Balancing Digital Presence With Human Presence

Transcription:

Jody Guetter (00:08):

Wonderful. We'll wait just a couple more minutes. I see a lot of folks stepping in and my trustee friend making sure I stay hydrated. There's a few more coming in. Are we closing the doors?

(00:23):

Wonderful, wonderful. Well thank you for that introduction. My name is Jody Guetter and I am the EVP of Market Innovation for Nymbus. I've had the privilege of working in marketing strategy, business development data fields for about 20 years now, ranging from working from global luxury brands, national retailers, working for a community bank, and all colleagues are here today. So thank you for joining us and FinTech and fin serves with that certainly brings a unique perspective and some diverse thinking, and I'm certainly not afraid to challenge the status quo or some CEOs in the room around that. But that's really what I'm hoping to get out of today's conversation is how do we create new thinking? How do we challenge the way we're doing things to ultimately serve SMBs in new and innovative ways? I have the honor of sharing the stage with three incredible thought leaders and experts in this space today. All that are coming at very different angles as well, and that's what you're really going to hear today. So first I'm going to introduce my friend Eyal Lifshitz. He's the CEO Co-founder of a Neobank blue Vine and he's representing digital only strategy today. So please a round of applause for Eyal.

(01:52):

Thank you. Second on the panel today representing a community bank but with a digital first strategy, my dear friend Corey LeBlanc. Corey is the COO-CTO and Co-founder of a locality banker de novo out of South Florida. Please give him a shout out.

(02:14):

Should probably click that over. And last but not least, an incredible last minute edition, but he will not disappoint. I'm sure of it. My friend Chris Nichols. Chris is representing a regional bank expansive of branch network robust digital capabilities. He's coming and joining us today from South State Bank. Thank you. So for today's conversation, I think it's really important to understand a little bit more about the gentleman's point of view and their unique business strategies. So I'll start with a 32nd elevator pitch and we'll go down just to really level set with the audience today. A little bit about your organization and business strategy.

Eyal Lifshitz (03:00):

Sure. Thank you Jody, and thank you for having me. This is my first conference, really enjoying it so far. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Bluevine. Blue Vine offers a broad banking platform for small businesses. We are a FinTech, we're not a bank. We partner with a number of banks in order to deliver our service to small businesses. We offer today lines of credit, checking accounts, credit cards, accounts payable. So for all intended purposes we offer banking services. Our target customer is a small business on the lower end of the spectrum, less than 5 million of revenue, less than 20 employees, all the way down to one and zero revenues. And we serve them digitally, I would say digitally focused. I'll talk about more of what that means. And we serve more than a hundred thousand of these across the entire us and our goal is to make financial services for them more affordable, more accessible, more intuitive, more easy, and leveraging technology and doing it in a digital way. Excited to be here.

Jody Guetter (04:02):

Wonderful, thank you Eyal. Corey?

Corey LeBlanc (04:04):

Yeah, I'm Corey LeBlanc. Like she was saying, locality bank. We're one of the new kids on the block. We started a community bank about two years ago. Me and Al was just talking about this, we're De Nova. We actually started from scratch. We looked to buy a bank, didn't really find one that was priced right, so we decided just to start one entirely from the ground up. So we are regulated by the state of Florida. We're a state charter bank and we are FDIC insured. Our, I guess attack to the market was to kind of be the hybrid approach. We wanted to be a community bank. We're all lifelong community bankers, me and my other two co-founders. But what we were seeing is this trend, right, where community banks would grow to about two 300 million in assets and then they would sell to our large regional.

(04:49):

And the customers are really disrupted with that. And so they just got whatever the service is with that other bank and then they would try to trickle out if they could. What we wanted to do is bring a community bank into the market that was digitally native on a major new modern platform. We partnered with Nimbus to do that and launched the bank successfully back in January of 2022 with the thesis that if we could build on a modern platform, we can continue to scale, but also serve the local markets for us. That's Broward County, Palm Beach County, and Miami-Dade and South Florida. Really authentically and honestly, but meet the modern needs that they have. As things change.

Chris Nichols (05:30):

I'm going to try to keep these guys from stealing my customers South state, 45 billion bank southeast footprint, six southeastern states, 250 branches, 5,200 employees. We try to do things the hardest way possible trying to bank retail, small business and commercial, about a third, a third, a third by composition. It has some advantages, it has a lot of disadvantages. And so we're a legacy bank with traditional legacy technology and traditional legacy bankers and traditional legacy branch footprint. And we're trying to make that change into being more technology forward and putting technology in front of our people and our people supporting our small business clients, our retailer commercial clients.

Jody Guetter (06:16):

Wonderful, thank you gentlemen. So as you can see, no shortage of confidence up here as well and points of view. So we'll make for some healthy debate and conversation today. So thank you. So anyone that knows me and knows the work we do at Nimbus, data is at the core of what we do. So I really want to anchor today's conversation in some data and set the stage for the folks. So there are today over 33 million US small businesses. So no shortage of a TAM or opportunity of that, six of the largest fis are capturing 68% of the market share and only 18% of the market share today is being captured by community banks and credit unions. When we think about attitudes and behaviors of small businesses, we've got 60, 67% state they're willing to switch banking relationships today, 69% say using a business app helps them better manage their finances and are whopping 82% of saying that they expect their banking provider to offer digital banking capabilities. So I want to start with Chris on this question today and get reactions from the panel. I want reactions around the market share and what are these larger fis maybe doing right that maybe community banks are not getting right today, but ultimately where do you see untapped opportunities for SMBs today? Chris?

Chris Nichols (07:48):

So small business banking is relatively new. The large banks have been at it for quite some time giving em their lead. I think most community banks have just kind of figured out the opportunities there, but it's really as hard to serve that small business client. It takes some retail aspects of it and some commercial aspects and marrying the two, I mean half the time just getting the technology rights the biggest challenge. And so I think most community banks are just starting to focus on the small business client. So I think that we are behind, but I think we'll catch up quick.

Jody Guetter (08:17):

Yeah, Corey,

Corey LeBlanc (08:19):

What I find is interesting is 82% expect digital banking. What's the other percentage is doing, right? I think that's probably a little, I mean it's probably an accurate number for the survey, but that's the problem is to Chris's point is most of these small businesses, it's not that they don't necessarily bank with a community bank. They're probably sitting in a consumer account at those banks because the services on the commercial side don't meet what they need, which is why as Chris is saying, you're trying to modernize, you're trying to build off of these platforms to now provide this very unique service to help these businesses and empower them to be successful, which is why me and Eyal when we started our businesses, was to try to figure out how do we start to fill this gap? How do we start to backfill this thing and really provide unique services that are needed, but also do it in a way that helps them kind of for us, that locality being focused on the commercial side is to get them into that small business account, help them evolve into a larger scale business, help them grow to their maximum potential, and then provide services along the way to continue to get them to that point and get them into that treasury, get them into that more traditional commercial, I guess, profile that you would see on the community bank side.

(09:29):

But I find it super fascinating. And then 69% saying they use business apps. Again, I don't know what the other businesses are doing, but it'd be fascinating to ask them that question.

Jody Guetter (09:38):

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Legacy providers and historically you've either been, will treat you like a retail customer and have limited capabilities. You may have some PFM type tools, maybe know where your money's going out or you have to kind of graduate and overpay to a commercial banking where it's very comprehensive, robust, but it's really overwhelming for them too. And that's where again, niche providers kind of coming into play too, like Blue Vine are really working to fill that gap for sure. So as I think about Blue Vine, you've already talked about some of these numbers a l founded in 2013 since then, very impressive growth numbers. So as we think about the maturity of the organization acquired over half a million in newer app users since its inception, booked over 14 billion in loans holding more than 900 million in deposits since 2013. Very impressive numbers, very meaningful numbers particularly for a startup as well. Describe to the audience to how you came about this digital strategy because when we think about balance of digital and human, clearly this digital experience is resonating with a meaningful amount of SMBs. So walk us through your digital strategy. And then my second part to that question too is I want to remove assumptions that you're neglecting the human in this experience by being digital first. So how can we all better seek to understand SMBs through this journey?

Eyal Lifshitz (11:12):

Absolutely, happy to touch on all of those. And maybe to start out with, I think there was a comment in one of the presentations yesterday that the average small business owner ages in the sixties or something like that, but there is a change in generations and you are seeing more and more younger individuals start businesses as well. And it's important to remember my dad was a small business owner. He loved going into the branch, he loved talking with the folks there. I have not gone into a branch as a consumer probably in the last five years and my daughter who is 14, doesn't like to talk on the phone. You need to remember that. Okay, so you need to understand where this is going. Now in terms of what we do, we are certainly a digital first native provider. That doesn't mean no humans. We do have humans, and I'll explain how we integrate human touch in our processes, but we are very much focused on delivering a digital experience and one that we don't have branches.

(12:18):

And so it needs to be very self-contained, meaning we need to allow the small business owner to do everything online, everything online, everything in their mobile app. There's a lot of challenge with that. How do you offer somebody a $250,000 check deposit limit when they opened their account three minutes ago? And so we need to solve that. There is no branch, there is no corner cases where we need to tell you, oh, we can't do that online. You can go into a branch and solve that. No, everything is online, mobile, we need to solve everything. So that's part of it. But it doesn't stop with functionality. It's not just having everything that they can do. It's also creating a guided journey and experience digitally. It's about anticipating their needs and creating interactions and their needs throughout their life cycle. It's about creating communication that sets expectations.

(13:09):

Again, there's no human, so we need to be able to communicate with them and set expectations about the experience and the processes that are happening that some of them are. Sometimes a small business owner doesn't understand why something's happening and so we need to be able to create that expectation. And then finally, discovery of additional products and services. All of that is done digital. So let me give a couple of examples to explain when small businesses open an account, what are the things they first need? Many of them need to order a checkbook, then they need to invite their accountant to get access to the account. Many of them need a bank verification letter to share with their merchant processor so they can show the details of the account. When a customer opens an account with us, we make sure to have these things upfront, but they're not always there.

(13:56):

Once they complete the tasks, those go away. And then we have other things that show up as part of the rest of their journey. Giving you an example of communication. When a customer looks to deposit their first check, which is abnormally large, and we talked, I think you and I, Chris, we talked about it before, if we don't have enough data on them, some of our customers and most of our checks do clear same day, but sometimes we need to hold a check three days, six days. We let the customer know before they endorse the check that there's likely going to be a hold. Why? Because otherwise they'll endorse it, they'll deposit it on their phone, it's going to say we have a six day hold. Then they're going to call support and be very angry about that. So there are things that you can do to solve for that in your experience.

(14:43):

And we do a lot of work to make this experience as personable as possible. Like the communication that we use, it's very clear, it's very direct and then it's very contextual. It makes sense where it appears. Now again, I started by saying we do have humans, meaning you can call us if there's an issue. We do have customer support. Our view is, and this is where we differ, our philosophy is always there never needed. So we are there, but our goal is that you never need to call us. Not because we don't want to speak to our customers. I'll talk about when we do want to speak to our customers, but we don't find you calling us to say something's broken is a value added conversation or I need something and it's not working. That is not value add. We do have account managers, relationship managers that reach out to you on how they can help your business and how they can advise you.

(15:35):

And maybe you want to use our international payments because you're paying too much right now for international payments or you may need a line of credit. Those we feel are value added conversation not, oh, I can't get a wire through, it's broken. That's not value add. That means your digital experience is broken. So this is how we generally think about this. We use a lot of data for making decisions. We're data geeks or addicts if you want to call it. We have logging events on everything that happens in our onboarding experience, our digital experience everywhere. We collect and categorize all our interactions with support. We record the calls, we categorize information, we know why people are calling in. We use that to solve issues. And then we run NPS every quarter, we review all of our reviews on all external properties, B, B, Trustpilot, whatever.

(16:26):

We take all of that in, we categorize it, we use that to getting better. And then finally we speak to our customers and we speak to our customers and we get information from them. And we also believe in people who know statistics know what statistical significance mean. We also believe in the end of one, what is the end of one, a few voices that are representative but are strong enough to give us an indication that we need to do something different. So we really believe in that and we take all of this data and we keep getting better. That is the way we approach the problem.

Jody Guetter (16:57):

I love that. I actually was fortunate to interview a couple of Blue Vine members in preparation of this panel and one of them that stuck out to me is they've anticipated the SMB experience so well that I don't have to call the bank. So I think that that's a great connection point to your point there. So using data first. So Corey, I am really excited and if those who haven't heard Corey be called the Tech Alchemist before, you'll hear a lot more about this If you ever have happy hour or attended an event, it's a term that's referred to Corey many a times, but Corey, you've been instrumental in not only determining the tech stack for locality, but also the vision and the strategy of how do you marry relationship banking through technology and digital delivery. And I think that that's what a lot of community banks and credit unions certainly struggle with. We've built this experience on humans and handshakes. How do we now adapt that into a more digital forward world? So describe to the audience and the panel today your approach to driving a tech forward strategy, but while still paying homage and respect to relationship banking and the human experience.

Corey LeBlanc (18:17):

And it is funny and actually don't disagree with you and a lot of what you were saying on the way that we approach relevant conversations when you actually sit down with your customers or have that discussion or you interact with them, making sure that that's a meaningful touch point and not just something that is, I don't know how to do this. I am here to cash this check or reaction. How do I send a wire to your point? Not even if it's broken. How do I send it? How do I get this set up and things like that. So that's where the digital native approach on our side really comes in. Where we do differ quite a bit is not that I think that his philosophy is wrong, I think it's spot on for the industries and the type of market that he's focused on.

(18:56):

However, when you start to look in a local community and you start to look at the local businesses and the size of that, right? So if you look at your true startup business owner all the way up to a hundred plus million dollar businesses, the needs are very different. And it gets a little more complex when we start to talk about relevant conversations with those businesses. And I don't know that we're quite there fully digitally, there is still a strong need in our opinion to have a human interaction in those local markets, right? Very specific. Now there's a lot of businesses that I think fall really nicely to be honest with you. If I'm running a small business, I'm probably more digitally first and in digital only in most cases. But what I found and when we started locality actually actually thought that we'd be much more digital heavy in the utilization by the vast majority of our customers.

(19:46):

But as we've progressed, what I've found is it's been a nice balance. It's almost been a true compliment, which is great for me because that's kind of the way we look at technology is we don't look at it as a business, we don't look at it as the core component of what we do. It's a tool set. It's the tool set that we give our bankers to make sure that they're able to successfully assist or help or improve the lives of our customers. And then it's a tool set we give to our customers to where Eyal's point is spot on. It's the self-serve, right? So they don't have to come into the branch to do certain things. They don't have to really pick up the phone and make a phone call to understand how to do something. We want to make that really intuitive. We want to make that really easy for them so that when they do sit down in front of us, we're talking about how do we grow their business, what do they actually need?

(20:33):

How can we improve not only their lives but the local community that we live in? And so that's something that we focus on very heavily now in the first two years it's been a lot of conversations with various industries to figure out, okay, here's the product we can deliver. Does this fit your needs? And then along the way we're adjusting and we're iterating and we're evolving that product to really kind of fit nicely into specific pockets of industries, but then also reach very broadly across the base in general because you got to feel for the masses, but then you also want to be very niche and focused for certain industries as well because they may be opportunities for us. That's been the fun part for me is sitting down with a lawyer and an attorney office and understanding how they use a bank account. And I think it goes back to that statistic.

(21:22):

Why do all the major banks have most of the SMBs is I think it's the tool set. I think it's the simplicity of the self-service that community banks don't really provide, but they do have that access to the physical side because there's a Capital One or a Bank of America or a Chase on pretty much every corner. We're trying to change that narrative a little bit and say that we can actually become a community bank that can serve that same market size. But in order to do that, it took a lot of thought and a lot of preparation and understanding how we're developing the business plan, how we're setting up the technology stack to support that business plan and does it actually create meaningful value on both sides. So that's something that is very, very important for us. And like I said, we went with a modern provider with Nimbus on the core. Everyone said we could not launch a bank without going to Jack Henry, FIS, Fiserv, if any of you guys are in our audience, I'm not going to apologize for that. But we did it because we knew that we wanted to take control of that so that we can deliver the experience our customers need and not wait on somebody else to dictate the roadmap.

Chris Nichols (22:30):

So what you going to do when you grow, when you go to Orlando, are you going to put a banker in Orlando?

Corey LeBlanc (22:34):

Potentially Yeah. So we're looking at opportunities and the same way Chris, that we've grown community banks in the past is that we're not necessarily just looking at a market. I'm looking at a team, I'm looking at people. If I can find a market that has an opportunity with bankers that are available, that are good, that are trusted, absolutely I'm going to put a brick and mortar there. And it may not be a true branch in a sense. And my wife, Cassie, who's on the marketing side keeps telling me I got to change the word branch. If I'm doing everything else different, I got to at least shift that because that's old something, right? But it may not be a full service, it could just be a loan office, it could be whatever the needs are in that market. We're going to try to keep brick and mortar as low cost as we possibly can because we want to continue to invest in the technology. So when things like the pandemic comes around, again, the ebbs and flows, we always see that we're not taking a year or two years to catch up to speed to where our customers need us to be that we're acting in weeks and days.

Jody Guetter (23:33):

I appreciate that and I'm glad you touched on iterative approach as well, who the last two years, probably every conference it was all about digital transformation. You heard about that. That was the buzzword too. And it was like this one-time capital investment and then you kind of walked away and thought it would do its thing. So this approach of constantly testing and learning, which is a cultural change to operating your business, not just an investment in technology too. And it's also about iterative with your customer base and your SMBs. Look at the market and economy of the last two to three years, the needs have changed. So how are we constantly iterating on the strategy and the experience to support those moments in time as well?

Corey LeBlanc (24:16):

Yeah, we always joke, if you're cooking a meal for the first time, do you get it spot on or do you start making adjustments? Do you taste a little bit more at little? It's iterative everything.

Jody Guetter (24:27):

Yeah love that.

Eyal Lifshitz (24:28):

There was something he said that I think was interesting. You said that sometimes people choose with the large banks, that they choose the large banks because they have the branch network and so on. We're finding somewhat, you asked us to disagree.

Jody Guetter (24:40):

Disagree away. Here we go. Buckle up guys.

Eyal Lifshitz (24:42):

I think what we hear is there is still a place for in-person. I think when we hear from customers when they choose another bank, they will choose a community bank or a credit union because of that personal touch. The branch in the context of the larger banks is more a bit of a crutch. It's there if I need it, I'll never go into it if I don't need it, but that's why it's there. So I think the local presence is somewhat different, the larger banks versus the longer tail. And I think some of that is just because of we're in the cycle where people are not yet used to digital only. But remember Commerce 10 years ago or 20 years ago, people said, oh, there's no way I'm going to buy clothes online or shoes online. I've not gone into a store to buy clothes for again, probably five to 10 years now. So I think as digital becomes better and more and more contained, that crutch will not be as important. I do think that the small business owners that care about that personal touch, then that's an advantage of the ones that are really looking to create those relationships like you.

Chris Nichols (25:49):

Yeah. So banking's not closed, right? No, we're not selling widgets. We sell a widget and we have a relationship with that person. And so while I'm not a fan of branches, I'm a huge fan of having a banker with the relationship with the customer. And so I think it's a question of technology works great if you're transactional, but to sit down and know that person I think is worth all the value in the world of some of our branch networks. I think that's where what you really want is you don't need a branch, you don't need a banker until you do and then you really want one. And so that's the question. And having that branch network gives us the flexibility. So when the pandemic hits, we can do both and we can pivot, we can go to digital, we can go back, we have a place and we have to have bankers. And we're very local market driven at South State. It's one of our hallmarks of our culture and every market is different and every industry segment is different. We need bankers where the people are to have that face to face. And so that's I think a difference in our business model.

Corey LeBlanc (26:46):

But I do think there is a crush, right? There is a crushed aspect. But when we do talk to customers, one of the things they tell us is for us they thought we were digital only. And when we start to have a conversation with them, they ask us, where's your branch? Where's your location? And it is still somewhat of a decision factor to your point. I think that's going to change sh, but it's not there today. Yeah,

Chris Nichols (27:07):

I agree. And all the surveys you see, everyone still wants a branch. And to Corey's point, everyone wants a branch just because we make them need a branch, we screw up and we can't do certain things digitally, so we make them come in for certain things. So that's a failure on our part. Say anybody that walks into our branch, that's a failure on our part. If we're not having an appointment with them, we're not doing it right and we got to solve those problems. But I think the model is somewhat like chess. If you look at a freestyle chess championship, you can enter it as a grand, you can enter it as a supercomputer, you can enter it as a grand with a computer. And who ends up winning is not the supercomputer and it's not the grand. It's a couple amateurs with the supercomputer to be able to crunch the numbers and know how to apply that digital firepower. And so that's who ends up winning. I think that's the allegory for banking in that you got someone that understands the market, someone that understands the customer, and someone that understands the technology using technology to leverage the relationship.

Jody Guetter (28:07):

Yeah, I appreciate that. And so Chris, just quickly before we move on to the next question as well, the largest bank from a branch, asset size geography on the panel today, I want to talk a little bit about product development as well as we think about SMBs because you've not only got this expansive geography that you're serving from a brick and mortar and digital perspective, but you're serving complex segments of the population too. Not just SMBs, but I had a conversation at dinner last night with a gentleman from Bank of Tennessee and we talked small business, but then you've got many, many complex individuals and business needs even going into that. So talk to me a little bit about your approach to product development to ensure too that you can offer bespoke experiences to an SMB versus a commercial versus a retail, and even from a geography perspective.

Chris Nichols (29:02):

So if you look at most banks' websites or most banks' offerings, we've commoditized products. They're all the same transaction accounts, a transaction accounts a transaction account. But that's radically changing. So if you look at instant payments for example, there's a myriad of products, a thousand plus products that will be built on top of instant payments that you're going to need new products and services. And I think that's the detriment of the banking industry is that we haven't been creative enough and inventive enough to maintain our margins, to create that value that relev seeds at the customer. And so if you're a banking, a service bank, and that's one of your functions, you're able to deliver, I think more than just banking digitally and then augment that with people. So I think the future is, and it speaks to a modern core, but being able to create a new product, whether it's helping a small business customer with their taxes, whether it's connecting them to the community, whether it's giving them loyalty points, whether it's escrowing payments and handling, instant payments form, whatever that is, screams more creativity and products to maintain engagement, maintain those margins, maintain that relevancy to that customer.

Jody Guetter (30:06):

Yeah, I appreciate that. So last question before we go into Q and A. And I expect eye rolls at a few size because we're going there, my friends artificial intelligence. So it would not be a conversation about balancing human and digital if we didn't address AI. So a couple of things I wanted to share. Paul Rota from the AI Institute did a recent study and the prediction is that in the next one to two years, 80% of the work marketers and knowledge workers do will be intelligently automated. So game people in this room, I'm a marketer, knowledge workers in this room, 80% will be intelligently automated. Google's CEO was quoted, and this is pretty dramatic, but it is a quote, AI is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire. So to my panelists today we're talking about human digital Manus machine, however you want to put it. I'd love for you and Chris, I'm going to start with you. I know you're very passionate about this topic as well. How are you individually approaching the use of ai, but more so as an organization. So as we think about the audience here, what are some things that they can take back to their organization and really start thinking about how to leverage AI and build AI into their systems and operations? Chris?

Chris Nichols (31:37):

So we're talking about it more in depth at 3:30, so be sure to come back for that shameless plug there. So AI will change the face of banking. It already is changing the face of banking, and I think every bank needs a AI governance group committee as well as a strategy about how to deploy both current AI and generative ai. And there's a huge difference that we'll discuss later, but it will be in products, it will be in augmenting your workers for productivity. We're seeing three to 10 x booth in productivity across the board. And for our customers, it's going to revolutionize how you handle your website, how you handle marketing search, et cetera. It's the new interface. Two years ago I would've said it's all about dashboards and building a cool business intelligence interface using Tableau or using Power BI or what have you, to give your customers a bunch of widgets to have the view of their banking relationship. And same for executive management. Now it's all about a generative AI layer as your main interface. So it means a lot less webpages, a lot less customer service interactions, et cetera.

Jody Guetter (32:45):

Yeah. Eyal, Corey, anything to add?

Eyal Lifshitz (32:48):

I mean, we've been using AI and for machine learning for a while now. We have 20 data scientists that build their own. We use it for our models, whether they're fraud or credit models. And so not gen AI by machine learning and AI for pattern recognition. This is something that we do and we are developers and as adopters of new technologies, that's something that we do on a continuous basis in terms of gen AI. We're likely going to start using it for development and making our development more efficient. So our engineers are using AI tools to be able to be more effective in what they do and more efficient, we'll likely introduce it in our back office operations and in our support teams as well. And then ultimately I see us using it also in terms of delivering customer experience. Like I can see a world where a small business owner logs in and says, I need you to do this for me, and the product will do that for them. So we see a bright future there. We're going to be adopters, we're going to be thoughtful about making sure that it's done in a way that doesn't create risk for us. But yes, we're very excited about it and we'll likely integrate it more and more.

Jody Guetter (33:59):

Wonderful. Thank you.

Corey LeBlanc (34:00):

And I think we're actually using AI and intelligent automation. We have, to your point, for years in some ways. And I know just our internal marketing teams, and heck, thanks to Chris and a couple of speeches that he's given. We're also also using that for policy modification, looking and reviewing things, making sure that we're compliant with the latest rules and regulations. And it saves us a tremendous amount of time. And so to both these guys' points, which they're way more versed in this than I am. I'm a new bank, so I got to abstain from even saying we're even looking into Moses' stuff at this point. But yeah, it's here.

Jody Guetter (34:34):

Yeah, it's here, it's here. So we're going to wrap up the moderated portion of the panel today. Certainly a lot of key takeaways. We heard a lot about, certainly the branch network isn't necessarily going away, but it's really about the value of the relationship. We heard a lot about humanizing data to anticipate the customer experience as well. But I would love to open up maybe two to three minutes for any questions for our panelists today. The American bankers should have mics. Any question, please go hard on these guys. They're not shy at all. Don't take it easy on them.

(35:14):

I have a question over here in red shirt. Hi.

Audience member 1 (35:21):

So one of the biggest concerns that, and I'm more on the policy side of things, is that small businesses are not the biggest moneymaker for banks. But then you discuss how you want to get to know them and have a personal relationship. How do you balance the fact that you have to make money as a bank, but you also have to have that personal relationship with your clients while trying to still make money? It seems like it can result in small businesses potentially getting left behind.

Chris Nichols (35:54):

Sure. So two things. One, it's augmenting the small business with data. So we look for ways to drive you to our website to make you fill out a form, see where you go, try to figure out your intent. We hate demographics, we love intent. So once we figure out your intent, then we can start to get to know you, give that information to the banker, figure out what products you need. But the other aspect of that is trying to move you to a set of products that is sing all your needs and make money across the board in a number of areas. And so whether it's wealth or mortgage or a business savings account is an unsung product in banking, any number of those makes you unprofitable to profitable. And that's what we look for. Strategies. And using ai for example, you can figure out the next best product to suggest. So you can take that amateur that I talked about in chess or that fairly new business banker in the branch and say, Hey, these are the next best five products for this particular customer. Using the data both that we have first party, second party, and then augmenting that with third party data.

Corey LeBlanc (36:57):

Yeah, I'll just highlight what he's saying there and then I'll turn over the O because that's really your focus area, right? It is. How do you make those processes? Entire business is on that small business side, but for us it is the tool sets, right? This digital, more digital first modern approach to banking them. We make them a lot more efficient to manage and maintenance. It's way more cost effective for us to manage a small business that is self-serving inside of our digital application than if we staff an entire branch structure on every corner of the city to support them. And that's where we try to balance those things. But for us, it is important as a true community bank to have not just the small business focus, but also larger business focus as well to also support the bank in a number of other ways.

Eyal Lifshitz (37:44):

Part of that question was how do you build a relationship with them? And the answer here is, this is going to be a little blunt. I don't have a relationship with Amazon. I love Amazon. I don't have a relationship with Netflix. I love Netflix. And so there's an assumption here that you need to have a relationship with them. No, our perspective is you need to create value for them. You need to create a great experience for them. And some of them will love you for that without having a relationship with you. And so the definition of relationship is changing. And again, I go back to my 14-year-old daughter. She does not want to speak with anybody. So including dad. Including dad, okay. She's not going to want go into a branch if she starts a business or even speak with anybody.

Chris Nichols (38:25):

And my counter to that is how much better would it be to have Amazon plus a relationship, someone that can figure out the problems? Amazon's great until you need to speak to a person. But if you could have a person there, it would be the best of all worlds.

Jody Guetter (38:37):

Awesome. Wonderful. I know we're wrapping up out time. If you've got questions, please use the app, throw it on LinkedIn. Let's keep the conversation going. I think this is the most valuable part about these conferences is the peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. We do have a lot of the data and research we shared today. Nymbus commissioned a study with filing to use the QR code. They're a great study around small business and the opportunity for entrepreneurs as well. But thank you so much for joining us today. Stay curious, keep learning, and we look forward to continuing the conversation. Thank you.