Partners in Progress A Blueprint for Revitalizing SMB Banking

Transcription:

Jeffery Kendall (00:08):

Afternoon everybody. Appreciate everybody. Joining us today is going to be a little bit of a different conversation because while it revolves around technology, it's really more about sort of a case study about two companies coming together and forming a different type of partnership to come to a different outcome versus just a supplier vendor relationship and how that was done intentionally. And then also how it came to be sort of by accident but also intentionally. And so really thrilled to be here today with, I consider him a close personal friend before a partner even. But Corey LeBlanc, who probably needs no introduction, but I'll introduce him as well, obviously from as CTO and COO. And do you have another C-level title on there?

Corey LeBlanc (00:54):

No, I'm trying to give up one of those actually. So if anyone knows a COO or CTO, that's lucky and I'd gladly give one of those away.

Jeffery Kendall (01:01):

Yeah, if anybody's got their resume out for either of those C-level titles, just drop it off. That's great. But Corey has been instrumental in obviously growing, I think around a de novo that have happened, at least in the time that I've been in banking over the past 10, 15 years. And I think the explosive growth, the sort of success that you guys have seen, I'm really, really excited to get the audience to maybe the next level down of, hey, what went right and what was a big challenge for all of us. So we will jump into it. And the first thing is just to start with maybe a question to get people thinking about this, but if you were starting an SMB or small business today, what would you start? What's something that's interesting to you that's a type of business that you think you could get behind? And while we're waiting for the results, I want to know what you would say.

Corey LeBlanc (01:52):

I think you know what I would say, and I think most people who know me pretty well know what I would say. I consider myself, I always call myself a builder. I started in IT and infrastructure, architecture, those things. And so I just building things on the technology side, but really I think fundamentally it just comes back to the core of me. I'm a maker. I like doing things for people and I like creating something new. So I'd open a cocktail bar, to be honest with you. It might be a restaurant, but I can't cook very well, but I can mix a mad cocktail. And so that's what I would want to do. And coincidentally, I'm always talking to everyone who's given me any money as an investment to a bank about how I want to start a cocktail bar, hoping one of them be like, yeah, let's do it right now. So I think that's what we'll do.

Jeffery Kendall (02:38):

So 20 years ago I told my wife when we were recently engaged that I wanted to move to California and start a motorcycle shop and a repair shop, and that was it. And so I think we could probably, maybe that's a terrible idea to put a bar in a motorcycle shop together.

Corey LeBlanc (02:52):

But well, maybe we shouldn't let them ride the motorcycles out, but I think it could work.

Jeffery Kendall (02:56):

That's fascinating. Alright. Fascinating. Alright, can we see the results of what people put onto the cyto? This will be really interesting.

(03:08):

Wow. A lot of retail. Retail for sure. Sports and gaming, like gambling. We got some online gamblers, not banking. That's a great business to be in. I think whoever put that on there, pretty clever. I like that. That's fair. So what's interesting about this is we all talk about small businesses though it's a thing, it's not really, and it's in the sense of every small business, they share maybe the size and some of the same challenges, but each of them in their own industry and what they do are going to have different needs, challenges, problems and things like that. And one of the things that I know that we talk a lot about, which is what is the real problem that we're solving for small businesses and really understanding how to go in and actually help them beyond what we know are the traditionally commoditized banking products.

(03:59):

And when you guys were starting locality, when you had the vision in your head, talked a little bit about this morning, but why was small business the thing that you guys thought was the most interesting?

Corey LeBlanc (04:08):

Well, originally it wasn't small business, right? Specifically, but then it kind of was, right? And what I mean by that is what we were talking about was the fact that we were all lifelong community bankers. Me and my other two co-founders, Keith Costello, who's our CEO, he started a few banks. If you're from South Florida or know the Florida banking market, most people know Keith and Drew sto, he'd also spent his entire life, he grew up in Fort Lauderdale, and I kind of became a banker by association from the fact that I was in the Air Force, I was an IT guy there. I didn't do anything super cool, but I did learn how to build networks.

(04:47):

And towards the end of my Air Force career, we decided, all right, we're going to separate. We want to move closer to family, get our kids to get to know grandparents and stuff. Like we grew up, and coincidentally, there was a small community bank in north central Louisiana that I started working in. But what we all realized over our lifelong careers in community banking is we really loved community banking. And we felt like that what we were seeing particularly over the past couple of decades is the community banks are somewhat shifting and changing. They exist, but then they kind of either go away or they just sit flat and small and they don't really make any kind of significant difference. But when we first started, it did the local business is small businesses relied on having that resource as a financial institution that had local decisions and people they could reach out to.

(05:37):

And it was a part of the community. It actually empowered the community to be more successful. And because what we were seeing was this shift where these community banks would somewhat disappear, get bought by a large regional, which would turn it into something entirely different. Or for the ones that were so successful that they grew larger, they would just become something different. And so when we were talking about this, this was mid pandemic and I was frustrated at my job even though it was actually really easy. I have no idea why I hated it at that time, but I just didn't like where we were going. We weren't helping the small business anymore. We were much more a large commercial bank at that point. And when I met Keith, it was because I was on a podcast and I was talking about how banks should really start to be looking at how much they're actually doing for their community by way of the small business.

(06:30):

And he reached out to me on LinkedIn, I ignored him. I thought he was a sales guy. I 100% ghosted him for a minute. It's the one time a LinkedIn connection has proven valuable. Is that? Yeah. Well only because my wife, Cassie was like, you got to call this dude. So we started talking about it and I was having so much fun talking to him and I could hear how excited he was and how much it mattered to him that Broward County and Palm Beach County was successful. And so that's what we started trying to build. But then when we started asking question, well, how do you build it differently? And it was kind of like writing on the wall right in front of us. The pandemic shifted so many things for so many people, but then the banking industry wasn't really doing anything other than be responsive to what was going on in that current moment and really not doing anything to make sure that the future version of that was ready for something different.

(07:19):

And that became a good conversation. And we were like, okay, well how do we go find someone to do this for us? This is going to cost a lot of money if we build it ourselves. And coincidentally, my wife who actually works with them was like, I think we do everything that you're talking about. And I was like, Jeffrey, Jeffrey does all this. And I reached out to you and I remember talking to you in a hotel lobby and I was like, look man, this is going to be hard. We're going to be small. We don't know if this works, but this is what we want to do. This is why we want to do it. I know you guys are doing all these things, but will you commit to doing it with me? And you said, yeah, and that was it. But we figured out the contract from there.

(07:59):

Everything else was just, okay, let's go. What did you see as your options? Because I have to think that when Keith started outlining his vision and was looking to you for a technology point of view, you're probably starting to lay out like, okay, how am I going to architect something around this to actually make it come to life from a technology perspective? But what did you kind of consider as the range of options? So it was huge. So one, we could do everything everyone else had already done and we can just go sign up for, I don't know, Jack Henry Bank in a box and call it a day. Then we're like, what does that really do? And we're just locked into the same thing that we're frustrated and we don't have scale. So what does that solve? And then it came to, again, I'm a builder and okay, we can build this whole thing from scratch.

(08:44):

I'll go pick this thing out and I'll pull this core and I'll go grab this digital banking and then we'll build this whole thing ourselves. And then we're looking at a five to 10 million debt technical debt. And we're like, how the hell are we going to be successful with that? That's not going to do local businesses any good if we fail. And so then we started looking at the modern providers and really asking, and I'm going to be honest with you, there's not a lot of people out there that's going to take on commercial banking on the modern core side. There's just not. And so when you said, yeah, I was kind of giddy, to be honest with you, I've always wanted to work with Jeffrey because like I said, we've known each other for so long, but I also know that you're an authentic person.

(09:24):

And so that was huge for us. But no, coincidentally, there just wasn't a ton of great options because nobody that I talked to wanted to be a partner in the way that I saw being a partner as a necessity in that they were going to say, Hey, here's my objectives. What's yours? We're both going to commit to making sure that we achieve those together. And it wasn't a one-way street. It wasn't a contract, it wasn't one of those things. It was like, what do we want to do? And nobody else came to the table like that. But you guys, I appreciate that. I think it's interesting too when you think about starting a de novo, because if you haven't been involved with the de novo, there's this sort of feeling of, Hey, this is awesome. I get to design everything from scratch. But then on the other side it's like, oh crap, I have to design everything from scratch.

(10:13):

I forgot that this is already covered 35 years ago and people have figured it out, but now we're having to reinvent the wheel. Talk to me a little bit about the balance. I know you had to go through the, oh man, how do I eat this elephant? Yeah, it's a difficult conversation because what you don't realize if you're going to go start a bank from scratch is that you're still going to hire a bunch of scratch bankers. And they've done things a certain way for a long period of time. And when things are hard for people, you go back to default mode typically. So talking to just my employees, my investors and our customers in day one and explaining what MVP meant, what is a minimum viable product? How do we get rolling? How do we get started Again, we want to keep technical debt low.

(10:59):

We wanted to get people in the door. And for me, as a guy who had been on that infrastructure, architecture, that technology side, the one thing I knew we had to do was build what people need and not build what we think people need. And so if we would've went and just pushed and picked all the products and did everything at the very beginning, we would've probably had a great version of a bank that we thought would be ideal, but didn't really probably work for the customers. And so it took us a little bit, right? Because when you open the doors and you start trying to get deposits, you start to get those and your treasury team's like, well, I really want this feature. It's like, oh, it's coming. We're going to get it, but we're going to get it better than you had it before.

(11:40):

You got to talk them off the ledge sometimes. But again, it comes down to why we pick partners. The way we pick partners is our team doesn't look at Nimbus as our core provider. You are, but you're a teammate, you're a team member. We look at that that way across the board we have Raj who is the co founder of Hurdler, who's working on invoicing with us. I don't consider him a contract. And so that become very, very important. So our team then become cohesive together, and we started to get better buy-in on doing that, which then started bringing people out of their shells to say, well, what if we did it this way? I've always wanted to be able to do it this way, and then we can kind of start to scale those things. And that's been the most fun for me. I jokingly say I've never had more fun being so frustrated and tired in my whole life, but it's a blast.

Jeffery Kendall (12:36):

I love that. It's interesting you remind me of a dinner that I had with Keith Costello, the CEO of locality before, I think it was before we even had the agreement signed and what we were going to go do together. And we were at a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale and to the point of focusing on your customers first, Keith, the owner of the restaurant came by, asked how our meal was, and Keith said, Hey, sit down with us for a second. I want to ask you some questions about how you bank. And I was just going like, oh, who is this guy? This is kind of crazy. It was one of the first times I've met Keith now knowing him, I'm like, oh, that's in his DNA is to start with the how can I help? What's the problem? Really, really interested and invested in what's going to make this restaurant owner successful or not.

(13:17):

I thought that it was inspiring to me in terms of technology and hopefully none of my investors are in here. But while technology is interesting, it's not even close to the point of why we do what we do. It's really about the outcome and really making sure that your customers are getting taken care of versus the tech. But that sort of outlined how you guys think about the market and it plays into it. But I thought that was so fascinating.

Corey LeBlanc (13:41):

Yeah, because I mean, if you think about what we were trying to do, I'm a technology guy, so yeah, maybe I wanted to have a cool app. Maybe I did want to have some of these features, but at the core of what we were trying to do was we wanted to solve a problem for people as bankers, we have this ethical responsibility to do that.

(14:00):

And if you don't just doing it for money. Granted, look, we could have built a bank out of anything and we could have probably all made a decent amount of money doing it. The hell's the point. So yeah, when I sat down with Keith, funny when I started talking to him, it's like June of 2020 and by October I pretty much quit my job. I barely knew the guy, but I knew really quickly he was authentic. And you get that from him pretty quick. And that's who I like surrounding myself with.

Jeffery Kendall (14:29):

So me, I'm a big proponent of saying, carve up your market, understand the segmentation within your market. And obviously I do get frustrated because I think when we call SMB small medium business, it's kind of this generic catchall. And what's interesting is that people who own businesses don't think of themselves as small.

(14:49):

They think of themselves as this is my life. And it's almost insulting when we say like, oh, you're an SMB owner. It's like, okay, I'm not 30 million in revenue or whatever, but I'm feeding my family. This is important stuff and you make me feel sort of devalued. And I believe that to really help people, you really need to focus and understand what the problem of that person is. And if we go back to the different businesses that were listed up there, there's all sorts of needs. The need of a landscaper and a landscaping company is very, very different than a software company or a restaurant, et cetera. And I've always believed that if you didn't understand the customer's industry that they're in, how can you actually help them? You can help them in a very generic commoditized way. But if I don't know your business, I mean, if somebody doesn't know how a SaaS software company works, what can they tell me? It's really tough. And so how did you guys focus on this is the market segment. We want to focus on part geography, but it's part attitude I think.

Corey LeBlanc (15:43):

It is part attitude. We're looking geographically in our community to really make sure we strengthen that. Because to be honest with you, we don't want a bunch of big banks and big companies just running our cities and everyone just becomes the same city. We like the unique ality of Miami and Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach and Chicago and all these name them, Nashville. I mean, come on. This is one of the coolest cities in the world, so that is important. But the way we kind of dialed it in is that we put out what we were trying to do and we said, Hey, look, we're new and we're not going to be perfect, but we'll get there with you if you can get there with us.

(16:23):

And the people who came in the door were ideal customers for us. And then we started having more and more conversations on how do we continue to expand? And funny, it kind of spearheaded what I think is the most interesting and probably the most entertaining project that I've ever been a part of is internally we started talking about what technology do you build or how do you partner with and how do you do these things? And it came down to how do we create a concierge experience for our customers when they're self-serving? So we've created everything that they need to do in application with you guys, but then what happens when they need something different or maybe they don't understand it or how do they do these things? And so internally, we're working with our teams and our employees to have conversations about how do we build better processes to make sure that we have touchpoints, not just an email that gets spun out, that's great, we can do that from our CRM, that's good, but how do we actually have a conversation with someone and understand what it is that they need today to be successful?

(17:24):

And then maybe help them understand how they can start to structure their future moving forward. And that's something that we both do internally. And then we work with your team. We contract with the Mrs. BPO ops team, and I know Susie, I see you. She's with the ops team at Nimbus and she talks to my customers almost as much as we talk to our customers about things. But I get calls all the time from investors saying that they've never felt more important than when they actually have to talk to us. They're just glad they don't have to talk to us. And I was like, it's the most weird oxymoron I've ever heard in my life.

Jeffery Kendall (18:03):

But that is the number one principle of self-service. I've done self-service in healthcare industry, I've done it in retail and banking. And I'll tell you time and time again, we want high touch, but only when we want high touch every time else we want to be left alone. But dang it, when we want that person, we want them there now and right on demand. And that that's the tricky dribble with anything self-serving is when do I lean in and provide that personal touch and when I know when to stay back and let the person sort of go on in a friction-free environment with their way. And I think to the point of what we're talking about really understanding your customer, I think one of the things that we knew and we actually developed new services together that we weren't providing other banks that you guys needed. And we said, look, Corey and Keith are trying to start up this new digital bank. What's going to make them not successful if we don't help them out? And one of the things that we sort of identified was beyond the technology was the people in the operations.

(19:00):

It was a call center, it was fraud investigation, it was following up with customers when KYC failed, I mean just the minutiae of things that you still need to have people involved with. We were like, Hey, we can scale that and bring it to you cheaper than you can do on your own. Does that make sense? And then now we have a personalized concierge onboarding service that we just launched, and it was all sort of in collaboration with what we did with localities. It was a huge benefit for us and hopefully for you too. But that's the point. So when we're up here talking about partnerships, there's things that we owe each other. So I always tell my team that we can't just ask. We're always asking our providers to do something for us, but we never actually do anything back for them necessarily. Oh, we pay them.

(19:44):

That's not the point. So how do we make sure that Nimbus or Hurdler or any of these companies that we talk to, how are they more successful in a better version of the product in three years than when we signed the contract? I don't ever believe in signing up for anything for what it is today. I want to sign up for what it's going to be. And so if I'm not going to be at the table with you, what the heck is the point? And how do we stake our claim on that? How do we feel good about what we're doing? I could have done that where I was before. I didn't have to start a bank, which would've been tremendously easier. I'm totally stealing that from you, by the way. I've never heard you say that, and that's really, really good. Okay. All right.

(20:28):

So another question for the audience first, we talk a lot about technology and obviously we're here and we're talking to a CTO and everything, but one of the things that we kind of see in the market is that there's this lack of ability to upgrade your existing technology to get the sort of modern services, to be able to give the tools to your small businesses that you're trying to conserve. So we'd love to know just from a poll perspective, from the audience, do you feel like you have the technology to even be in this market and to serve it effectively? It'd be interesting to see how people feel behind. And that is pretty far behind, although don't tell me it's like two responses yet.

Corey LeBlanc (21:08):

I was like, this is a question I don't have to answer, right? Jeffrey?

Jeffery Kendall (21:12):

You know this one that's right on this one. Boy if you say, no, we're really in trouble there. It's a weird conversation. No, but this is important. So because when we start talking about technology or innovation or strategy, and what we forget is it is iterative, right? And like I said, what you're talking about is we have a version of the product we're pretty happy with, but we keep building and pushing onto it. But the question here, right, what we're talking about is in most institutions when we talk to at these conferences or do anything, you guys come up to us after them like, how do we get started? How do we do these things? And sometimes it's not easy because you don't have the right infrastructure and architecture to do that. And that's why it was so critical for us to make the right decision at the beginning on who we chose to do it with because we wanted ownership.

(21:59):

We wanted to be able to drive that thing in the future. And if you can't do that today, the answer isn't saying, we can't do that today. The answer is, you better figure out how to do that today or you're never going to be able to compete. There's too many people entering in the market right now that they're coming in from scratch and they're doing it this way. And there's a lot of people investing in these things. If you're not one of them, good luck. Just do what was the one. Not banking, just not banking, whatever your career choice is after that. But if not, you need to have the right conversations on this.

(22:31):

And when you think about when we were putting together sort of your vision of what you wanted to architect from a technology, from a capability perspective, not everything you wanted was in our platform at the time.

(22:43):

We knew things that we needed to build out, we needed to go develop them. Obviously if you had to have some confidence, but probably some uneasiness there about who you're partnering with. And I think one of the things that comes up in technology, especially in banking, is do we partner with the newer providers who are, maybe they have a certain sort of risks, got funding risks, got execution risks and things like that when they're beginning their journey. On the flip side, you might have a company that's 30, 40, 50 years old and it's like they're so huge. It's like, how do I get an attention? How do I even get something from there? How do you balance that? Because I think there's space for both. There is. And the small vendors love to poke fund at the big vendors and the big vendors to say that the small vendors will all go away. So don't listen to anything the vendors say. But I am curious how you think about it.

Corey LeBlanc (23:28):

Well, it depends on what you're trying to do. If you just want to just want to pick which, and I know Cassie's going to cringe at this, I say this too much. If you want to pick what you provide your customers from a small diner menu of services that have been kind of put together from somebody else, and you're okay with that, awesome. If you're okay with your app looking the exact same in the app store, awesome, cool. Go pick one of those big vendors. They'll probably make it really easy for you to roll it out. They'll send you the contract and it'll be a couple hundred pages. You'll never know what you're actually paying for. But if you actually want to do something entirely different or you want to set your company up to be something that you can control and have some sort of power to enter into new markets or even to be able to keep your customers, or in some examples, I just did a data webinar today and we were talking about how if you go look at data historically, like year over year, banks are losing customers consistently.

(24:28):

Now in one given year, you don't really think it's a problem, but if you look at it over five or six years, it's becoming a problem. And those banks have not just a problem that they lost this attrition that happened, they have zero ability to go get that relationship back. They have a better version of a banking relationship somewhere else now because somebody else did invest in these things. It's just a question of where you're trying to go and there is a place for two. And in some cases I think there's probably a better solution to maybe have both because you already have this old one, start positioning your company, focus on a specific industry or a market or SMBs or whatever it is. Maybe you're not great at that. Well, you can start building an entirely new infrastructure, architecture, tech stack around that thing and slowly and iteratively move the rest of the business over because you're going to need to do that anyway.

Jeffery Kendall (25:22):

Yeah, and it's fascinating. There was a great comment in the session earlier where the founder of a Neobank Bluevine had said, let's talk about the word relationship a little bit. Does that really mean something in banking? Do you really have a relationship with a digital bank or a neobank? And I think you guys have more of a blended sort of view about what a relationship means with your customers, but how are you thinking about that human touch here specifically with locality versus when you were at a bigger bank and things like that? Is it more important, the same, less?

Corey LeBlanc (25:53):

No. Relationships are equally as important as they always have been. And I would say that it's probably becoming more important to have some sort of humanized element to what you do. And that doesn't mean that you have to go sit down in their office all the time.

(26:08):

It may not want you to. It doesn't mean you have to have a branch on every corner so someone can come deposit. Please don't make them for sure. But there is an element that as we've become more digitized and people have become more disconnected, that the conversations we used to have about how do we improve things, how do we do things or what do you need have been lost? And the only way you can retrieve that is you either get a scrub and pay for the data to then make some sort of predictive outcome to go try to solve for that, which is what a lot of your digital only institutions are doing. Or you figure out a way to blend that. And for us, we like the blended approach because you meet them where they want to meet you. If it's at my location, come over. If it's at your building, we're coming. And if you're good with the self-service and talking to someone, even better now, we both saved some time, but it's a people business man. Banking has to continue to be a people business.

Jeffery Kendall (27:08):

I think it's fascinating because the case study, there's a comic book next to everybody out here, and I really lobbied for them to put everybody in tights except for me, but that didn't make it in. But I love the analogy of sort of the hero on the journey. And if you're familiar with storytelling, there's this concept of the hero's journey. And there's always a point where somebody's trying to do something, but they hit a wall, they hit a big challenge, they go, oh man, maybe this isn't going to work. Or it looks like our hero is going to just absolutely botch it. Can you tell the audience one or two things maybe of the journey when doing this? You were like, oh man, I don't know what is going on, why I did this. Did you ever have any of those moments? I know you did. Yeah,.

Corey LeBlanc (27:55):

Absolutely. Absolutely. Day one, day one of go live watching the system and just be like, please work. Please work. Please work. People are going to start trying to open accounts, they're going to do these things. And the days leading up to that, all the testing that went into making accounts and obviously boast for selfish reasons and testing reasons. I had one of the first accounts open at locality. But yeah, I mean, that's very stressful. And you start to wonder, why the hell am I putting all these hours? I didn't have to work this hard at my last job. It was pretty easy. I could have just taken a vacation for a month and nobody, I think you were making more money, way more, way more money.

(28:36):

Cassie knows that part too. Yeah, no, I took about a 40% pay cut to do this, but it didn't matter, right? Because what we were trying to do to solve this problem that we saw was happening, we felt was absolutely necessary. And so yeah, day one was tough, but I would say recently going through some of the first regulatory exams and going through some of these things, and when you realize that when you're creating documentation, policies, procedures, everything, you're building everything from scratch, and inevitably you're going to have gaps and holes and things you got to keep doing. And there's a lot of pressure there. And to be honest with you, I mean everyone already knows this. Writing policies is not fun at all. And so those are days that I question a lot. But no, I don't think we really had very many bad days, to be honest with you, because even in the toughest times, we knew we were doing and we know what we're doing is what we're supposed to be doing.

(29:37):

And we know we have the right people. We know we have the right people on our team with your team and the partners. We know we have it right. We just got to put the work in. So it's really not that stressful for me.

Jeffery Kendall (29:48):

It's phenomenal. And I'm going to actually modify this slide a little bit on the fly here. I'm not sure it's necessarily a technology partner, but a partner in general when you're a bank and you're picking someone to go on a new journey with or something like this. But we'd love to know what the audience, your point of view is, what's most important to you when picking someone or looking about how to build this partnership for Journey? And then obviously we've heard a lot about you and I appreciate your partnership. Yeah, absolutely. I will say one of the things that I love to talk to bank execs about from the perspective of a supplier, vendor, whatever you want to call it, is that when you show up and you can find those relationships with a supplier where they actually care about your outcome and you're past the contract negotiation and it's like we're in the boat together, that's magic there.

(30:39):

That is where you actually get outsized returns for your investment. And one of the things I see a lot when I'm working with banks is that's an uncomfortable position. It's not necessarily a natural stance to take when you're negotiating a contractor, picking a new partner, just saying like, Hey, is this person going to pick up the phone when I call at nine o'clock at night when I've got a real problem that I need to go do? And considering sort of that it's beyond the contractual relationship, it really is about sort of emotionally caring. And what I tell bank execs is, if you do it right and you spend time and you build relationships that are true partnerships with your suppliers, you will use that as currency. You will get better pricing, you will get more out of them, you will have better service. And all of it comes from the mindset and the mentality of we're here to help each other, versus I'm here to extract as much out of you as I can for as little amount of cost.

(31:37):

And I think that if bank execs really knew the power of what they could do with some of the partnerships out there, you have done absolutely that they would realize it's actually it's hard cash that they're actually investing and getting back out of the strategy.

Audience Member 1 (31:51):

So I'll throw, it's not going to go up on the screen, but I'll throw a poll question just for your internal selves, is how many of you have a core provider that has a bank account open at your bank.

Corey LeBlanc (32:02):

The CEO of the core provider? How many? I would've guessed very few. And the funny thing is not that you have an account open, that would be easy. It only takes a couple minutes to open because of the system, so that's great. But he didn't open the account because he wanted to show us that he was going to support us.

(32:22):

He opened the account. He wants to test it because how many times you call, you're like, does this always look like this? I'm like, no, we're working on this. We got it. It's fine. But that's the reality. And that's like at eight or nine o'clock at night, like you said. And that for me makes all the difference in the world. That's why, again, it isn't as stressful for me as most people think.

Jeffery Kendall (32:43):

Oh, I appreciate that. And we are past our time now, but appreciate coming in here. But if there's any questions, I don't know if we have a couple minutes there, them kind of blinded here, but looking for someone to wave me off or, all right.

Panel Support Member (32:56):

Yeah, you can take one question.

Jeffery Kendall (32:57):

Do you? Yeah, if anybody's got a question for Corey or me, please jump in. We didn't even have a plant in the audience, man. Nothing. Alright. Uhoh all, there's one right behind you. I think there's somebody with a, oh geez.

Audience Member 2 (33:12):

Hey, thank you for the amazing presentation. We talk about SMB, it's one thing and we talk about community banks, it's one thing, but we all know that we need differentiation. How do you go about doing that?

Corey LeBlanc (33:25):

Yeah, really again, it is being authentically who you are supposed to be. In South Florida, our markets are very different than the market here in Nashville or any of those things. And the product, the service and everything we're building is very specific to the industries, the opportunity and the things that are happening in those spaces. And so when we talk about small businesses being very unique, that's very clear, right? Everyone's different. But on the banking side, we come to these conferences and you listen to these pitches and stuff on stage and we think that, oh, if I sign that contract, I'll be as successful as that other bank without ever asking ourselves, is that the business we're even in? I think that's probably more of an internal conversation that probably doesn't happen enough when we start to talk about transformation or change or addition. And if it's not happening, you probably really need to question your executive team.

Jeffery Kendall (34:18):

Yeah, makes sense. And I think also starting with the data, we said it earlier, Jody said it when she's on stage, it's surprising. You can access the data about how many small businesses are in this geographic area that look like this. They have this much revenue and a lot of this exists to be able to really target and focus and narrow down on what the TAM is, who's got the problem, how can we go solve it? And that's the answer.

Corey LeBlanc (34:44):

Yeah. If you've got time for a dream, we can talk you through all the whiteboarding sessions we did at the beginning, right? With you guys on just market what his opportunity.

Jeffery Kendall (34:51):

Exactly. Well, thank you very much, Corey.

Corey LeBlanc (34:54):

Absolutely brother.

Jeffery Kendall (34:54):

Thank you to the American Bank. Appreciate it.