The strategic imperative for banks to establish fintech partnerships is essential in driving innovation, speed and cost efficiency, but will also have a significant impact on customer acquisition, retention and engagement, particularly among digital natives. As open banking, real-time payments, embedded finance, artificial intelligence and data-powered personalization, and agentic AI further define the banking landscape and the future of digital finance, banks can rely on fintech partnerships to accelerate digital adoption and enable them to focus on and measure the return on investment in terms of increased customer lifetime value, engagement, and revenue growth. Panelists will discuss how to map out a bank-fintech partnership strategy that includes the following:
- Aligning partnerships with digital channel strategy, including how to integrate fintech offerings—payments, lending, wealth management, for example—into mobile apps, online banking, and omnichannel strategies.
- Personalization and customer experience through data and AI, as well as the use of embedded finance to create contextual offers.
- Building customer loyalty through value-added services provided by fintech partnerships, such as buy now, pay later, financial wellness, robo-advisory and real-time payments.
- Engagement models such as gamification, rewards and community-building powered by fintech tools
- Building trust and security as loyalty drivers by addressing data privacy and fraud concerns.
- How to select and structure the right partnerships, including factors such as alignment on culture, tech stack, customer segments, and compliance readiness.
- Creating the right commercial model (revenue sharing, white-label solutions, co-branding approaches, etc.).
- Governance and performance monitoring, including key performance indicators, service level agreements and joint innovation roadmaps.
Transcription:
Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio for the authoritative record.
Mary Ellen Egan (00:14):
Hi everyone. Welcome. I'm Mary Ellen Egan, senior director of Content and Strategy Live Media at American Banker, and welcome to our virtual summit on partnering with fintechs to enhance the digital customer experience. While partnerships are not without risk, community banks' engagement with fintechs is expected to increase this year and with good reason. FinTech innovation empowers community banks to build more personalized digital experiences for their customers, expand digital products and services based on individual customer needs, which is very important, and then manage risk based on AI and machine learning driven insights and comply with bank regulations.We have three outstanding panels. Today, our first panel of experts will discuss how FinTech can partner with banks to enhance customer experience. This will be followed by a fireside chat with Vivian Young, who is the Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Fremont Bank, and she will discuss how to identify partnership models with an eye on mitigating operational risks.
(01:19):
Our third panel will discuss how to vet FinTech partnerships, what you should look for, how to create a partnership model, and all again, with an eye on compliance and regulations. Just a little bit of housekeeping: there'll be 10 minutes for questions at the end, or depending upon the moderator, the questions might be during the session. Please submit your questions through the Q&A function tab. Between sessions, there'll be 10-minute breaks so you can go get coffee, check your email, or do whatever life things you need to do. Now it's my pleasure to introduce my colleague Bailey Reutzel, who will be moderating our first panel.
Bailey Reutzel (02:22):
Alright, hey everyone. Let's get started here. Our first session is about mapping out a FinTech partnership strategy. We're going to do that by creating a strategy that optimizes bank digital channels and also builds customer loyalty. I am Bailey Reutzel. I'm the senior director of content and strategy of live media at American Banker. I'm coming to this having over a decade ago started my career at American Banker as a reporter writing about payments technology. At that time, so many years ago, it feels like there was real animosity between traditional financial institutions and fintechs, and that has clearly shifted. There are even some traditional financial institutions like FIS, for example, acquiring fintechs like Amount, which just happened yesterday. I feel like some of that animosity has moved towards crypto and blockchain, which I've also covered extensively over the last decade.
(03:27):
But that's also shifting as we see the regulatory landscape and even the broader financial landscape take in some of the crypto players. Anyway, let me get started by introducing my esteemed panelists. First, we have Ashley Nagle Eknaian. She is the Chief Digital Officer at Eastern Bank. We have Aleda De Maria, the EVP and Chief Banking Officer at People's Bank, and Jeffery Kendall, chairman and CEO of FinTech Nimbus. We're going to start with what seems like an easy question, but I think with all the new technology that's out there and all the mergers and acquisitions, it is a bit challenging to understand exactly what a FinTech is and exactly what a FinTech partnership is. I'm going to pass this to Ashley first. Can you define how you think about FinTech and FinTech partnerships in this current environment?
Ashley Nagle Eknaian (04:27):
Sure. I'm happy to be here today. I love talking about FinTech. FinTech is short for financial technology. I think a broad way to think about it is any company that is delivering financial technology to other companies, I would call a FinTech. This could be really big, it could be really small, a startup, and it really runs the gamut depending on what you're looking for, but the basis is you're doing something with financial technology.
Bailey Reutzel (04:56):
Yeah. I'm going to pass it to Jeffrey too, coming in as a FinTech, how do you define yourself in this new industry where there are such big technology players and then the small startups?
Jeffery Kendall (05:09):
Yeah, absolutely. I love Ashley's definition and I would just add to it, maybe make a distinction. People think about from a competitive nature, fintechs like neobanks too. So sometimes you see the word FinTech be applied to Neobank or Revolut or digital-only propositions like Chime. I think some of the fintechs that also deliver products and services to end customers and not just to banks are kind of the source of more of the, "Are we competing or are we partnering?" The bank techs part of fintechs, which is where I put the category of a Nimbus. We're a tech provider for the benefit of banks; we're not competing with them. That is some of the difference. I think knowing what you're getting into—in terms of is this microlender competing with me by generating loans on their own or are they just giving me the platform to do it—is an interesting distinction to think about.
Bailey Reutzel (06:03):
Yeah, that is. Aleda, I'm going to give you a chance to chime in here too, just to see if you have anything else to add there.
Aleda De Maria (06:10):
Sure. I mean, Ashley and Jeffrey really nailed it. I don't really have much to add. It is such a broad definition. I have to agree with Ashley because when you look back in time, some of the things that were labeled as fintechs at the time are not really what you would put in the same category when you're talking about fintechs today. Over time the definition of what is an emerging FinTech and what is more of a mature FinTech always changes. That's really the only thing I would add.
Bailey Reutzel (06:41):
And I'll stick with you Aleda. I'm interested to know how you are thinking about this idea of competition versus collaboration and keep in mind what customers are using. Are you seeing, "Oh, they're using this FinTech, we want to bring that in" even though it's maybe competitive?
Aleda De Maria (07:05):
Yeah, so I think that's a great question, and I'm actually going to dovetail on what Jeffrey said about that because there are some fintechs that we view as direct competitors. Are they trying to gather deposits or are they making loans that the bank could possibly make? What are we partnering to use? When we look at it from People's Bank, you mentioned competition versus collaboration. I've always focused more on the collaboration side because competition is going to be there no matter what. So there's no use in me hyper-focusing on, "Oh, I got to beat those fintechs" or as a bank "I've got to beat those credit unions." It is kind of a futile effort. Whenever we look at fintechs, we look at it more from a collaboration standpoint. How can we use what they are offering either direct to our consumers or is it something that we can use back office to benefit us and help us be more competitive?
Bailey Reutzel (08:14):
And on that topic as well, talk to me and the audience about how you have partnered with Nimbus.
Aleda De Maria (08:21):
Yeah, so our roots with Nimbus go deep. Nimbus runs our fully digital national brand that launched in 2020, which is Zilo Bank, which is a multi-award winning bank and quite a successful initiative for the bank. That was a result of us trying to gather deposits outside of our market. It started as a deposit gathering strategy and evolved into this FinTech partner sandbox where, through Nimbus, we were able to connect with other fintechs that we wanted to try out or we were very interested in and successfully bring some of those back to People's Bank. That continued through our successful core conversion that we did from our legacy core to the Nimbus core just this past June. Nimbus is our biggest FinTech partner for sure.
Bailey Reutzel (09:22):
Okay, cool. I want to talk more about that for sure. But let me go ahead and pass it to Ashley. I know I want to hear about your FinTech partnerships as well, Ashley, just giving us a lay of the land of who you're working with and what you're working with them on.
Ashley Nagle Eknaian (09:38):
And just to pull a little bit more on something Aleda said in terms of the competition collaboration, I think that's a really good way to view it because Aleda and I work for banks; we're competitors, but yet we can still be on panels and we can be friends. It's this whole idea of rising tides lift all ships. Whether you're a FinTech, you're a bank, whether you're doing direct to consumer, as Jeffrey pointed out, sometimes they're competing with you, sometimes you can partner and work with them. At the end of the day, everyone wants better services in order to serve their customers better for what they need at this point in time, in the year 2025 going into 2026. I think it's this evolving space where, yeah, maybe they're a competitor, but good ideas come from everywhere and we should be looking at what people are using technology for and what innovative ways they're putting that into their product offering.
(10:39):
At Eastern, we work with a lot of fintechs. I think two of the most famous examples are: we had Eastern Labs here at Eastern Bank, and we incubated what is now called Numerated, which was just sold to Moody's. It was a way that we found a friction point that we wanted to solve. We incubated that within Eastern; Numerated spun out. Another FinTech that we incubated here at Eastern was Monnet, both in the small business space; they have gone on to be successful and they're their own entity. We also have vendor relationships; people that we just procure services for. We have partnerships, and we can get into how we define that, but I would say even if you're just working with a vendor, you want to partner with them, meaning that you want a good relationship, you want to be able to give them feedback. You want to be able to give them ideas for how they can make their product better because you are using their product at the end of the day.
Bailey Reutzel (11:48):
Yeah, that's super interesting. Let's dive into how a bank would start thinking about partnering with a FinTech. Jeffrey, I'm going to pass this to you first. How do you think about, or what do you look for when you're going to a bank that maybe wants to partner with Nimbus? Are there red flags and green flags when a bank comes to you and asks, "Hey, can I do X, Y, Z?"
Jeffery Kendall (12:18):
Yeah, I do have Gen Z kids, so I know what that means. Framing it up that way, I think it is really critical. You have the two best panelists alongside me here to talk about this. They both partner in really, really advanced ways. But I think that fundamentally when you get into a relationship, it has to start as a basic relationship. You're developing your knowledge of each other, finding out what your personalities are like, and you're discovering those things. That's what it leads to. When People's Bank and Nimbus first started doing business together, it was probably more of a vendor relationship: "Hey, here's a capability we need." Then over time you're like, "Hey, we share a common point of view. We have shared common objectives," and it can go even as deep as People's Bank being an investor in Nimbus.
(13:07):
Now, that didn't start that way, but five years into the journey it was like, "Well, this makes sense," and you sort of evolve that. I would say one of the things that you just need to be aware of is how fast do you need to commit to someone versus take your time to date for a while before you get married, if you will. Some of the red flags and green flags that we look for are, number one, we don't judge a bank client potential by their size. We judge them about where they want to be. In order to know where they want to be, you have to do your research, spend time, and understand; you've got to have conversations. I think for people who have a really big growth ambition, we feel like that's a good match for us.
(13:50):
We look for those types of partners. We also look for people who really understand technology—that it's not perfect and it's never static. It's constantly moving, and it's almost organic. It is continually living. We need to make sure that our partners can stomach that. When we're co-developing and building new innovative things together with People's Bank, part of what makes it work is that they don't panic when they start seeing things like, "That looks weird," and we don't recognize why this is happening. And it's like, "Well, it's technology and it's the way it goes." I think having an appreciation of each other's limitations, challenges and opportunities, that's really where great partnerships have to start. But I guarantee you Aleda and Ashley will give some great insights on it.
Bailey Reutzel (14:40):
Yeah, that was super interesting. Let's hear it from the bank perspective in terms of red flags, green flags, when you're going to fintechs to partner. I'll pass it to Aleda first.
Aleda De Maria (14:54):
Sure. So first of all, when we look at partnerships, we're not going out and finding the company or the FinTech and going, "Hey, it'd be cool to work with them." Although that would be great. I'm sure Ashley will say, there's so many shiny objects that you're like, "That's awesome," and you can't do them all, right? So you have to start with the plan. A lot of it's tied to most bank strategic plans. Ours usually is, and it develops from what Jeffrey said: where do we want to be? Our strategic plans obviously are where we want to be at the end, and then kind of backing into how are we going to get there? Sometimes "how" is by partnering as opposed to building or doing something in-house. That's really part one because when you look for partnerships, you can't do everything and you also can't be all things to all people and do everything at once.
(15:52):
It's really starting with sectioning off that strategic plan and figuring out if "how" is an outside partner, and then going from there and saying, "Who's out there? What do I want this partner to do? What do I want them to look like?" Since it's part of your strategic plan, I would be willing to bet that the majority of the fintechs are going to be more partners than vendors. Usually the way that I define a partner is: who's going to help us grow? If they're part of a strategic plan, then it's more than likely I'm looking for a partner to grow with us, to go to the next strategic plan, and to continuously make us better. For that partner, we want to see that partner grow as well.
Bailey Reutzel (16:42):
I just want to dive in a little bit to one thing you said: this idea of partnering versus building it in-house. Is there a parameter or maybe it's a cost that flips that over to, "Oh, we just need to go with a partner instead of building it?"
Aleda De Maria (16:58):
Well, for People's Bank itself, we don't have development staff here. When we talk about building something in-house, it would be: can we leverage something that we already have? Is there another purpose for it, or can we reimagine something that's already here? For us, that would be building. Anything else beyond that would be finding a new partner, which could potentially replace some of the existing partnerships we already have because it does more than what we're used to already.
Bailey Reutzel (17:32):
In terms of replacing a partner, how often are you doing that kind of work where you're looking at the FinTech landscape and saying, "Okay, that company could solve the problems that these three companies work for us on, so let's get rid of the three and take the one?"
Aleda De Maria (17:56):
How often? It's kind of constant, right? Because if we're trying to look to solve another problem, we're going to look to see if that problem that we're solving for is duplicative somewhere else. I have to give our risk team and our project management, our business solutions group team, a lot of credit because they're kind of always involved with that process. We have our insight third parties—we don't even call them vendors anymore. It's all third parties. It could be partners; it could be we're the vendor to somebody these days. It's constantly evaluating those relationships and reaching out to the business lines and saying, "Okay, what's going on here?" Again, tying it to the strategic plan and making sure that we're not just adding on something that's a bolt-on that is going to be duplicative of something.
Bailey Reutzel (18:54):
Right.
Aleda De Maria (18:54):
Not a silver bullet is what I'm saying.
Bailey Reutzel (18:56):
Yeah, sure. Of course. And Ashley, I'll pass it to you. I got stranded here diving in with Aleda, but I'm going back to the topic. What do you look for in a vendor or a partner? Especially, I'm kind of interested, are there red flags when you talk to a partner? Is there something that they say or do that you're just like, "Okay, that's not for us?"
Ashley Nagle Eknaian (19:23):
Yeah, I mean, I could talk to Jeffrey and Aleda and you guys all day because it's just fun to talk about this stuff. I think something that Jeffrey said really resonated, and it was really funny: you want to date before you get married. I think at the end of the day, we are people, so you want to be able to have really honest and open conversations about what your goals are versus what their goals are and how do they align. Are they good people? Are they the people that you want to be on a Zoom call with at 11:00 PM when something's going wrong or on a weekend? Do you want to be building with them? I think that's the "are they good people?" part. The next is: do they share the same mindset, the same vision?
(20:21):
Do they have the same vision about what direction the industry's heading and where they're trying to go, and does that align with you? And I love how Aleda said the "shiny objects" because there are so many FinTech companies out there, which is amazing. It's like Willy Wonka's Candy Factory and you're like, "Yes, I will take one of those and one of those." But when you talk about partnerships, you need to nurture those partnerships. You need to be in the room. Those require resources, whether they're tech development, your compliance officer's time, risk evaluations, or information security. You want to make sure that you're not doing too much. You want to focus on a small number of really good ones. I think in terms of red flags, with anything else, if they don't take information security seriously, if they haven't understood what it takes to be a provider of services to banks—which are highly regulated entities and we have a lot of rules that we need to follow—we take the trust that our customers have in us extremely seriously.
(21:38):
So if you're not going to take your business and your policies seriously, we don't really want to work with you. This means you have to have a good handle on data privacy and information security and compliance and risk, and run your business in a way that behooves us to trust you because it is about trust. At the end of the day, we are hiring you for services that are going to be provided to our end customers. That is really important to us. So I would say red flags are if you're not taking those things seriously, which I very rarely see, but it happens. Having a respect for the industries you come from is important. Jeffrey mentioned people that understand tech; you don't want to work with people that are putting you down for whatever it is that you're doing. I've seen banks do it to fintechs being like, "This FinTech is doing this thing over there and they don't..." Yeah, they're starting a business. They're not going to know those things. Conversely, fintechs being like, "Oh, banks don't think innovatively." I don't think that's a fair comparison on either end. There are a lot of smart people on both sides of the fence doing really interesting things and I think you just have to meet with them and talk that through.
Bailey Reutzel (22:55):
Yeah. That's really interesting. I like hearing that because I agree with you, it is shifting a little bit, but the conversations of "they don't know anything" and "they're not innovative enough" were happening all the time. I don't think that's fair on either point.
Jeffery Kendall (23:13):
Just one thing to throw on that, I really want to underscore what Ashley said about, "Are they good people?" and extend that just a little bit. One of the things that I think that banks should know and get better at is the more that you're willing to invest in the partnership and be a little bit more open and vulnerable together with your partner, you can actually get more value out of the relationship. No client and no partner is going to be the same, but I constantly tell people one of the things that Aleda is very, very good at is she knows where to invest her personal time to make sure that the people she's working with know her as a human and are accountable to her as a human, not accountable to a contract.
(24:04):
To be clear, Aleda and I never get into discussions about what our contract says, ever. It is kind of ridiculous. She comes to me and says, "We really need this." I'm like, "Okay, how do we help you get it?" Or "Hey, I can't do that for you, we don't have the resources." And then we have a discussion about it. She's not saying, "Well, you put it in this contract," and I'm not saying the same thing to her. To me, that's a big green flag of: are you going to be able to truly partner? When you're in that contract negotiation phase for the first agreement, pay attention to who they are on both sides of that equation by what they're arguing for in the agreement. I think people don't pay enough attention to that.
Bailey Reutzel (24:49):
Yeah, that's fair. Aleda, did you want to add on anything there before I move on?
Aleda De Maria (24:54):
Just in terms of red flags, quickly: about the sales cycle. If you're talking to a potential partner and everything is "yes, yes, we can do this," you probably need to dig a little bit more into that because it's very highly unlikely that every use case that you gave them, or the resources that they have, allow the answer to be a yes. That leads you down issues with the contract because all of these things are promised and nothing can be delivered. In the sales cycle, if I'm talking to somebody and I don't care if they only have five or 10 people on staff—that's fine—but if their roadmap, when you talk about the roadmap, is the size and scope of a Nimbus roadmap, that's probably also a concern because all of the things that they told you that they can do and they said yes to, you really have to understand how important those things are to you in case you don't get them in the time that you expected.
(26:07):
So that's kind of, I guess that would be an orange flag, or a beige flag.
Bailey Reutzel (26:11):
Beige flag. It's red, beige or green. Yes, in the Gen Z speak. I'm not even Gen Z, but I have a niece, so she keeps me abreast of all of this stuff. I wanted to dive in a little bit about the "shiny objects" and new toys mentioned, because I think it becomes hard to weed through some of this stuff, especially right now with crypto, blockchain, and stablecoin companies making bigger noise in financial services, and then AI on top of that. How are you all, and I'll start with Ashley, thinking about all these shiny new toys?
Ashley Nagle Eknaian (27:04):
Yeah, for sure. I think one thing is you have to constantly scan the marketplace, the news, and keep up with trends—what companies are making waves, what's happening with regulation, what's happening in the market. Something that Aleda said earlier in the conversation is really important to pull on: it's really about your company's strategic priorities. I could list 500 things that I want to do, but I don't have the time or resources to do them. I have to prioritize. This happens in my personal life: I want to do all the things, but I can't. What's important to my bank? What do myself or the other executives want to achieve? What makes the most sense? And then let's put that in a plan and prioritize that. That funnel gets really small really quickly because you're force-ranking one thing above another and you start to get a prioritized list.
(28:10):
I think that's really important because some of these things take time. If you're going to launch a new product, you need compliance to sign off on it, marketing to do campaigns, and maybe you need to train staff on how to sell it. There are a lot of things behind the scenes that you need to do for just one product launch or adding a service. You want to be surgical with the time and resources that you have to get things done well. I would rather do three things really well than do 50 small things really badly. I want to do the things that I can do really, really well and execute on them. It's not hard once you look at the plan and say, "Oh, well this group of fintechs is doing X, but I'm not in that space, nor is it on my plan for this year." I'm not going to prioritize them at this time. I'm going to keep my eye on them, but I'm not going to prioritize them. It becomes easier once you have your priorities aligned.
Bailey Reutzel (29:25):
With all this talk about how AI can transform banking, are you all looking at AI right now and testing any of those AI fintechs?
Jeffery Kendall (29:37):
Yes. Yes.
Bailey Reutzel (29:44):
Jeffrey, go ahead.
Jeffery Kendall (29:47):
One of the things that we're taking a perspective on in AI is can we just talk about your poor procurement teams and having to figure out where tech companies are plugging in AI and embedding it in the software now? It's a huge concern. I have to imagine that teams are working overtime just to try to figure out what to look for when a new vendor comes in to make sure that they're using AI responsibly. From a banker perspective, not only do you have to worry about what you're preparing for yourselves directly, but also what your vendors are embedding and shipping in their product now, because a lot of people aren't disclosing that, right? It's like, "Well, we just put a little bug in a little field in there that's generated and we don't know what's going on." I think everybody needs to be paying attention to that right now.
Bailey Reutzel (30:43):
That's interesting. And Jeffrey, in terms of your core transformation technology, does that have AI or are you implementing AI there?
Jeffery Kendall (30:55):
Yeah, absolutely. Where we're starting is really being able to fundamentally connect the core to the LLMs via MCPs (the Model Context Protocol), which really allows you to safely get in and explore the entire context of a data application. That's what we're thinking about with user experiences: you have your user interface for what your staff are working in on the core or your back office customer service reps. That user interface is going to start looking more just like a ChatGPT window. It's going to be, "Hey, tell me how much Jeffrey Kendall has in this account" versus having to go to Jeffrey Kendall, click on his account, etc. It's just going to be conversationally navigated. We're really, really interested in getting advanced on that problem.
Bailey Reutzel (31:43):
I am really interested in banks getting advanced on that problem, so I support this decision. Aleda, I'm going to pass it over to you to talk about the shiny things idea. How are you trying to vet all the shiny new toys and focus in on which ones you want to apply to your business?
Aleda De Maria (32:04):
So I'm going to be boring and tie it back to the strategic plan, but also take it a step further to what our board appetite is. I may have a personal love or excitement surrounding the crypto market, but our board doesn't have an appetite for that, so I need to be conscious of that and not waste time. Also, what does the executive team think? What do all my peers that have to support and make the decision think? We have conversations about that. If you're not having the discussions around your boardroom table or your executive table about AI, you probably should start. One of the things that we're talking about—and Jeffrey hit the nail on the head—is that we're not opposed to it, we just don't feel like we have a good understanding of where it all is. Do our partners even understand if they use fourth or fifth parties who's using AI where? We need to understand if that's touching our customer data. We are having a lot of conversations around AI in terms of how and when and what kind of protocols we use. That's still in the early stages, but we do know partners such as Nimbus are using it and we're just going from there.
Bailey Reutzel (33:31):
Yeah. And then segueing to customer interest: I'm sure you are getting interest in AI and these shiny new toys. What do you want to give your customers through these FinTech partnerships? Ashley, I'll start with you. Are there specific features that you're looking to include in the digital platform? Do you want to give them access to crypto, etc?
Ashley Nagle Eknaian (34:08):
I mean, I think some of what we do is asking our customers directly for feedback about our online mobile platforms and what they would like to see. I think what we are trying to do, especially for consumers, is just make your financial life easier. What are you trying to do and how can I help you execute on that journey? Are you trying to pay off your student loans? Are you trying to buy a house? Are you trying to save for vacation? Are you trying to get a loan for your small business? We try to think about it in those customer journeys. What is the customer trying to do and how do we power that? I make this analogy—and I totally stole this from someone smarter than me in UX—but it's Super Mario Brothers.
(35:06):
When Mario hits the flower, he gets the flower power. At the end of the day, that's what I'm providing. I'm providing you the flower power for you to go and do the thing that you want to do. We're just trying to think about ways in which we can help our customers and enable them to do the things that they want to do with their money. I don't think it's specific to one thing at all. It's just overall in this day and age: what are the problems people are trying to solve and how, as a bank, can I solve those?
Bailey Reutzel (35:43):
And a follow-up question: is there something that maybe you didn't expect your customers are asking for?
Ashley Nagle Eknaian (35:56):
I can't think of anything off the top of my head right now. One thing I've noticed now is that you're serving four generations: Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and Gen Z, who have very different experiences and expectations about just even a basic UI. To Jeffrey's point about conversational stuff: how do you think about that and how do you think about personalizing at scale for those different things?
Jeffery Kendall (36:38):
Yeah, super interesting. If I had to say what we hear a lot of, it's not specific features or functions, but "You should know more about me, you should understand more about me." I think the opportunity for AI is to have more context awareness. Being able to say, "Oh, we know that Jeffrey originated a loan over here." Some of the AI work that we're looking at is: how do you bring it all together into that one snapshot view of someone? I think that's a huge use case potential there.
Bailey Reutzel (37:14):
Yeah, totally. "You should know more about me" across the board. I feel this way when I go to the doctor and they're just like, "Who are you?" I'm like, "What? I've been here so many times." So that's very interesting. Aleda, I want to pass it to you with the same question. What are your customers looking for?
Aleda De Maria (37:40):
Ashley and Jeffrey just absolutely crushed it. The one thing that I would add is I think what customers may not be aware they're looking for is for us to tell them what they need because they're not bankers, they're not in FinTech. To Ashley's point: "What do they want to do? How do we make their lives easier?" To Jeffrey's point: "You should know more about me." And then to the customer's point: "You should just make it happen. I shouldn't have to ask you for these things because I don't know that this exists, but it should just magically appear." I think it's our responsibility also to not be afraid of our customers and start to introduce things that we know is the next generation of things or things that we know they need based on data trends or AI responses. We really try to stay ahead of the game to serve all of those generations because they are very different. We sometimes need to be all things to all people as a bank. People's Bank and Eastern Bank aren't niche model banks. So we have to be a lot of things to a lot of different people. Whereas at Zilo, I can kind of target because I've got a certain target market there. It's more focused.
Bailey Reutzel (39:08):
Fair enough. Jeff, did you want to add on to that?
Jeffery Kendall (39:11):
Yeah, I think when we work together on some of these things—in terms of just how you get that, as Aleda said, "something our customers want us to do"—it's the age-old "If I asked customers what they want, they'd say a faster horse." There is this balance: you want to get input, but you also want to do some innovative things. I love banking because financial problems touch every single human. It's not like we're building something for farmers and if you're not a farmer, you just don't know what it is. We all have our own things that we do in our daily personal lives and it annoys us. We know the system's not perfect and no matter what bank you're with, we've all been in a situation where it's like, "Oh my gosh, this is so frustrating. Why do I have to do this?" I think that gives us a lot of direction; we know what we need to build because we are who we're building for.
Bailey Reutzel (40:06):
That makes sense. Alright, I'm just going to remind the audience here that if you have any questions, please drop them in the Q&A box. We are about 10 minutes out and we would love to take some of your questions. First, I want to ask about return on investment metrics. What are the metrics that you are looking at to gauge ROI of your FinTech partnerships? If those metrics are not hitting, how do you know when to let that partnership go? Aleda, I'll start with you there.
Aleda De Maria (40:52):
The metrics can really be different depending on what type of partnership it is. Is it for growth or is it for back-office efficiencies? Without going into too much of the sausage making, it's really built into that onboarding process with our solutions group and our internal project management teams. "What's the goal of this partnership?" We turn that into some metrics that we can evaluate. If it's not hitting the metrics, that's when you have the conversation. Is it because of something we're doing? Are we not thinking of this the right way? Does the product or the solution work but we're not using it appropriately? Or if it's really the partner—it's not the right solution because they said "yes, yes, yes" and it can't do all of those things in the timeline that you needed.
(41:45):
It's having a conversation with that partner to say, "These were the expectations. This is not being met," and having those open conversations. One of the biggest things I always say is, if Jeffrey used the whole dating and marriage analogy with a partner, we're going to get divorced before I even use that word. It shouldn't be a secret because they should want to help and nurture and fix the relationship. It's having those conversations and being specific about what's not working and why, so that maybe you're not communicating appropriately and they're like, "Well, why didn't you just say so?" And it's kind of fixing some of the ways that you do things. It really needs to be transparent. Even the worst relationships need to be transparent so that you can exit quickly as well.
Bailey Reutzel (42:39):
I feel like we're also giving you advice about your personal life, audience. These things apply there also. Aleda, I'm just going to stick with you for one second. I think it's really refreshing to hear that you're also thinking, "What are we doing wrong? Maybe it's us who's not using the tool correctly." That brings me to the topic: what is the process of training your staff to use the new tool? Are there any tips and tricks that you have there?
Aleda De Maria (43:11):
I don't know if I have tips and tricks. One of the biggest things—because it's so fresh in my mind and I'm super, super proud of it—is the change management process that we did during our core conversion. That's kind of one of the biggest deployments of a partnership we've seen in People's Bank history and really getting everybody to embrace the change. I don't want to drone on about it, but how much focus we put on change management and internal and external communication was really huge. Our internal communication and change management protocol was absolutely pivotal in making sure that we got to the June conversion and didn't have people saying, "I have no idea what's going on. I don't know how to use this. I don't believe in this." That's really what it is. Do they believe in it? Do they know why you're doing it? Do they know how it benefits them? What everybody cares about is: "How does it affect me and how does it make my life better?" It's making sure that's communicated.
Bailey Reutzel (44:18):
Jeffrey, I'll pass that over to you now in terms of adoption.
Jeffery Kendall (44:33):
Absolutely. One of the biggest things in terms of these partnerships is that you may have a really tight relationship with one sponsor and one person at the vendor, but how many times have you gotten into it and then it's actually now affecting 30 or 40 people on each side of the equation? You have to be intentional about building a broader relationship than just one-to-one for the two companies together. Aleda and I have a really, really strong relationship, but also Aleda has a strong relationship with dozens of people in our company and vice versa. That's where it looks like it grows over time; it's more of a strength through ropes, right? And if each relationship is a thread, make sure your rope is strong enough to hold it. But we'd love to know what Ashley thinks about that too.
Bailey Reutzel (45:24):
Yeah, Ashley, how are we determining ROI?
Ashley Nagle Eknaian (45:30):
I'll chime in on the relationship thing. It's the change management and it's the ropes. I think people always appreciate when things aren't done to them and they're done in concert with them. Encouraging people to be part of the process—especially if you're thinking about incubating and launching something—you want people that are using, especially if it's an internal-facing tool, involved with the development and the rollout of the tool. That change management process is so important. If you're developing something with a vendor and it's more of a new thing, you want to make sure... I always give a shout-out to all my corporate function folks like Risk and InfoSec. You don't want to design things and then go to those teams and jam it down their throats.
(46:27):
You want them on Day Zero. You want to be open: "Here's what we're trying to do, help us get there, help us understand what you're concerned about," and then we can figure out how we mitigate those concerns and build with you. I think the whole training aspect is: you really have to show the value of it. If you're not showing the value, I think it's dead on arrival. People need to understand, "Oh, this is going to make my day easier" or "Oh my god, this use case is amazing, this is going to save me 30 minutes" or "Oh my god, I don't have to use paper anymore." Highlighting those success stories is key. On the ROI, I think Aleda did a really good job of rounding that out. I do think it varies depending on the project.
(47:16):
This could be an application process: "How many new sales or applications are we getting through?" It could be process improvement: "How many widgets are we pumping through? How many errors are we getting?" Or "How many users do we have on the platform? How many deals have we closed?" Having a variety of those metrics per project—what are your end goals at the start, what are we really trying to achieve—and having top three KPIs that you can go back to and be like, "Hey, did we hit those?" If we're not hitting them, what are the things that we could tweak? Usually there's something we can tweak, whether it's something in the process or the user experience. As Aleda and Jeffrey mention, it's collaboration: "Hey, we need to have a conversation. Something's not working. How can I help improve that?" We can get there together.
Bailey Reutzel (48:10):
I really love your saying that you don't want to jam it down everybody's throat. The people involved should be involved. Sometimes it feels like institutions can get bogged down in "We don't want too many cooks in the kitchen" because then there's a lot of opinions, but the people who are using it really want you... you want to make sure that they understand how to use it and they want to use it.
Jeffery Kendall (48:34):
I think from a partner perspective, one thing that I've learned on this side of the fence is a lot of times when you get into a new relationship, your clients may be like, "Oh, I don't really want to go put you in front of procurement or compliance." The people in the organization who can say "no" but can't say "yes" are really important to develop that relationship with as well. The mistake people make is they just tend to focus on the people who can just say "yes."
(49:09):
Remember, there's a lot of people that are going to have to support this going into it. I always try to be like, "Hey, second meeting, let's talk to everybody who this is going to attach to. Let's talk to your compliance team; they're going to have questions. Let's get ahead of it."
Bailey Reutzel (49:22):
That's a really good point. We do have a couple audience questions. We only have a minute though. This one is important: How would you recommend a small institution staff FinTech relationships? And how many people on your team are dedicated to these partnerships? Aleda, I'm going to pass that to you.
Aleda De Maria (49:47):
I'll do it in reverse. Everybody owns the FinTech relationships here. It may start with a certain process, but every business unit owner and business unit team has some sort of relationship leadership role with the partner that affects them. We totally approach it as a whole-bank approach. You might have your specific pockets of people within that business unit, but it's not just owned by the executive or just owned by project management. Especially after implementation, it's really owned and driven by the business line. For "how many people," I think that answers it because we don't just have one or two people; it is an enterprise-wide initiative when we do bring on new partners, because to Jeffrey's point, we want all of that feedback and those different perspectives.
Bailey Reutzel (50:51):
And Ashley, I'm going to tap you to answer this as well. For a small institution who maybe has limited staff and limited resources, how would you go about looking for a FinTech partnership with those limits?
Ashley Nagle Eknaian (51:07):
What's one or two of the problems you're trying to solve? Concentrate on one. Moneyball view of innovation: base hits. You don't need to hit a home run. You need incremental improvement. Focus small, focus on one thing, try it out and execute on that thing. A lot of people think getting to the top of Mount Everest is like you've won, but most of the accidents happen on the way down. That's the execution. Launch is Day One. You need to keep on fostering these partnerships and the services they provide. You need to get back to basecamp; you need to continue doing that. Just focus small and focus on one thing and try to do that through an implementation.
Bailey Reutzel (51:55):
Amazing. I apologize for not getting to all the questions. Audience, we are out of time, but we have the questions, and maybe the next couple sessions will get those answered as well. That was a really interesting conversation. There are so many fintechs right now, so many new shiny toys and they can help your business. I hope that this has been helpful to hear from banks and also fintechs about how you can do that. Thank you so much, Ashley, Aleda and Jeffrey for this session.
Ashley Nagle Eknaian (52:27):
Thank you.
Bailey Reutzel (52:28):
All right, and audience, we'll see you back here in 10 minutes with another session.
Opening Remarks & How Fintechs Can Partner with Banks to Enhance Customer Experience
September 25, 2025 10:00 AM
52:38