Key takeaways:
- Understand how financial institutions can better uncover fast-growing institutional and industry-wide issues with customer complaint data.
- Unpack the payment-related challenges that are top of mind for regulators today — and those that will be front and center in the near future.
- Explore innovative ways that financial institutions can manage risk.
Presentation Narrator (00:09):
All Right everybody. Thank you. I hope you all enjoyed lunch. We're going to kick off now on the next panel, the power of customer narratives, new ways to get ahead of regulatory concerns. I'd like to introduce Marcia Tal the CEO of Tal Solutions who'll be moderating the panel and she will introduce the other two panelists. Thank you.
Marcia Tal (00:32):
Thank you. Good afternoon. Welcome to our panel,the Power of Customer Narratives, new Ways to Get Ahead of Regulatory Concerns. My name is Marcia Tal. I'm the CEO of Tal Solutions, the founder of Positivity Tech, and I was previously executive vice president at Citi, where I worked for more than 25 years. One interesting fact about me, I've been in the unique position of having been a corporate executive, a founder of a technology platform and a consultant to enterprises. Katrina Holt currently serves as a firm's SVP of operations where she leads customer care, merchant servicing, collections and fraud operations. She has been with the company for four years and previously held leadership roles across financial services operations and risk management at organizations including GE Capital and Web Bank. One interesting fact about Katrina Katrina's first real vacation ever was at 18 years old when she joined her mom here in San Diego for a teacher's conference. Josh Williams is executive vice president, chief banking officer and head of partnerships at Seattle Bank. He joined Seattle Bank in 2014 and now leads partner banking, collaborating with FinTechs, marketplaces, and brands to integrate financial services into their customer experience. He was previously with Wells Fargo for 12 years, leading teams in both business and global banking. One interesting fact about Josh. Josh is an avid runner and skier, and he recently ran the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim. In this afternoon's panel, we will explore the importance of customer narratives as a way to understand our customers and community's needs and emotions, prioritize business applications and initiatives, and fulfill regulatory requirements to protect your customers and the safety and soundness of your institutions. For example, the CFPB states losing money or possessions to scam fraud and exploitation can be especially devastating to older adults who may not be able to earn back what they've lost. If we listen to what's inside of some of the customer complaints that were submitted to the CFPB, here is what you might hear. Here's something that you might hear. I am an elderly citizen. I have suffered fraud and scam because of unscrupulous people taking advantage of my lack of knowledge of internet technology. I've been banking with my current bank for 27 years, and they knew the routine and movement of my funds and they did not protect me one other. I get letters every week stating that I'm delinquent on payments and need now to give them thousands of dollars to catch up. I have made every payment early, they see my age and probably think I don't have the brains or courage to fight them. This is elder abuse. Just to set the context for what everybody is dealing with. So Katrina and Josh, how do your institutions currently listen to your customers and include customers' voices as direct input into your business strategy and initiatives?
Josh Williams (04:14):
Sure, Yeah. Well, it's great to be here. Thank you, Marcia. And hearing these testimonies, I think anybody who works in the business has to have a bit of a pit in your stomach just knowing how prevalent and aggressive these tactics are. So I think to start with, all of our business practices and strategies are built around what we know from our customers. It's not an afterthought, as I'm sure, and I'm sure that's the case for most of the other FIS here in our business. We have maybe think about this along two lines. One is we run a traditional retail bank where we're working directly with our clients providing private mortgage and commercial banking, and on the other side, it's more indirect on the partner banking side where we're working through partners who are providing those services on our behalf, are distributing them on our behalf. And I guess in both cases, the key to it is us really understanding and starting out with a close understanding of our customer, what their needs are and the problem they're trying to solve. And that's very easy to do on the direct side because our team is working face-to-face with those customers. It does have those experiences of seeing what those transactions look like, and we have full control of what the customer experience and data stack that they might be using are on the indirect side when we're working with partners, then it's incumbent on us to both select partners and make sure that the partners have the tools and the expectation around ensuring that these types of obligations are built around. But also leveraging the fact that one of the advantages of working with a partner is they know the customer well. Oftentimes, they're D dealing directly with a customer in their own flow, their own customer experience. And so we have the opportunity to take our knowledge of where the risk factors are and use the partner's dataset or the experiences that they're seeing to help identify where there might be areas of concern, but also use the fact that they know those customers to help inform what we want the overall experience to look like.
Katrina Holt (06:21):
Yeah. So similar, I would add that a firm really is a technology based company. This is my, although I've been here for four years, first time operating at a financial services company that is technology led. And the mission of a firm is building honest financial products to improve lives. And when that's your mission, everything needs to be built from the customer lens, literally from product ideation to the way the whole entire ecosystem is built. And so for me, I went from starting at the company as a chief compliance officer thinking about compliance and consumer protection from a principles based lens and making sure that we were thinking about the way our products were designed in the right way. And now leading operations. I am literally face to face, voice to voice, human to human with our customers every single day. And it has become even more real for me. This need to understand the way that the consumers are experiencing our product because what you think makes sense might not what you think the consumer will love. They might hate what you think might be their behavior. They might be doing a different behavior. And so for us, we deploy numerous ways to listen to our customers. And so that could be explicitly through NPS, CSAT, customer effort scores. Of course, we have a complaint management program, we have social monitoring, app review monitoring, and we're constantly analyzing that data. But then also implicitly, we have software and different partners that allow us to analyze the sentiment of our consumers. Do they sound stressed? Do they sound upset? Do they sound happy? And what is going on systemically that is driving that? And as well as just analyzing the underlying data, which I think you would appreciate, which is like how is the consumer actually behaving? Where do they drop off? Where do they go from one maybe servicing channel to another? And why are they doing that? Are they confused or why you not giving them the information that they need? And so using all of that information to try to get in the shoes of the customer.
Marcia Tal (08:38):
Excellent. Thank you both. So now as we know, no two customers are the same, and our industry is very sophisticated in differentiating and segmenting customers based on their behaviors and their attitudes. At the same time as we just heard, our customers are sharing their feedback and their complaints in very different ways. So based on how you bring in this information as you were just describing, can you tell me a little bit about how you think of this from a risk management standpoint? Maybe give a couple of examples similarly to the way you were just talking about business strategy now, let's put our risk hats on for a minute and think about how this is helpful from that standpoint.
Josh Williams (09:28):
Sure. Yeah. I think when we're talking about risk, it's helpful for me to try to make this more of a framework. And as I arrived here and was driving along the harbor, I was reminded, I years ago had a chance and a different career to get Coast Guard training around essentially emergency response on a vessel. And interestingly to me, anyways, sort of the hierarchy of concern is number one, is it on fire? Number two, is it taking on water? And number three, are you on course? And it's kind of interesting as you put it in that sort of framework to say, Hey, if it's on fire, everyone could die before we can solve the other problems. If you're taking out water, you might not get where you need to go. If you're a little off course, you can adjust. And this may not seem like it has anything to do with financial services, except it's a pretty helpful framework to think about for us, is a customer actually, if we get a complaint, is the customer actually is there consumer harm happening that we can essentially stop the line and right away assess is there legal risk or compliance factors that are going to create exposure for our institution over time? Or is this more of an issue where it's like, Hey, we could be doing a better job of adjusting our course, essentially. So I think for us, having that framework, having a shared understanding across the organization of which this is, but also having a culture that says, if you're not sure, you need to start having that dialogue internally right away. And to the extent that there's any concern that there's actual customer harm, that needs to be right away. And so I think it's in one, just not over complicating it. Essentially having that shared sense of what our obligations are. We work in financial services, it's regulated next to maybe only healthcare. This is the most important sort of fiduciary role that you can have. And by having that then informs how we go about thinking about the structures and processes necessary to make sure that at the end of the day we're reacting the way that we need to and making sure that those reactions are going to be spread out across the organization. We need to be able to decentralize that type of sensitivity and responsiveness so it's not just falling rolling up to somebody because of their job title.
Katrina Holt (11:37):
Yeah. So again, I would agree with that and I would add that the way that we think about it at a firm specifically is both from a triaging standpoint, because there's always something that can go wrong at any given point. And I have found that because we are second to second, again with the consumer at all times, they tend to be the fastest way of something is wrong. I just got a call that a customer is having a payment, seeing a payment issue that doesn't seem consistent with the behavior of our processes and systems. And so triaging that very quickly across engineering teams and product teams and our customer teams really enables us to very quickly if something is cut to stem the bleeding. And I think that is such a critical component of the risk management framework because then when you handle the immediate, the bigger wounds tend to not sort of transpire, but then you have bigger picture things where that are systemic. And again, you may not be recognizing that something is amiss or wrong or not being understood accurately. And so we use all these data inputs between our complaint systems and the insights that we're getting and start analyzing the underlying root cause of what is going on. So for example, if you're seeing a number of credit disputes suddenly coming through, but they all seem to be completely fine, that's not the end of that problem that you got to get into the underlying problem of why is the consumer confused? Are we not doing a good job of explaining certain things? And so I think taking that absolute consumer lens, and for us it is in our DNA, do no harm, not to be cliche about another company, but truly do no harm. And if there's any suspicion that this just doesn't seem like this should be, the reaction to our product is on us and we're responsible for doing some more of the underlying digging, but then really getting the whole of the company on that sense of the risk to us is, I mean, we are regulated from every way from Sunday, including the CFPB, despite, oh, what gets reported, we are constantly regulated and my mantra is do right by the consumer and we will be fine. And that tends to be showing up in actuality being the right thing to do.
Marcia Tal (14:13):
Excellent. I think that now that we've heard how we're taking things from a business strategy standpoint, we're looking at things from a risk management standpoint and exactly how you said then figuring out what actions we need to take. Oftentimes in being regulated companies we're actually looked at in terms of the actions that we do take in being able to carry that all the way through to the decisions. And the way you just described that both of you, it's really looking for how we take action. Can you talk a little bit, maybe give an example or two of something that you've actually experienced similar to how you were just talking about the disputes, where you were able to make either a policy change, some type of a product feature change, something that really initiated because of that kind of could have been a customer inquiry that then turned into more of a friction point that then turned into a bigger issue. But looking a bit for actions that you've taken.
Katrina Holt (15:21):
I can give you a quick and simple example or although I could give you examples all day long of reacting to customer feedback, changing our products and services. But the one that I thought was really interesting this year is especially kind of taking ourselves out of a financial institution mindset and putting ourselves in the serving consumer mindset is that as we're going through this period of economic stress and looking at your underwriting, we are having to take a step back because we underwrite every single transaction and making sure that we're not overextending consumers. That means from time to time we are going to decline a consumer that otherwise historically had been approved for an affirmed loan. And so doing everything within compliance, but then realizing this, again, listening to these consumers where it's just this extreme frustration of I want to be a customer of yours and I want to continue to engage with a firm, but is this now where it ends? And so starting to rethink how we do that and think the consumer wants to be able to use a firm as a payment vehicle. So can we instead shift the narrative and say, this is not the right product for you because we have an obligation to not overextend, but we can help you pay now, we can help you with a down payment product or maybe a different product that is, it would be better for you. So instead of just like, no, and here's the reason why is instead like this is not right, but maybe this
Marcia Tal (16:51):
Excellent, Josh.
Josh Williams (16:53):
Yeah, I think maybe on the other side of that is just sort of planning with the end in mind. So when we're working with potential partners be that FinTechs, marketplaces, brands, it really becomes insightful in terms of just how much I think in the banking industry we take for granted the level of compliance that we are already managing. So as we go through that process of essentially saying, Hey, walk us through the customer journey that you want to have, what's the value you're trying to create? What are the experience, the key experiences that you want to make sure that those are delivered on? And then essentially what we're doing is our team is basically building out, well, here are the business requirements around that, recognizing literally the A to Z of all the compliance or regulations that essentially would trigger whether that's literally reg Z or reg B in terms of fair lending and (17:45) and essentially is just flagging each one of these steps and all of the follow up items that have to happen so that we can then really work through with the partner to say, okay, let's talk through, here's what you want to have happen. Here are the things that we're going to have to manage for this to be a compliant product and for this to be a product that we can all feel really comfortable about, especially at scale, that it's going to have the desired consequence for consequence for the end user. And so I think it's, so much of it is just really being able to not throw the book at somebody and not say, Hey, solve this, but really say we're going to work through and say for each one of these steps, these are all of the factors that have to get met. And just recognizing the inherent complexity of those that, again, it was much easier to do that when you were in a traditional sort of banking server or somebody walked into a branch and a trained banker took them through a one-on-one experience. It's very different trying to build products that really can scale, that are much more delivered digitally and with a lot more, with a lot of different endpoints informing that. So we have to make sure that we essentially can still build that basic sort of protective nature into the design.
Marcia Tal (18:52):
Excellent. Thank you both. So I think we're hearing commitment and passion around this statement. Your customer's voice is your most valuable asset. The OCC emphasizes its continued focus on the safety, soundness and fairness of the federal banking system and its work to elevate fairness in banking. Recently there's been a quote from the OCC stating, fairness in banking matters as much as financial safety and soundness visibility into these high risk interactions is key. And oftentimes, as we've heard, require proactive management, including proactive compliance management using complaints as a source of intelligence. Financial institutions can resolve systemic issues across different lines of business. Now we know that banking is complex and also that understanding our customers is everyone's business across the organization. So can you please share ways in which you and your leadership teams are developing and executing cross-functional strategies, including management processes, bringing in, as you were just describing, innovative techniques, technologies where we integrate the customer experiences, experience is a method to increase both our controls over risk and regulatory issues as well as drive efficiencies and profitable growth.
Josh Williams (20:28):
Sure, yeah. I guess I'd say on the lending side. So we recently rolled out a partnership with a company that developed technology that allows merchants, primarily small businesses and primarily in the home improvement space to offer their customers, which are homeowners, a financing solution. And these are essentially allows them to, as they're looking at a project, determine what they can qualify for. And in many cases, and especially now as interest rates go up and the cost of borrowing is significantly higher, letting them value engineer that project around what they can afford. And so if you think about this, in many ways, this is doing a transaction or an activity that would've just been called community banking. Several years ago, somebody would've maybe met with a contractor, gone down to their branch, got approved for maybe a HELOC or some type of consumer loan, which originally that all happened in the community bank, and now it's allowing them to do that oftentimes in their home or over the internet while they're dealing with the contractor. But also by virtue of that being more iterative, they're able to then back into a project that they know meets their needs. So that's where we're seeing obviously the innovation in terms of being able to generate demand. We're seeing innovation and efficiencies in terms of being able to push a lot more of that leveraging technology. But in order to do that safely, we then need to make sure that every part of that customer experience is going to meet the various, and in its many, as a lot of people here know regulations that would impact that type of lending, including in the home sales. So it's really just taking all of those pieces and saying, all right, given a use case, given a problem we're trying to solve for the consumer, what are the steps we have to take?
Katrina Holt (22:15):
Yeah. So my answer was just like, yes. I mean, I think that's how we spend our entire days, weeks and months. And I was sitting here thinking about it. I was thinking we are constantly and amongst friends here, so I believe you'll understand what I'm saying. Constantly balancing the risk. We're constantly balancing cost. We're constantly thinking about scale and scaling effectively, constantly thinking about our employees and how they experienced showing up to work day to day. And then of course how our customers are experiencing our products. And balancing all of those things can actually sometimes be this conflicting set of priorities and experiences. And for us. And really when you're balancing all those priorities, if you get down to the basic first principles, fundamentals, which are if you do right by the consumer, if it's good for the consumer, it's good for the company. So generally, if it's good for the consumer, there's the risk standpoint, you've got that covered. If it's good for the consumer from a cost standpoint, it's probably far better. And then of course, scaling will start to take care of your it, itself if you have figured those things out. And so from a cross-functional standpoint, everything that we do and build is, and one of the things that I really like that we do is that as a cross-functional group across product and engineering and legal and compliance, user research, analytics, all of that, we get together every single month and we have a voice of the customer discussion where we're pulling in all of these data points across the company and looking for trends and themes and systemic either issues or even opportunities where our customers are saying, I wish you would do this, or I wish this looked like this. And so it's really those forums that are then informing what it is that we need to be for our consumers and what we need to build. But I am constantly sort of like that's so fascinating in that often what our consumers are asking from us, it ends up being far more cost efficient or far more value preserving than we had originally intended.
Marcia Tal (24:35):
Excellent. Thank you both. So both of your organizations are less burdened with legacy systems than many of your colleagues here today. If you could go back in time, advise your colleagues to do the same, how would you rebuild your financial institution from a customer centricity standpoint? Where would you begin? What practices and policies would you ensure were in place to protect your customers as well as the safety and soundness of your institutions? And how would these practices then better humanize financial services?
Josh Williams (25:17):
Sure. Yeah. We've been really fortunate about five or six years ago, we started out on a pretty full sale technology transformation. And I think the key for us that enabled to do this is number one, we're relatively small banks, so we have just less inertia. But the other piece of it is we really just recognize that you can't extricate your business strategy from your tech strategy, and this is only becoming more and more relevant in financial services. We were able to shift and started the shift five years ago to a more open banking platform. It started out incrementally, in our case, we actually moved our digital banking experience first, meaning we kept our existing core in place and introduced a new digital banking layer. And what that allowed us to do is basically get most of the customer impact out of the way upfront. And then within about a year or two after that transitioned the core out from under that. And the core that we moved to is with an Astra, it's an open cloud based real-time core. And what that's enabled us to do is really go about having a technology stack that we don't own it, we're still not building our own stuff necessarily, or certainly not the key elements of that, but what we've been able to do is put together a much more configurable and scalable tech stack. And so that's really how we think about it, is we want to have modules or components that we can bring in that fit the business case, that fit the economics, that fit the customer need, and that's giving us just a completely different sense of flexibility to either bring new products to our existing clients or go reach new clients through new products. And indeed, in the case of partner banking through whole new channels. And so for us, it really has been back to that foundational sense of how we look at our technology and its ability to open up our flexibility in terms of the ways we can go contend in the market and then down the road have opportunities to start leveraging some of the things that basically Katrina's talking about on in terms of just whole new data sets that we're able to leverage. So for us, that's really been what it's about for us and what we're seeing and continue to see huge opportunity.
Katrina Holt (27:32):
Okay, So I'll say two things. One's a shameless plug and then one is full accountability in that I think the thing that I'm most proud of is that from day one, the company was built around being on the side of consumer. I know you've said, heard me say it over and over again, but it is truly in our DNA. It's how decisions are made every single day. And so I think I believe that because of that and because of it forms our decision making and because it informs our risk tolerance and because it informs the products and services that we build, we aren't having to go back and sort of Maya culpa and Oh, that probably wasn't right, and oh, that was sort of cringey and maybe that we shouldn't have done that. We can sort of sleep at night knowing that that is not something that we have given into despite the, sometimes it's just like, oh, but the revenue and oh, but nope, that is, it is not what we've built this model on. No late fees, no hidden fees, no capitalizing interest, no deferred interest, all of these things that are really big money makers, but just fundamentally for us as a company are like that's not actually on the side of the consumer. And so I think by sticking to that, it is why we're seeing consumers choose with their wallets and choose with how they pay at the checkout. And so I would say that to the extent that you don't feel like that's informing your decision making, I would absolutely and wholeheartedly encourage that. On the accountability side, the thing that I get cringey about I feel like is when we build this cool product and we build all the operational capabilities around it, usually pretty quickly because we're trying to test it in the market and make sure that it works, and of course it'll be compliant, but maybe a little bit like hacky or takes human intervention and then we keep scaling that and building on that and we've got to go back and fix it, which is all kind of part of our cycle. But the thing that I've been noticing lately, if I could just go back and rewrite how we did it all, is that a lot of things are built on how does it make it easiest for us to service our customers? How do we make it easiest for our agents to be able to do this? And the more that we kind of flip that upside down and start looking at the customer journey and meeting them where and how they need us, I'm like, this doesn't even make sense if you are an actual consumer trying to do this. And so what we've started implementing is, I mean, it makes total sense to us because we're all bankers and so this is how we speak, it's how we talk makes total sense. But if you are just a consumer, everyday consumer, it doesn't make sense. And so we've been doing things like our engineering team is now shadowing phone calls as customers call in, what are they actually experiencing as they're asking particular questions or we're doing our own testing of how things work. I tried to pull money out of my savings account and was using chatbot, and you want to know who's the most critical of your servicing the person in charge of servicing. This is not acceptable. And I think that really, truly putting yourself in the shoes of a consumer, not with a banking lens, but from how would just any person interpret this, that's what I would've done differently because now we kind of have to go back and rethink that to make sure that it truly is interpreted the way we intended it to be.
Marcia Tal (31:06):
Excellent. I think these are very rich examples and insights into how each of you are leading in your companies. Before we open it up for Q and A, is there anything further you would add to summarize or add something else in bringing in your perspectives on the topic that we haven't touched upon?
Katrina Holt (31:28):
I think when I was thinking about it in terms of getting ahead of regulatory concerns, I am no longer a chief compliance officer, but I guess, you'll never get it out of my blood in that when you look through the themes and what's on the landscape and what are the regulators focusing on, if you were just zoom out, always the same things. It's always unfair and deceptive practices, it's always equal credit discrimination like discriminatory practices and making all of that is consistent at a high level. And yet the way that it's deployed now, I actually was a regulator even in a former life and it was so much more simple even back then where it's just so complex now with the way that data is being used and now the introduction of artificial intelligence. And again, with all these FinTechs coming in coming online, which I is awesome obviously, but it just is adding so much complexity into a system that it's already difficult to make sure that we're making decisions that do no harm. And so I think that it's only going get more complicated, particularly as CFPB continues to sort of ramp up its focus on how do we deal with this uprising of technology and disruption. And so anyway, not that probably doesn't make you sleep at all any better, but I think that maintaining that vigilance right now is absolutely going to be critical.
Josh Williams (33:07):
And I actually maybe would then just add that I totally agree with that. And I think in some ways it's really just leaning into an inherent strength of the banking sector and now more than ever, right, it's evident that sort of basic instinct and that DNA really is important. Move fast and break things just doesn't work when it's other people's money. And so I think really banks just need to, as complex as the technology gets, as dynamic as the economy or the market or the industry can be us just sticking back to, well, we actually know what we need to do here. We've done it forever. We just have to figure out how to put it into place in this case. And to not let it a team overly complicated I think goes a long way.
Marcia Tal (33:51):
I think that's excellent. I think both of you are basically bringing up a point that I would also echo, which is the basics don't really change whether we're talking about it in terms of the basics of banking, the basics of regulation, doing the right thing, all of these things. I think those of us that have been in the industry for a while, we're always understanding that those are our roles in this industry. But the complexity that is now upon us is as we are expanding these ecosystems and as the technology and the data and the capabilities becomes more and more integrated, it's not as easy to draw the lines. But what I think we're being asked to do, and this is the way I guess I would close at least this part of the conversation, what I think we're being asked to do is keep those hats on, which are the basics of why we are doing what we're doing to protect our customers, to do what's right, to be bankers and understand what our roles all from all angles are, and ultimately to keep our institutions and our customers safe. And it's just more about now the ways in which we do that and the ways we're being held accountable at levels of detail that may not have come up in the past even. So I'd like to open a thank you first of all. Thank you both very much. I'd like to open it, we have about 10 minutes, I believe. I just can't see, we have even more. We have 14 minutes, so we'd love questions and specifically left time because we're hoping that this is a topic that many of you have an interest in.
Marcia Tal (35:52):
Okay. Thank you.
Audience Member 1 (35:57):
Maybe I missed part of this, but what, Katrina, could you talk a little bit about how you actually collect narratives? What's your process within a firm?
Katrina Holt (36:08):
So numerous ways that we're collecting narratives. So you can do it explicitly through our, of course, our complaints management framework. We've got all of that documentation. We are monitoring app reviews, we're monitoring social media posts, so you get explicit narratives that way. But then we're also doing NPS scores that's more particular to the product overall, how likely are you to recommend a firm? Then we go down into the CSAT level, which is how was this particular servicing experience, did you get what you need? And goes through a number of factors. And then we have a customer effort score, which is like how hard was this? How much friction was this for you to engage in? So those are all of the explicit ways that we're getting feedback from consumers. But then we also have technology that's actually recording the conversations, whether they're chat conversations, phone conversations, and it's analyzing the sentiment within those conversations. And we can pull up that
Marcia Tal (37:19):
There's a question in the back I saw, Henry.
Audience Member 2 (37:32):
Thank you. Great presentation. This is Carolina Stein voice of department is very key for the corporate side as well as banking. I'm interesting to see what are the tools that you have been using to collect that data because it could be disaggregated across social media, the customer service. So I'm interested to see how you aggregated what type of dashboard you use and just to see what had been effective.
Josh Williams (38:00):
Do you want to talk at scale about that? Oh, sorry. Well, so if I heard the question correctly, it was just what are the methods, the specific methods and systems being used to capture that data? And I'm guessing Katrina will have more. They're doing that at much, much larger scale than we are, but so part of it is one, we absolutely have customer feedback lines, any sort of contact us, and we're doing that directly as well as making sure that any partners that we're working with are have and support that and understand the significance of us maintaining both from a qualitative standpoint, but also from a standpoint, a proactive stance around obtaining that feedback so we can understand are there any regulatory concerns here? Are there issues that we need to deal with in terms of training? And particularly that's a huge piece of this is showing that we not just have a program but actually follow through with the training and the testing of that. So those are some of the things that we're doing. But again, we're at a slightly different scale probably than a reach at a firm.
Katrina Holt (39:00):
I still feel like that someone needs to come up with a technology data pulls all of it together because we use a tool specifically that's scanning social all of the time and looking for references either to at Affirm or at Maxin or to get that data. Then app reviews is coming in through another data channel. We have an AI system that we use for our chat and our phone call sentiment monitoring. And then we're just general, we're using all sorts of complaints databases, I'm sure similar to the ones that you all use to pull in that data. And so it is literally coming into one data repository and then we're sifting through. And then of course we use Salesforce as our case management system. And so you've got notes and data coming in there. And so I would still say even as we're scaling, I'm not sure that we're at scale, but as we're scaling, there has to be a better, this is more of a taking my firm hat off and to all of you disruptors out there, there just has to be a way of doing that more systematically to really, but I have these humans that are incredible analysts that go through that and look for qualitative and quantitative insights that are coming out of that and then start confirming it with the actual data that we're seeing.
Josh Williams (40:29):
I feel there is a Qualtrics account executive somewhere who is just exploding.
Marcia Tal (40:33):
Well, I'm exploding actually, because the product that we've built is called positivity Tech, and that product is built to ingest all of these narratives. It's focused solely on the fact that narratives as a data source is an input into model building. So to the point as you were talking about sentiment scores and customer effort scores, we have built these types of scores only using narrative based on these narratives that are coming in from various places into one data environment managed that way because you'd be surprised how complicated it is. As you were giving an example earlier, Katrina, about understanding the journey that the customers have taken, such as also the case of the journey of these complaints. You know, don't wake up one morning and complain to your regulator. You start with sometimes an inquiry or a question, it then turns into a friction point that then doesn't get addressed, and then ultimately you don't know what to do anymore. And when you actually follow these journeys, the whole point is to be able to look back in time just like every other risk management tool and score that we have and say, how good could we actually get before the customer even calls to understand the behaviors in such a way that we would know that this type of an action could happen? And that's really our goal. So thank you for that because I think that it is very complicated. Other questions?
Audience Member 3 (42:16):
Hello guys. So could you advise maybe something or answer, how could you manage the craziest narratives from your, I see you have a lot off on your back. I guess how do you manage it? How do you convert it to the rules maybe?
Katrina Holt (42:40):
For me?
Audience Member 3 (42:41):
For you Katrina.
Katrina Holt (42:44):
Convert the craziest narratives? Actually I will was when you were talking about that, I was thinking that one of my things to do if I'm feeling particularly sassy and I need an ego check I'll pull a complaint that we're working through and I'll go back in time into what has happened through this sequence of events. And your comment about people don't just wake up and they're like, forget this, I'm calling my regulator. No, it is actually these sequence of events. Either it is trying to take an action and not being able to get help and then not being able to go to an agent, not getting the answer necessarily that they want. And that will escalate and that can escalate in a way that is entirely preventable from the get go. And yet to your point about crazy narratives is, and sometimes people are just not nice humans, but generally speaking, it's reached a point of frustration and I believe that it's on us not to take the position of how do we defend ourselves or how do we get out of this unscathed, but to actually go in with an empathetic and personalized lens and start to unpack what is happening and what might this consumer be feeling. And then I would say, I'm guessing there are a lot of risk experts in this room in that you can actually, as you're going through that, the sentiment, and again using good qualitative tools, you can start picking up on this, this just seems really unfair, or this is not the last time and you can start picking up on, you almost adjectives that or synonyms that kind of mean the same thing but are pointing in a particular direction. I'm confused, I didn't understand that. But that's why it's not super simple is because no one is writing in to affirm or to the CFPB saying, I feel like my rights under acoa. Were explicitly no one is doing that. They're just like, this is crap and I feel like horribly taken advantage of. And so really knowing how to unpack that into these systemic trends, certainly part of the complexity, but also becomes part like systematically part of your framework.
Marcia Tal (45:15):
Go ahead Josh.
Josh Williams (45:16):
Sorry. I was just going to say, I think it's also important to note at the end of the day, hey, a narrative is just a story, and the same way that if we put a bunch of plots on a chart, we're going to estimate a line, but every dot that's not on that line is a real person and a real story, but that doesn't make them all right, right? So I think it's up to every institution to figure out where is your true north? Where is your risk appetite? What's your brand? Where do you fit into the risk profile and the types of transactions you're handling? Because I guarantee you in the commercial banking or corporate banking or wealth management, on the one hand, of course, we're going to bend over backwards to provide white glove experience. On the other hand, if it comes down to a wire transaction, the customer is not always right. There are times we just have to say, we can't do that. We're not going to put either one of us and the level of risk that you're asking us to do. And that's where it's really important to have this really well trained staff. That's where it's really important to be able to empathize, ask open-ended questions, be creative. Well, so it's necessary to do that so it can hopefully knock, get to the point of a complaint, let alone a risk, a left, a missed payment if it was in fact legit. So then it's trying to figure out, okay, well how do we build technology and systems that can have some of those same catches built in place but are firmly grounded in what is the underlying risk here for the FI am for the consumer, and then what's the customer experience that we need to have around that? I don't think any of us, the customer's just not always going to be right in some of these cases. In many cases, part of the fiduciary obligation we have as FIS is to help protect the customer, and that isn't always what they want in that moment.
Marcia Tal (46:50):
Absolutely. And remembering that this is the perception, right? Listening to the story as you said, it is their perception, but also then doing exactly what it is that you just described. I just also wanted to add, when you talked about these narratives in some of the work that we've done, the reason that this is so complicated is because customers tell us a lot inside of everything that's going on, we have analyzed that they're on average nine topics that can be covered in really frustrated complaints. So it's really hard also for our agents and for all the people trying to help customers to understand what is it that we're exactly trying to address because they've told us a long story about a lot of things that have happened, but at its core, what is it that we really need to address? And that also takes a whole level of discipline. I think we have time maybe for one question or we can wrap it up if there's another question. Okay. Then I want to thank both Katrina and Josh, and I hope that you found the panel informative.