective.

Again, in the spirit of we’ve already been talking about deals, both in terms of funding rounds and investors with Lumin Digital and all the deals that Kelly has been involved with over the years, man, Stephen, Kinective has been in a lot of deals.

When I think about the last couple years, you came together as a company by way of deals.

CFM, NXTsoft and IMM all sort of coming together as a mashup.

Probably not the way you would describe it, but give me a little rope there.

Then more recently, you’ve had what, Datava and EPIQ River?

You also had, coming into 2023 or 2024, a couple of private equity backers, OceanSound and TA and some others out there that are involved.

So it’s the deal episode.

I guess it wasn’t planned that way, but deal episode.

Welcome to Fintech Hustle.

Thank you.

Yeah, I appreciate it, Sam.

Happy to be here.

I also, like Kelly, am happy to be in fintech.

I think I just clicked two years in May.

I was sort of one foot in with a payments company in the real estate space before, but I’m really enjoying working with financial institutions.

It’s a great market.

I understand why you guys get sucked in and don’t get out.

Yeah.

I was thinking about that, you and Kelly both, because you were in the finance and real estate market, right?

It was real estate market, finance, proptech, fintech crossover.

So I was one foot in and then kind of came all the way in with this.

Yeah.

And you know, Stephen, super interesting, but that property management piece and the payments piece around that that you did.

I actually got a little bit adjacent to that and had a little bit of that inside of the bill payment business for a while.

It was very interesting.

We were very tempted to run off and chase that numerous times.

Yeah, I think you should see somebody tackle it.

Well, many have died on that field.

It’s a tough one.

Yeah.

I’m not going to say it’s a land war in Asia, but it’s kind of on that dimension.

Well, yeah.

Listen, just to kind of jump in here a little bit, to your point about the connection of the real estate market and the fintech market, look at just this week the valuation of Bilt in the loyalty space and the rental market space.

I think they were valued at bordering on $11 billion on what appears to be, I mean, growing.

I think they’re headed towards a billion dollars in revenue next year, but that’s a forecast.

Hundreds of millions right now.

We saw Bilt pop up.

It was only like five years ago where they really became a brand.

Now you walk through O’Hare Airport, they’ve got 10-foot-long ads, and I’m like, geez, is that the same company?

I mean, they’re an absolute rocket ship.

It tapped into a really exciting space.

I think everybody was excited to get on that bandwagon.

Kelly Schultz, what did you think about when you saw that one?

What did you think about that?

I just think, crazy multiples.

At that size, to drive multiples that high at that size.

It’s one thing for a smaller company to drive multiples like that on a smaller revenue scale, but at that size to still be driving that kind of multiple is just insane.

It’s unheard of.

I think it’s reflective, at least in part, everybody wants a piece of rental payments.

It’s the biggest thing most people pay every month.

Chase is after it.

They’ve spent money.

They’ve spun up joint ventures.

Everybody’s chased it.

Bilt has gone after it and tapped into it in a way I don’t think anyone has in 10 years.

I think that’s what we’re seeing.

They’re frankly just kind of tapping the surface, right?

If you look at what could be.

They’ve developed all the partnerships you need.

So I think that’s probably what they’re getting paid for.

They’re already at the places you need to be to do loyalty for real estate and they can expand that market a great deal.

If I was underwriting it, that’s what I’d look at.

It’s really interesting.

I was trading notes yesterday with John Meyer on our team.

He’s done some writing over at GonzoBanker about the real estate market and risk.

He was a strategy officer and product officer over at Abrigo.

We had a chance to work together at Harland Financial Solutions way back in the day.

John was saying the same thing you were there, Kelly Schultz, about the revival of the dot-bomb.

I think if nothing else, two things that jumped out at me on that was the absolute marriage of loyalty, data and a network.

I think the other one is, coming into 2025, with all the turbulence that’s been in the market around the tariff factor, plus or minus, is it going to happen?

How’s it going to happen?

What’s going to happen to the economy?

I think there’s, hey, is fintech going to be okay?

Maybe that’s extraordinary, but if that’s anything at all representative of the interest in the market on fintech, let’s just say fintech is back.

It’s going to change shape, right?

I think there are a lot of ways that’s going to happen.

But fintech is, I don’t see any downturn in this market in our lifetime, right?

Kelly Mahalik, any thoughts on not necessarily Bilt, but just interest in the market?

Obviously, you guys have had investor interest.

That could be, again, you guys could be a really extraordinary case, but do you think it’s representative of some of the excitement in the market?

I think you guys would have been kind of early days of this because that was late last year coming into this year, right?

Late last year coming into this year.

Yeah.

But if you think about where we were even just that short time from where we are now, it’s incredible momentum.

We’ve got more interest now than we did then.

It’s really been just an incredible ride.

It’s been eight months, nine months since our Series A, and we’re just in a completely different place now.

So the momentum is there, and I don’t think it’s just for us.

All of our partners are seeing the same thing.

So it’s timing, right?

Great place to be.

Good time to be here.

Yeah.

We see inbound interest on the private side on probably a weekly basis.

There is, I still think, a lot of money, a lot of unspent capital investment out there.

I think everybody’s excited about fintech.

I think people are excited about payments.

That has been a trend for a number of years.

I don’t think it’s abating.

I think there’s plenty of money that’s looking for its way in.

I’m sure Lumin had no shortage of suitors when it came time to raise money.

That’s indicative of, let’s put it this way, I’m not concerned.

Yeah, no.

I wouldn’t be either.

Hey, I’ve got a question for Kelly, Sam, if you don’t mind.

No, jump right in.

Kelly, I am so curious.

You’ve got a marketing background, really impressive history there.

You came over into the fintech space.

But now you’re in the commercial side of the business, which is really, really interesting to me because I think as an industry we have not done well with that segment, from a commercial banking perspective, commercial digital banking, and then getting into payments.

There’s so much paper flying around everywhere still and all of that.

I’m curious about the shift from marketing to commercial.

I think I like it.

I think I like it a lot because I think half the problem and why we’re failing out there is because there’s some sale to be done, right?

For sure.

There’s such a big shift that’s happened.

I started my career on the sales side.

It wasn’t until about 15 years ago that I flipped to marketing.

I thought, what am I doing here?

I’m not a marketer.

But we had a new product line.

We needed a marketer.

We were looking for a unicorn, somebody that had deep experience in the product, knew the sales team, etc.

So I finally raised my hand and moved over.

I think that child’s-eye helped me think differently, think out of the box, etc.

I think now, with the ability for us to be truly personalized in everything that we do, what technology is giving us, we’ve flipped.

So marketing and the storytelling and the personalization, human touch, is entryway into good client experience, good lasting trusted relationships.

That just now flows into the sales process.

It’s like one continuum versus these segmented things.

Back in, I think it was November, when I inherited sales, I was like a kid in a candy shop.

Okay, wait.

We can finally break down these barriers and actually put the prospect or client first in this experience and really lean in from an empathy perspective.

So I’ve loved every minute of it.

Yeah.

The commercial element is interesting to me too because, from the bill payment perspective, we looked at things like a consumer needs things, and then a small business needs a few more things.

A couple of little twists and turns in the product, and that helps a small business.

Then to get into the commercial level, you need more things.

But I always thought this broken, siloed perspective on how to move through that growth path was part of our problem in the industry.

If you think about it, I’m a consumer.

I’m an entrepreneur.

I start a business.

Now I’m a small business.

Now I’m going to go raise some money and pull some private equity in behind one of my companies, and now I’m a big business.

As a bank or credit union, you want to keep my business and you want to grow with me.

How does that continuum kind of go so that I don’t just have to jump ship, abandon all my history, switch products around and all that kind of thing?

I can just kind of grow along the way.

I felt that was really broken in the industry.

I never got a chance to fix it.

But that’s definitely, when we look at our commercial banking product, one thing that we are really focused on is exactly what you just said.

Humans are humans whether they are doing work for themselves, whether you mentioned you had three kids, I have three kids and four animals too, so we have more in common.

We should talk about that later.

Whether we’re a parent, a child helping our parents, or to your point, entrepreneurial small-business owner.

We’re still the same person.

So we need the experiences to be easy, integrated and adaptable.

Because in all of those realms that I just mentioned, what’s happening today is going to be different than what’s happening tomorrow and next month.

That’s one thing we know for sure.

Love that you’re focused on that.

Yeah.

I’ll just throw in real quick that, Kelly, when you took on the full kind of go-to-market of marketing and sales and revenue and all of it, I thought, yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense.

Because it reminds me a little bit in bank and credit union land, maybe a little bit in fintech land, where you have this chief experience officer or where they would roll it up in commercial banks.

Get out of this whole head of commercial lending and head of treasury and go to a president or some type of role that oversaw the whole pipeline.

Because to me it is sort of indicative of how, now with digital-first exploration and how we all go try to get smart about things before we ever enter the pipeline in an official way from the seller’s perspective, by the time we even get to that pipeline many of us are already knee-deep in content.

It’s almost like the pipeline has changed a little bit.

There are still some aspects of it that are the same, but where marketing left off and where sales started, or vice versa, has all become blurry.

It’s an interesting soup, I guess I would say.

So it actually made a lot of sense to me.

I just don’t know, candidly, in banking and fintech if most CMOs were hired or had that track where they had had the experiences that you had in sales.

It’s almost like sales and marketing were set up, you read about this all over the place, that it’s some battle in the sky.

But it just seemed to me like it was different tribes.

One person oversaw events and brand and was a cost center.

One person oversaw a pipeline and a bunch of gunslingers, and they were going out trying to get money.

They were different culturally.

Very siloed.

Yes.

So siloed.

There’s so much content and books written about exactly that battle in the sky you’re talking about.

Quite typically, the trajectory typically is a CRO will inherit marketing, or marketing will roll under a CRO.

I obviously have a biased view, but I think then your marketing department becomes transactional and sales support versus strategic and client-experience focused.

So when you look at our funnel or our campaign plans, it’s all integrated.

We’re creating pods where marketing and sales own accounts and are working together.

We’re no longer doing old-school marketing like, fill out this form and maybe some BDR will call you and bother you.

It’s the last person you want to talk to.

So we’re really rethinking the entire experience.

We’re only able to do that because there’s one person on top.

You don’t have that struggle or that fear anymore.

I love that.

I think this is something everyone struggles with, right?

Because marketing is under pressure.

You’re spending money, and everyone, I think this is a traditional thing, in the boardroom, marketing talks about leads and website traffic and everything else.

The sales guy or gal is rolling their eyes, like, well, where are my bookings?

At the end of the day, and I’m curious how you solve for this, Kelly, this is, by the way, I think there’s a similar, as a former CPTO, I think there’s a similar problem with product and engineering because my analog there is always, you’re in the same canoe.

Engineering’s canoe, if it’s going down, guess what?

The whole boat is going under the waves.

You’ve got to row that boat together.

I think this is so much the same example.

The way we solve for it ultimately is we all sign up for bookings.

There’s a marketing-driven bookings element, but my marketing leader is also tied to the overall bookings number.

That’s how I solve for it.

Because I think you’re right, Kelly.

Either you have to have one chief that’s running the whole show, or you’ve got to find a different way to stitch them together.

My marketing leader is also a former sales leader, so that helps.

I think you’ve got that background too.

That helps a lot.

But I’m curious, how do you guys solve for that?

Do you guys metric the same, or what’s the idea?

Yeah.

We talk about engagement.

We don’t do MQLs out the door.

We don’t do website visits out the door.

We are very account-based.

One thing I love about this industry is I can define my market.

I know a finite market.

Oh, yeah.

And I know who is a best fit for Lumin, because all of our clients have these similar characteristics and needs.

You can look at the market and say, okay, here’s a group of clients like our existing clients.

So we are measuring, here’s our ICP, and with the technology available, ABM technologies, etc., we know who’s engaging in our content and at what level the account is engaging.

So we truly get a 360-degree view of account XYZ.

Then there is a very collaborative approach from the sales and marketing pod to say, okay, these folks are engaged.

We need to reach out.

We need to engage with them more and get them into the actual pipeline.

You have account-based marketing in pods.

So you’ve got a pod with a set of targets.

That’s cool.

That’s interesting.

Yeah, very cool.

Do either of you, I’m curious because I spent a good deal of my career working through distribution channels, which is a challenge in and of itself, do either of you rely on distribution channels to sell, or are you more direct sales?

I can jump in.

So we have both, Kelly.

We are fortunate, and this has actually gotten better since I got in the seat.

I’d like to take credit, but I think a lot of it’s frankly just core banking systems becoming more open-minded.

We’re resold by core banking systems in a lot of cases.

If it’s on their paper, you’re not arguing over who’s what.

It’s cleaner.

But we still drive the sales on our side.

Then separately, for some of our product lines, we’re direct sales.

So it’s a bit of a hybrid.

But I will say we’re fortunate in the sense that we have a bit of a tailwind that comes from being a preferred partner for core vendors for a certain set of their solutions.

It’s super helpful.

But we’re also out there, hand-to-mouth as well, in terms of deriving direct.

Well, channel sales, if you can get it and you can get it to go, it is one of those things that, honestly, it’s like a freight train.

You couldn’t stop it if you wanted to once you really get it spun up and going.

I love when I see a model working like that.

I kind of sense that, Stephen, in your company.

So I was just really curious how things are working today.

Because if you think it was difficult a few years ago working with core system providers or even digital banking providers to try to get connected into those reseller referral relationships, 20 years ago it was just total hell at that point.

I’ve heard all the horror stories, and I’m super fortunate.

I’m two years into this industry, but I’ve got guys on my team who are 25 years in.

I’ll be honest, I’d be nowhere without those guys.

I’m fortunate to have them.

But also, the folks at the core banking systems have also been there for 20 years.

Exactly.

But there’s trust and there’s relationship there.

The business has been a major beneficiary from that.

That’s great to hear that model’s working.

I think also my sense of this is there’s a tailwind on the category too, Stephen, in the sense that when I started out in the banking business, and as you can probably tell, that wasn’t recently, integration was a huge challenge.

Guess what is still a huge challenge?

It’s like, you haven’t fixed that one yet.

There are some fixes and you guys have been working on it.

But what I found interesting is as the supply of problem solvers in integration, Stephen, you and then, Kelly, members of your team and implementations or whatever, as those have gone up, the number of things that we’re looking to integrate has gone up faster.

Exactly.

Well, now you’re at the point where the new solutions are more sophisticated.

They don’t just need connected data.

They need normalized, aggregated data to do their magic.

Frankly, that was behind the Datava acquisition, being able to provide that curated set of data.

You go to a conference today, and you go to all of them, Sam, I think.

That’s always prime spot on the agendas today and the keynotes, right?

It’s all about data, aggregating it, making use of it.

A lot of the new fintechs, they need that.

But it’s not just connectivity.

They need aggregated data.

Exactly.

They need a lake.

Exactly.

I think what’s interesting about this industry, or at least I found it so, I started out in telecom and then came into fintech from there.

What’s been interesting all along is that while we’ve talked open banking for way too long before anything happened, and then we finally got some things to start to happen and it just took a long time to get things turning, while we’ve talked about all that, still to this day, we don’t have integration standards as an industry.

I still kind of stand back a little boggled that, at the fundamental levels, we don’t have that.

It would seem like if we did, we could build the new stuff that we need to add on so much faster because everybody knows how the plug-and-play works.

We can do it in a uniform way that’s more cost-effective and just easier to manage.

But it is a tough nut to crack in this industry.

It is.

It’s such a mess because every core does things differently in terms of different data artifacts.

Then within a given core, some of them, which are, one of the benefits is how flexible they are.

But you offer a flexible solution and guess what?

People are going to flex it.

Now you’ve got a snowflake for every way that somebody’s implemented a given core.

What seems interesting is the industry has had some Silicon Valley folks come in in the last few years.

I think they come in and they’re like, they paint with a broad brush.

“Oh, we’ll solve this. We’ll just do XYZ.”

They quickly get ground down and the optimism, you can kind of see the happiness drain from their eyes after they’ve been trying.

It’s much harder.

Right now, after they’ve had five calls where somebody says, “Well, you know, it’s complicated.”

I’ll give you a great example from my past.

Before I joined Cornerstone 13 years ago, I was asked by a large credit union that was a client of mine to join this consortium that was working on a credit union data standard.

I suspect you guys know what I’m talking about.

I went to all the meetings.

I was our company representative.

We were all in.

We were doing all these things.

Somewhere late in the game, I asked my client, who asked me to go to this session because they were on the advisory committee of this group, I asked them, “So, how are you going to use it?”

The CIO said, “Oh, we’re not going to use it because we want to be different.”

I thought, well, there you go.

That’s tremendous.

I brought it.

Then you add things like low-code platforms and things like that that make the data architectures flex even further.

I don’t know that we’re going to solve this problem.

But I also think that the U.S. fintech industry is protected from the outside world.

I’ll say that because any international company that tries to come in, their minds are blown.

They’ve never seen anything like it.

It’s not like that anywhere in any other landscape in the world.

Our community banking landscape is here.

I think that does cause this little fintech circle to keep going around here in the U.S. and keep kind of turning more opportunity for the entrepreneurs that have figured that out or those who are brazen enough to tough it out long enough to figure it out.

I’m so glad we’ve got you guys coming in because we need fresh perspectives in this space.

Yeah, for sure.

I was just thinking, as you guys were talking, coming from the travel-tech industry, I only spent a year there, prior to that it was HR tech, but they had solved this.

They have to because of all of the travel agencies, airlines, airports, etc.

However, even though they’ve solved this, only a few were benefiting from it financially.

So now all the new entrants are figuring out how to work around that and create their new things.

Everything just seems so, we’re looking for these solutions, but there are other problems to solve past that.

So if we can leapfrog and learn from those other industries on how to do it right the first time, I think we’ll be in good shape.

I think standards are going to be really challenging just because, to Sam’s point, who’s got the incentive to drive the standard?

If it’s not the customers.

Look at, I spent time in telecom way back.

I started my career, I worked for Motorola for many years.

That’s a great case in point.

In Europe, everybody got on the same page.

They came up with a standard called GSM and they did their thing.

In the U.S., you had fragmented standards.

Everybody picked their own different spectrum.

It took decades of watching how successful Europe was for the U.S. to kind of get on the boat and standardize.

Exactly.

But the thing is, there’s no constituency that really benefits, other than the market as a whole.

Candidly, that’s kind of one of the challenges we’re trying to solve for.

Kelly, you made a good point.

A foreign entrant comes in and is just freaked out.

That’s actually a group that we talk to on a regular basis where it’s like, hey, we’re trying to create a decoder ring.

It does become easier.

I think the idea is agnosticism is key.

This can’t be provided by somebody who’s got a dog in the fight.

No core is going to do it.

No individual fintech’s going to do it.

But having almost a universal player to try to normalize and create a single point of entry, I mean, that would be...

Yes.

And Stephen, back to your earlier point about how you have veteran people on your team that have kind of lived in the trenches.

One of the things that we’ve done, a considerable amount of advisory work for companies that are headquartered overseas, whether it’s Europe, India, etc., several of them.

Many of them have been through multiple iterations of attempts to make market entries.

One of the things that I’d love to tell you that there’s been widespread uptake of our recommendation on this, but this is one of them that I think many of them have been culturally challenged by.

They tend to have sales leaders here, and they sometimes tend to have product leaders here, meaning they live here.

But what they often don’t have is an implementations leader here that is empowered, authorized, a decision-maker, that can fix problems, that can deliver that last mile.

Right.

That can deliver that last mile.

So it gets stuck there at the end.

We’ve identified integration.

We’ve identified data.

We’ve identified organization, marketing and sales work.

So I think we’ve done a good job of identifying some things that have been breakages out there that we see some promise on.

I’m curious, for my guests, what’s something you guys see right now in the market that you think is working really well or that you’re really jazzed by?

I would just love your take on anything, because I think as entrepreneurs and business growers as you all are, you’re used to identifying problems and trying to find solutions to them.

But have you seen something and you’re like, “Yeah, you know what? This is working, or this is great. Let’s double down on it.”

I’ll open it up.

Stephen or Kelly Mahalik, any thoughts on that?

Yeah.

I mentioned earlier what we are seeing in terms of openness from core banking systems, and I’ve heard all the horror stories.

So to me, that’s a great trend.

I think that’s going to serve the market well.

It’s going to serve, frankly, at the end of the day, consumers well because I think it helps our clients do a better job of putting together the system that’s going to help them deliver for their clients.

They’re going to need to do that to compete with the big banks out there because, arguably, we’re not winning the war right now, if you look at the data.

I think that’s the other thing that excites me.

We’re sort of at a moment where some of the AI that’s available is going to help our clients, who are smaller and more agile, do some cool things that people care about.

Personalization in the banking experience and maybe some insights around how they’re applying AI to optimize their operations.

The big players in the market, the biggest, it’s going to take them longer because they’re slower.

I’ve spent time there.

I spent time at a Fortune 500.

I know how slow it is.

So what inspires me the most is the ability for AI to kind of leapfrog, help our clients leapfrog and maybe start turning a tide of this deposits war in their favor, especially amongst the younger generation.

You’re starting to see stuff where AI is doing some, just for me personally, I think it levels the playing field.

I’m not a C, these Excel jockeys who know all the SQL queries, they can do anything with data.

But now, natural language model, you put it over your own data, holy smokes, you can get real sensible answers out of it.

Turn that around to these guys and what they can do with their stuff.

I think that’s exciting, and I think we’re at the tip of the spear in terms of what can really happen there.

So being able to differentiate that way too with our community financial institutions.

Often they have niche markets that they’re serving.

So being able to kind of wrap those solutions around that niche market and really go deeper into that market, whether you’re targeting whatever you’re targeting, I think is really cool.

Personalization beyond just the individual as well, into market segmentation components.

Also, I think, I might have a contrary view, Stephen, that I think the community banks are gaining traction and starting to win the war.

I’m delighted to hear it.

We’re kind of diving into this in a deep way.

I think speed to market, to your point, is one of the key differentiators, both from a reactive and a proactive perspective.

Kelly, to your point, we can do things that are more community-based.

We can enable and empower our financial institutions to react to things like the Texas floods in a faster way.

So when everything is changing and unpredictable all around us, I think our clients have a unique ability to respond faster and in a more personalized way to individuals that they serve as well as to those segments.

We’re starting to see a lot of examples of that and how that’s building more and more trust while that trust is eroding on the big banks.

So I think we’re going to see that.

By the way, I love that because that to me is an example of what community institutions are great at and what is part of their core DNA.

Hopefully that translates into that person experiencing that, referring another client, or maybe their friend who’s coming out of college.

Hopefully they’re in their 20s.

But Kelly, I’m curious, do you see the same thing happening?

That’s existing-client trust and stuff.

I guess when I was describing arguably losing the war, I’m thinking about when folks are coming out of college and they’re choosing who to bank with.

Coming into this industry, I would have assumed these young people who care about the world and all their philanthropic causes, they’d be choosing community institutions versus the biggest banks.

We’re just not seeing that as much.

If you’re seeing that pivot, I’m delighted.

That’s frankly something I’ve become passionate about.

We’re passionate about it as a business.

I think we all need to lock arms and figure out how to move that needle.

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.

I do think that the way that these younger generation, the younger, newer bankers, and I have some horror stories.

I have two in college.

When they experience fraud, which we actually had with one of our college students, and I think college students are becoming a big target for fraud, actually, because they’re a bit more naive and newer to this.

I hear a lot of stories when the girls are over.

I think when they experience that and then they are not taken care of the way that they’re used to being taken care of in any kind of issue, they are searching for other answers.

A more, “Hey, don’t make me come into a branch, or don’t make me feel like I’ve made a mistake, but help me through this because this is all brand new.”

That hits close to home for me as well.

My wife had her purse stolen, and someone impersonated her at a major top-six bank I will not name, and they cleaned out her account.

The person just went to the teller station over and over again.

You think to yourself, how could that happen?

We tried to pursue it and it went nowhere.

It just felt like nobody cared.

I just think you would never experience that at one of our clients, right?

One hundred percent.

I had a situation with fraud on our account and they made me go into a branch.

Okay, fine.

I made an appointment.

I went into a branch.

Same thing, top-five megabank.

I went to the branch and then they sat down and called the 1-800 number that sent me.

That’s hilarious.

I was like, I just don’t know how you can do this with a straight face and think that this...

There’s a culture there, though, right?

You’ve heard of multichannel and omnichannel.

You just got omnichanneled, Kelly.

That’s hilarious.

You know what’s really cool though?

If we think about it, these are the stories we need to get out there from a marketing perspective in order to drive the attention of this generation to community banking institutions.

We need to tell the horror stories.

How do we apply that in our marketing?

I don’t know.

I’m fascinated by who can earn the primary financial institution status.

Fascinated.

I’ve always been fascinated by that.

Trying to get to college-age students, or even younger than that, with some of these messages like, for example, heaven forbid you add an extra zero to that transfer you made through PayPal.

Good luck getting help with that.

Well, I think if there’s one thing, one of the takeaways, I covered this a little bit in the session I had at FinovateSpring in San Diego.

Community institutions, small to midsize, whatever you want to call that grouping that’s going up against the megabanks, is just working on solid digital content to go along with their digital banking and digital origination and sales capabilities.

Back to our earlier thing about how the pipeline, the funnel in fintech, it’s all one thing.

Just making sure that all those nudges and self-help things are out there for folks to do.

Listen, I’m looking at the time here and I realize our time has gone so fast.

But I also know that you guys are super busy, and I want to make sure that I’m not being rude and keeping you from another meeting here that might be coming up at the top of the hour.

So I want to make a couple quick comments here in closing and then thank you all.

Just real quickly, I’d like to do a quick tip of my hat to the soul of Barb MacLean.

Barb was a guest on Fintech Hustle at FinovateFall last fall, and just a couple weeks ago, tragically, she passed away at a very young age, leaving behind a family and a lot of others who are missing her, including yours truly.

Stacy Bryant and I, along with Danny Payne from Jack Henry and Nick Evens from Curql Collective, had the episode.

We were on Times Square in New York, I’m remembering it, last fall.

Barb was the CEO of a company called Validifi.

She was the co-founder.

She was an entrepreneur, but she was a longtime senior vice president at Coastal Community Bank, vice president, I think 15 years plus at Celero, which is an industry provider, a Canadian industry provider.

She had something called the Fintech Playlist.

You can go check it out on LinkedIn, her last several episodes, where she matched up things that she heard in the industry with songs.

I was very honored to be in a couple of her liner notes over the years as a student of liner notes.

So I wear my Barb MacLean tribute Fintech Playlist shirt in her honor.

I am grateful and thankful to have known her and to have worked with her both on Fintech Hustle and in this industry, just like I’m thankful for Kelly Mahalik and Stephen Baker and Kelly Schultz.

Not just joining us for the podcast today, but also for just being helpers like Barb.

Barb was focused on just getting information out there that can help people get things done.

So I want to thank my guests, all three of you, Kelly and Kelly and Stephen, for joining us today on Fintech Hustle.

Appreciate all of you joining us today.

My pleasure.

Yeah, happy to be here.

Thanks for having us.

Well, I guess we’ll see all of you out there on the road and in a fintech hallway somewhere near you.

Peace out.