Digital Banking 2021: Digital Banker of the Year

Transcription:

00:00:13:03 - 00:00:47:01
Penny Crosman

Good morning and welcome to this session where we will reveal American Banker’s Digital Banker of the year for 2021. Every year American Banker gives this recognition where we search for the bank executive who has done an outstanding job or the bank executives who have done an outstanding job of building digital tools that are innovative and user friendly. Every year we solicit a number of applications through our conference website.

00:00:47:16 - 00:01:23:11
Penny Crosman

We get dozens of applications and we review them all to pick out the ones that we think are truly outstanding and exemplary people who are moving the industry forward. So this year our judging panel was Miriam Cross, technology reporter at American banker. David Heun, technology reporter, American Banker and myself. Penny Crosman, and we all read through a lot of really great applications, and we chose three people who we thought were really doing an outstanding job in this area.

00:01:23:29 - 00:01:53:15
Penny Crosman

So today we are revealing our choices and each of us are going to be talking with the winner and our two finalists about some of the work they've been doing and how they look at the future of digital banking. So it is my pleasure to announce that our Digital Banker of the Year this year is Dontá Wilson at Truist And we're going to talk with Dontá later.

00:01:53:22 - 00:02:33:11
Penny Crosman

Congratulations, Dontá. It was a crowded field, and we really thought you did some really interesting work. And our two finalists are Hari Moorthy at Goldman Sachs and Lincoln Parks at Heritage Southeast Bank. So we've actually written profiles of each of our winners that you can find on the American Banker website. They're all live. And what we want to do right now is talk with each of our winners, finalists and talk a little bit about their work and how they look at the future of this industry.

00:02:34:01 - 00:02:41:17
Penny Crosman

So now I'm going to turn things over to Miriam Cross, who is going to speak with Lincoln Parks. Miriam.

00:02:42:22 - 00:02:44:28
Miriam Cross

Hi. Thank you so much. Hey, Lincoln.

00:02:45:19 - 00:02:46:18
Lincoln Parks

Hey, Miriam. How are you?

00:02:47:07 - 00:03:09:23
Miriam Cross

Good. So a few things that stood out to me about Lincoln. Number one, when he joined Heritage Bank many years, several years ago, he did not have a background in banking his background was in digital marketing. That actually was a plus for the CEO of Heritage Bank when he hired him, because he was looking for someone who thought like an entrepreneur not like a banker.

00:03:10:23 - 00:03:43:05
Miriam Cross

Another thing that stood out to me is Lincoln really pays attention to Heritage, its online reputation, small things, that may seem inconsequential in the larger picture, such as whether the hours for the branches on Google Maps match up to the hours, the actual hours in real life. But Lincoln almost single handedly has stayed on top of Heritage's online listings across a range of websites He monitors all of the online reviews and responds to both the positive and the negative ones.

00:03:43:14 - 00:04:09:01
Miriam Cross

And he also keeps on top of Heritage's visibility in Google search rankings. Whether that means creating content that matches popular search terms or buying ads that shoot Heritage to the top of the results. When someone nearby searches for a branch. Another thing that stood out to me is Lincoln built two products that a bank of Heritage's size would normally outsource to a partner.

00:04:09:02 - 00:04:31:07
Miriam Cross

Instead, Lincoln built an online account opening, an account opening, and a portal himself. Few part it was just in 48 hours, and he did so by piecing together different pieces of software. So my first question for you is what is your approach to partnering with a fintech versus building functionality in-house?

00:04:32:27 - 00:05:04:03
Lincoln Parks

Good question, Miriam. And the reason why we actually went that route initially was really when when it's a team of one and an assistant, I had the expertise, you know, internally myself with an assistant that we were able to pull it off the time frame that we we actually had to do that also was another mitigating factor for why we decided to do it in-house then to outsource.

00:05:04:04 - 00:05:34:04
Lincoln Parks

I do, however, believe in fintech partnerships and those partnerships are some things that we are looking at and going to continue to work on. So for the future as we go along, we needed something in the immediate term, but we do want to continue to leverage fintech partnerships because I know there are a ton out there that can help us out about a bank of our size.

00:05:34:07 - 00:05:39:26
Miriam Cross

So on the note of the future, what do you think are the next steps for Heritage in terms of digital capabilities?

00:05:40:19 - 00:06:09:25
Lincoln Parks

Well, the biggest thing for me was customer engagement and the customer experience. I really, you know, when we initially launched a few of these projects, I just step back for a second to realize, okay, what are our customers experiencing and what does that look like from their standpoint? And so I think for us, we're going to have to focus really on what that experience looks like.

00:06:09:25 - 00:06:21:29
Lincoln Parks

So from our digital account opening process, that we built in-house, imagine coming into a branch and, you know, it's going to take you 2 hours to open an account. Nobody's doing that anymore.

00:06:23:12 - 00:06:45:10
Lincoln Parks

So, you know, and there may be some folks that want to do that and have that conversation. But if you're a busy professional and our bank was pretty much dealing with a lot of small business owners you know, they wanted to be able to do something online. So when we implemented the online account opening process that dropped that down to about five to 10 minutes for our customers to be able to do that.

00:06:45:13 - 00:07:06:16
Lincoln Parks

So we're going to be focusing on now looking at what that customer experience looks like from the back end. I wanted to make sure that they didn't know what was going on on the back end for them. If they're going to do that online account opening process, it's seamless to them. But on the backend, is where, you know, our customer service reps are able to process everything on the back end.

00:07:06:25 - 00:07:37:08
Lincoln Parks

So the next steps from that now is to make sure that we have auto decisioning in place. We were going to partner with a fintech that was going to allow us to use pretty much integration as a service product that had about 140-plus data and service connectors that were built into it that would allow us to automate that process even further, which would allow us to then sort of launch our own banking as a service platform.

00:07:37:08 - 00:07:45:00
Lincoln Parks

So I think customer engagement and our customer experiences is where we're going to be focusing in on for the future.

00:07:46:06 - 00:08:07:21
Miriam Cross

Okay. And I know even outside of Heritage, you've done work on your own time to help connect community banks with fintechs and promote technological advances among community banks. So in your view, what are the biggest challenges facing community banks when it comes to competing, competing with larger banks, with more technological resources?

00:08:08:13 - 00:08:35:01
Lincoln Parks

Well, I think it's just that it's making sure you have the budget and also that your growth path involves some sort of fintech. There's a lot of community banks right now that they don't either have the expertise on staff in order to head that up. So how I got in this position, coming from the marketing standpoint and being an entrepreneur, you know, I didn't think as a banker.

00:08:35:01 - 00:08:39:02
Lincoln Parks

So I always put the customer first and try to figure out, okay, how can I think as a customer and improve their experience. So a lot of community banks right now are heading in the fintech space and they are looking at more products and implementing those. But if you don't have from your CEO down, if you don't have that as a focus on, you know, where how are you going to move for the future, then it's sort of at a detriment.

00:09:03:24 - 00:09:16:12
Lincoln Parks

So I think a lot of community banks now are jumping on board and are realizing a lot of fintech partnerships that can help them along and along the way. And that's where Heritage Southeast Bank is headed as well.

00:09:17:13 - 00:09:18:22
Miriam Cross

All right. Thank you very much.

00:09:19:29 - 00:09:40:21
Penny Crosman

Great. Thank you both so much. And if you want to hear more about Lincoln's work, you should really read the profile that Miriam Cros wrote of Lincoln Parks. It went live on our Web site on Tuesday. If you just search for his name on our website, you will find it and be able to read that. So thank you both and congratulations once again to Lincoln.

00:09:41:04 - 00:09:51:08
Penny Crosman

So our next finalist is Hari Moorthy at Goldman Sachs. And David Heun did a nice profile of him. David, I will turn things over to you.

00:09:52:20 - 00:09:54:17
David Heun

Thanks, Penny. Hi, Hari. How are you?

00:09:55:07 - 00:09:58:06
Hari Moorthy

David, how are you? And congratulations to all the finalists.

00:09:58:16 - 00:10:30:27
David Heun

Yes, yeah. No doubt. It's really enjoyable to listen to these folks. Very smart people. And it's nice seeing you again. You know, I was kind of impressed with the fact global head of transaction banking at Goldman Sachs, the fact that you came back to the bank and kind of took on this monstrous job that you were kind of leaning towards that position anyway with your former background, you know, you were a technology person at your other positions and you were with Goldman through 2014 anyway.

00:10:30:27 - 00:10:52:18
David Heun

So it wasn't like you were a new kid on the block. So that probably had to help you in terms of getting the Transaction Banking situation set up. But the thing that impressed me, Hari, was putting together that team in and of itself. You know, I mean, you talked about getting people to place all over the globe, and then that's got to be kind of a tricky notion to begin with.

00:10:52:29 - 00:11:16:10
David Heun

But you had mentioned something to me that I thought was really important that when you were building that team, you were a little bit concerned about whether [inaudible] would want to come to the bank because as a technology mastermind, they might go to Google or somewhere else. Maybe you were a little bit concerned about that. But then you told me you discovered that they really were up for the challenge.

00:11:16:10 - 00:11:39:02
David Heun

So my question to you was, how did you know, you could sit down with somebody and say, oh, yeah, that sounds great, I love the challenge. And then they go home and say, you know what? We're starting this thing from scratch. I'm not sure how to ask, you know, what was it that you saw or felt when you were talking to these people that these were going to be the teammates you wanted and you know what parts of the puzzle they were going to fit in?

00:11:39:05 - 00:11:40:11
David Heun

How did that process go?

00:11:41:13 - 00:12:13:23
Hari Moorthy

It's a fantastic question. One that wasn't super easy when we began this process. I think there are fundamental things that will come out when you talk to somebody about a new project, a new idea, clearly a passion towards this is a first step. When you talk to somebody who's really passionate about changing the way banking payments are done digitally, you can actually sort of, you know, with a bunch of ideas that will come in just within one conversation, just within one lunch or breakfast.

00:12:15:00 - 00:12:44:02
Hari Moorthy

So that was super important. Right. Knowing, you know, the person who's coming on this role, who our bank has the passion to change the world, passion to understand what's the problem and figured out the solutions that may actually be put in place. That can fundamentally change how banking and payments like that. And the next sort of important element is the cultural fit we know don't want just the passion or the technical sort of capabilities of skills that are product insights.

00:12:44:17 - 00:13:18:12
Hari Moorthy

But we want somebody who is a long-term asset and a person who could be successful at Goldman Sachs within Goldman Sachs culture for the long term. So if you ask me those are the two big, important elements. Obviously, you have skill sets. You have, you know, the background experience. All of that is important. But even without it, if you have the right passion, right culture fit, I think there's a lot a person can do within our organization that actually still surprises me in how bold they flourish in the respective jobs, just as they have seen this team grow in the last three years.

00:13:20:05 - 00:13:38:27
David Heun

Right. I would agree with you on telling somebody they're starting from scratch. It would take a certain [inaudible]. I mean, that sounds great. You know, there's nothing to compare to, nothing to say. That isn't how we want it to be because this isn't how we do it. So that there are probably some advantages to that whole thing in terms of starting from scratch.

00:13:39:06 - 00:13:58:05
David Heun

Now, you know, the other thing with Transaction Banking, you if I spoke to you, Hari, I got the impression that you were really trying to make the Transaction Banking platform for your corporate clients to be similar to [inaudible], happened on my online banking site and doing what I need to do but I couldn't wrap my arms around the simplicity of that.

00:13:58:05 - 00:14:31:12
David Heun

I mean, with the corporate bank clients, there's got to be other things that come into play here. But when you look at your uptick in process payment processing time at 99.5%, you know, a client opens an account in less than 10 minutes. You know, they're using the multi factor authentication. It really sounds like all your goals were hit. But if you could give me a couple of examples of how that Transaction Banking platform would differ from me, pay my bills on my bank side, you know, what's the corporate client looking for and what did you address most immediately?

00:14:32:07 - 00:15:00:13
Hari Moorthy

I think the foundational problem for a corporate that's different from a consumer is that many of the corporates have very complex international setups with multiple entities, multiple bank accounts. And so the number one thing that they want is ease of use understanding, rather payment is understanding what the liquidity that they need to keep in that particular branch or that particular entity and optimizing for it.

00:15:01:07 - 00:15:39:09
Hari Moorthy

Right. So when you have a large corporate and even mid-sized corporates, think of them having operations in ten different countries and they have centralized teams and decentralized teams for them to be able to know what's happening across the value chain of the Treasury is super important. So unlike a consumer oriented product where you have to be very good, but you're talking about one customer and you're talking about a handful of payments per day, if not much to corporate they send billions of payments in hundreds of thousands of member payments across hundreds of thousands of entities.

00:15:39:28 - 00:16:12:06
Hari Moorthy

It's a very complex operation. Higher the automation, lower the operational risk and operational headaches they have, higher the adoption. It becomes so the view of just obsessively focused on getting that automation. Then keeping that [inaudible] API centric data led platform has been our focus. And I believe that's the future of how this is going to evolve over the next five to ten years as we expand internationally Pretty good.

00:16:12:06 - 00:16:33:25
David Heun

You know, I will bring this up because I made it part of my story, and I'm going to tell you that you inspired me to rejoin my yoga class. I'm going to start doing that again in January. But it really resonated with me that you spoke about your meditation process and how it helps you clear your mind for work.

00:16:34:05 - 00:17:03:16
David Heun

You've kind of [inaudible] your teammates into this thing as well. You said some of them pretty consistently others kind of come and go. But overall, it's probably a really important process that a lot of us want to think about. You know, in a setting and in this type of a position. But if you want to share with the rest of the Digital Banker nominees and finalists, just how do they come about?

00:17:03:16 - 00:17:14:14
David Heun

And and I know you said you made a sign that wasn't that big a deal, but I kind of thought it was if you want to explain how that came across and how your teammates have been still reacting to it, I thought it was kind of an important thing.

00:17:15:19 - 00:17:43:16
Hari Moorthy

Yeah. Look, I mean, I began the journey in my mid-teens and I said… I give that up as like any other good teenager would do. And then they rediscovered that again. In my early twenties. So the last 25, 26 years, if there's one thing that is constant in my life, which is to sort of sit down and meditate every morning and evening, and it's actually that simple.

00:17:44:19 - 00:18:11:29
Hari Moorthy

The tend to make it complex because oftentimes it's much easier to do work than not do work. And you know, some of the best institutions have had some of the best talks and ideas that have had have happened after that quiet time. You know, often times you know, I just figured over a period of time that just listening to us makes us better human beings.

00:18:12:05 - 00:18:39:18
Hari Moorthy

That allows us to listen to others in a much deeper better way. You know, in fact, over a period of time, I found that's probably the biggest change I found in myself. And that keeps me sort of going and, you know, makes me sort of do the next thing I want to do. And that is sort of the source of my power, if you will, in the grand scheme of things that I've sort of experienced over the course of the last 20, 25 years.

00:18:40:29 - 00:18:50:20
David Heun

Excellent. Hari, I really appreciate you sharing that with us. So I think that's why you had advice and occasions so I'll flip it back over to Penny to move on to our Digital Banker of the year.

00:18:51:12 - 00:19:20:14
Penny Crosman

Excellent. Thank you both so much. Really interesting conversation. And again, David Heun wrote a nice profile of Hari Moorthy that went live on the American Banker website yesterday, so you should check that out. And now we're going to shift to our Digital Banker of the Year, Dontá Wilson. Congratulations. We much we really were impressed by a lot of things that you've done in the past year.

00:19:20:27 - 00:19:43:20
Penny Crosman

I mean, I think the key thing was the fact that you've built this entirely new mobile banking app from scratch while you're in the middle of this big merger between BB&T and SunTrust. I mean, that's just going through a merger integration. You know, for anybody who hasn't done it, it's a huge, huge project with a lot of integration work, a lot of headaches.

00:19:43:20 - 00:20:07:00
Penny Crosman

So to to create something completely new, trying to take the best of both worlds from the legacy banks and create something fresh and then add a lot of new elements to it. Is really a huge undertaking and really just the size of that project just kind of eclipsed most of what we've seen in the industry over the past year.

00:20:07:22 - 00:20:37:19
Penny Crosman

They also Dontá's team also built something called Truist Insights, which is real time practical advice for people based on what's going on in their account. So if you've got an upcoming bill and you've got some money in savings that could be shifted into checking to cover that bill, you might get an insight about that. And this is the kind of personalization and advice that I think a lot of banks have been trying to get to is kind of a holy grail.

00:20:37:19 - 00:21:09:20
Penny Crosman

But I think for a lot of people, it's still out of reach in terms of having all the right data at the right time to be able to give that kind of just-in-time advice. They've also Dontá’s team has also been doing interesting work with customer journey rooms, which I'm going to ask him about, and a lot of work with shifting into cloud computing and more API driven computing to help with partnerships and integrations with third party.

00:21:10:00 - 00:21:26:19
Penny Crosman

So. So again, congratulations. [inaudible] what client journey rooms are. But that was kind of interesting. It's not a term that I had heard before and I think it would be interesting for people to hear what you're doing with that.

00:21:27:28 - 00:21:55:19
Dontá Wilson

Yeah. Thank you. And congratulations to all the panelists and thank everybody for joining today. This is really a recognition for the entire team. So I want to congratulate the entire Truist team for the great work they've put into some of the outcomes that we're creating we're really focused on outcomes versus outputs. But to answer your question more specifically, the Client Journey Rooms is a commitment that we've made when we decide to come together as Truist to really double down on client centricity.

00:21:56:00 - 00:22:14:08
Dontá Wilson

And what our client journey rooms allow us to do is allow us to move at speed and co-create with our clients in the room. So in our journey room that we have assigned to each of the lot of businesses. So think retail wealth, commercial or capital markets group, our wealth group, all have a journey room assigned to them.

00:22:14:18 - 00:22:48:18
Dontá Wilson

That Journey Room is co-led by a client Journey architect and the business liaison from the business in that Journey Room they're given the mandate to just do to discover what's possible to transforming and creating distinctive client experiences within the fall experiences. The digital and the non digital. And in that room we also have the digital product managers. We have the designers experience design folks, UI, UX, we have the engineers, we have risk, we have the clients, we have legals, we have our behavior scientists all in the room co-create experiences together.

00:22:49:06 - 00:23:10:22
Dontá Wilson

that we talked about the innovation and tech center that we just created, 100,000 square foot center in the headquarter building. We want to put it at the heart of the company so innovation can take place everywhere and not be something that's set aside where people go do innovation. We want to become core to our DNA. That's where the client journey rooms exist.

00:23:10:22 - 00:23:20:23
Dontá Wilson

Within the Truist entity. So we're excited about that. We're excited about the way we're transforming and doing work differently to create the products or features to ultimately change client outcomes.

00:23:22:02 - 00:23:35:13
Penny Crosman

Sure. And is there anything about the new apps that you've created that you'd like to mention? I mentioned the Truist Insights. Is there anything else that you're building into that app that might be interesting to hear about?

00:23:36:20 - 00:23:57:09
Dontá Wilson

Yes, we're super excited what we're doing with the new app. And we also built the new website at the same time. So we chose the best of both from an ecosystem perspective. When we put the company together and it from a mobile app and a website, we just built an entirely new one. And I think what's exciting about the new digital experience that our clients have, you mentioned the digital merging that's going to happen in that experience.

00:23:57:26 - 00:24:18:25
Dontá Wilson

We also have, if you are a small business and have a personal relationship with this, you can toggle between your business account and also your personal accounts. So we got a lot of feedback from clients analysts that we hate to go in and have to authenticate personally and go out and go authenticate business. So we created that opportunity on the business side of things as well.

00:24:18:25 - 00:24:35:02
Dontá Wilson

We've created a single sign on opportunity where you go and you can sign in one time. You can get to your merchant accounts, positive cash, cash manager accounts, because clients were saying again on the commercial side at several places they need it now to be able to authenticate and have passwords, administrators. That just became very, very complex for them.

00:24:35:09 - 00:25:02:11
Dontá Wilson

So excited about the value that we're bringing there. We also have embedded on the personal side and on the wealth side of emerging wealth. We have a robo advising solution that's embedded to our application. So if a client is getting introduced to investing in a new and they want to have the companies to start but perhaps don't have the assets to have a human wealth manager now have the ability to program their values and tolerance and the risk they want to take in what their goals, objectives are.

00:25:02:17 - 00:25:10:11
Dontá Wilson

And our robo advisor helps them invest the money and provide them, you know, market leading returns. So we're really excited about all the solutions we bring forth in a digital way.

00:25:12:14 - 00:25:27:00
Penny Crosman

When we spoke, you told me something about something you learned from sports being a point guard in sports. And I have to admit, I'm not sure which sport that would be but what was that thing that you learned that you've been able to apply in your current job?

00:25:28:08 - 00:25:49:25
Dontá Wilson

I've learned a lot about being a point guard, and I think the digital officer and the chief experience role, the main thing that you're supposed to do your job is to usher your team to score. And I think from a teamwork perspective and one team, that collaboration and helping bring people focus towards the goal and the goal basketball was to put the ball in the basket.

00:25:50:14 - 00:26:12:17
Dontá Wilson

The goal from a client experience, perspective and banking is to help clients get to financial happiness through financial competency and financial literacy. Therefore, as a point guard, your job is to usher that along. So I learned a lot of them. I can't remember exactly which example, but I do know that the main role is to help us through the team towards the goal and the goal.

00:26:12:17 - 00:26:22:04
Dontá Wilson

Get a basketball to scoring a goal for us in financial services is not a new feature or new product. Did you really create a new outcome? Did you make a positive difference to the client side?

00:26:23:09 - 00:26:48:28
Penny Crosman

I think you said something about I think we were talking about how you hire people and you said that you want people who want to help other people score rather than score themselves. And I thought that was an interesting thing to look for in new hires and an interesting analogy to, your kind of work. You tell us anything about what's on your drawing board for the coming year.

00:26:50:09 - 00:27:12:07
Dontá Wilson

So I'm going to take some best practices from Hari. I'm with first do more meditation. I thought that was outstanding and a great reminder. So I'm going to incorporate that into my personal life. And maybe introduce that to my team. But from a Truist perspective, we're going into our third year. You know, at the time of the merger, when we announced it, we said we wanted to accomplish two better agendas.

00:27:12:07 - 00:27:30:27
Dontá Wilson

The first was to accomplish a greater purpose together than we could have achieved as separate banks. And the second was we wanted to be the leader in client centric innovation. So the last two years, we've been building a solid foundation to achieve both agendas. But looking into 2022 and beyond our immediate priority is to complete the merger.

00:27:31:08 - 00:27:52:09
Dontá Wilson

So the integration work from the heritage systems and the rebranding efforts will take place by the end of February. That allows us to move forward, put more focus on what's next from an innovation and client experience perspective. So we'll move from building and migrating and doing some innovation and re-imagining to doing even more reimagining and innovating at a much faster pace.

00:27:52:09 - 00:28:18:20
Dontá Wilson

So we're really, really excited about that. You mentioned our innovation and tech center that we're activating on a schedule to open in the first half of the year. And that's really the physical manifestation of our culture of innovation and continuous improvement. And we're just going to really try to take the client centricity to a whole new level. We're building thoughtful ideas that are bold, that will enable things like behavioral science, design, thinking, agile at the center of our unique innovation process.

00:28:18:29 - 00:28:41:29
Dontá Wilson

To bring solutions to life through the journey rooms that we talked about. So you'll see more activity happen there. We've created specialized research rooms in that ITC where clients can react to new solutions that are tailored to their needs and they can help shape the solutions of the future. So we'll start to inject and have more activity in our ITC in those rooms to build new solutions and ultimately want to change outcomes.

00:28:41:29 - 00:28:55:00
Dontá Wilson

So we measure our success on clients lives that have been helped. And so we've got to be really focused on that and it's a three way and we talk about touch and technology to build a high level trust. So again, that's digital and non-digital channel coming together in a seamless way.

00:28:56:17 - 00:29:19:23
Penny Crosman

Okay, great. And for anybody who joined late, we are talking to our Digital Banker of the year, Dontá Wilson, who is Chief Digital and Client Experience Officer at Truist Financial And we're also here with our two finalists this year and Lincoln Parks at Heritage Southeast Bank and Hari Moorthy at Goldman Sachs. And we will have a few minutes to take any questions.

00:29:19:23 - 00:29:38:16
Penny Crosman

So if anybody has any questions, they want to type into the question box, feel free. So Dontá one thing I want to ask you was and we talked about this a little bit before, but how do you look at competition from fintechs, from tech companies or even from rivals what's sort of your philosophy around that?

00:29:39:23 - 00:30:01:01
Dontá Wilson

I think competition is great. You know, our goal or purpose to aspire, build better lives and communities at Truist but it takes a collective group of great entities focused on a client to do that. We want to do the majority of that because, of course, that allows us to be in the first position but we really embrace and encourage great competition.

00:30:01:03 - 00:30:25:10
Dontá Wilson

That means [inaudible]. Right. And the results of that is that more people across this world are going to get better financial solutions, which ultimately than the financial happiness. So I don't really look at competition in a negative way. I actually encourage competition. I'm excited about competition. We obviously do benchmarking, we do research, look at what competitors are doing, but we spend most of our time not focused on the competition.

00:30:25:10 - 00:30:49:28
Dontá Wilson

We spend most of our time focused on the client. We talk about co-creation. Our clients ultimately buy our solutions and pay for our solutions, and they know what they need. So we spend a disproportionate effort paying attention to their needs, starting with empathy and doing the research and setting up MVP and scaling it and take it to market more time there than we do actually focus on what competitors are doing.

00:30:50:14 - 00:31:08:21
Dontá Wilson

We'll say we are in this unique, competitive sea of sameness. At least we've had that. So we got product of price parity. I can release a feature, competitive release a feature, I can change something on price that is saying something on price. And so what happened historically is how companies have differentiated is that they were winning on the human side of things.

00:31:09:00 - 00:31:31:14
Dontá Wilson

And so overdelivering on how we serve the client from a human perspective, that puts you in a what I would call a lack of differentiation to move you from the competitive sea of sameness or in the future in order to really when in a competitive environment, you have to be in a pool of distinction and you can't do that without having a robust, dynamic digital capability integrated with the human capability.

00:31:31:22 - 00:31:55:10
Dontá Wilson

And so we're focused on how do we create that distinction to be in the pool of distinction. And if you think about different industries, we said, who's the best amusement park in the country? Somebody comes to mind who's the best fast food company in the country? Someone comes to mind. And our goal is that when we say who's the best, you know, absolute best financial services company, that the first thing that comes to mind is Truist.

00:31:55:22 - 00:32:05:02
Dontá Wilson

Now, that being said, we want to be that much better, but we want everybody to be best so that everybody's getting help. [Inaudible].

00:32:05:02 - 00:32:30:10
Penny Crosman

Well, unfortunately, I am being told we're actually out of time. But I want to again say congratulations to Dontá Wilson, Hari Moorthy and Lincoln Parks We're really, really pleased with what you guys have done. And we really want to thank you for joining us today. And thank you, Miriam Cross, David Heun, for joining me on this panel. And I want to thank all of you for your time and attention.

00:32:30:10 - 00:32:32:03
Penny Crosman

And I hope you enjoy the rest of the day.

00:32:33:16 - 00:32:33:29
Lincoln Parks

Thank you.