How Digital-Driven Strategies Are Transforming the Customer Experience

Customers today have high expectations for companies to provide an end-to-end experience. Digital tools can help small businesses understand their customers on a much deeper level. Technology can provide enhanced personalization and customer engagement, offer a seamless omnichannel experience, and provide real-time assistance. Our panelists will discuss strategies for digital tools, including GenAI and fintech products, to enhance the customer experience.

Transcription: 
Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio for the authoritative record. 

Stu Richards (00:08):
Good morning. How's everyone doing? All right. I will take that as a positive sign. So we're going to be talking about digital strategies and the customer experience, and I'm delighted to be joined by a great panel. What I wanted to do to kick things off is ask each of you to introduce yourselves and your organization.

Danielle Bateman Girondo (00:33):
Hi, good afternoon, everyone. My name's Danielle Bateman Gerondo, and I head up marketing at Midwest Bank Center.

Adrian Ade Kabal (00:41):
I am Adrian Ade Kabal with Fairwinds Credit Union based here out of Orlando. And I'm the SVP of digital delivery. I've been there for about 22 years in various roles, but most recently this one.

Mark John (00:55):
Hello. Mark John Dew. I'm the Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Stratavate, which is a consulting firm focused on banks and credit unions. Prior to that, I was a chief digital officer at Ameren Bank.

Stu Richards (01:10):
Great. And I'm Stu Richard, CEO of Braden. We are a B2B market research firm that helps clients better understand and engage small businesses. So the customer experience, the customer journey, and market segmentation are near and dear to our hearts, as is customer acquisition through data-driven outbound programs. But to start things off, Danielle, I'm going to start with you. I wanted to understand, from your perspective, what the small business customer expectations are for the digital customer experience.

Danielle Bateman Girondo (01:47):
So small business is our bread and butter. We're about a $3 billion bank. And as we think about customer expectations and where we can win, it really is about the relationship. So we lead with relationship and try to digitize everything behind the handshake. So that's our mantra: digitize everything behind the handshake to make it easier, more seamless, and more automated. From our customers, they really value that trusted advisor, that local knowledge, that local touch, and they want the digital experience to be table stakes. Now, that bar keeps rising in the age of Amazon. Everything keeps getting better, faster, and more personalized. But for us, we lead with the relationship and then the digital component really compliments that.

Stu Richards (02:51):
Great. Adrian, what's your experience?

Adrian Ade Kabal (02:54):
Yeah. I would echo that as well. There's an aspect of, whether it's small business or consumer, wanting everything quickly, wanting it now. But what I find is interesting is there's still this kind of dependency on needing to have a branch location. It's still one of the things that remains at the top of people's lists when they're choosing their primary financial institution, even if they are someone who never walks into a brick-and-mortar location, because it gives a sense of security. So whether or not they realize it, I think one of the things that they need is some trust signals when it comes to digital. I took an Uber ride recently and I get into the app and I'm about to get into a car with a complete stranger late at night. And what's the first thing I see? It's their rating. What people have said about them.

(03:41):
I can see a picture of their face. And when we're thinking about being able to give digital solutions to people who have always relied on a person to provide that service, we have to be able to communicate that trust element. And then I think people will be more apt to use digital services.

Stu Richards (03:58):
That's great. Out of curiosity, who are you seeing actually come into banks or to branches? I know it's kind of a security blanket, but—

Adrian Ade Kabal (04:07):
The people who come into the branches are obviously the longstanding members who have grown up with the credit union that way. Or you also do still have a lot of your businesses that may come in if they're cash heavy, but we haven't seen as many branch transactions as we have with the move toward digital. So you definitely have traffic dwindling, for sure.

Danielle Bateman Girondo (04:28):
For us, one of the things that we see is, yes, our more loyal client base that has grown up with us, they tend to come in for day-to-day transactions, but what we have found is that our branches become problem-solving centers. Most people want to do everything on their phone or on their computer, but when they have a problem, that is when we see them wanting to come in. So we're having to upskill our workforce because it's no longer about the simple transaction. It's really solving some of those more complex and nuanced challenges that they might have.

Stu Richards (05:05):
Sure. And I'd imagine it's a great opportunity to educate some folks on how to use online or app-based experiences. That's great. And Mark, I'd love to get your take on where you feel the bar is set for the digital experience for small business.

Mark John (05:21):
Yeah. Well, I want to echo what both of you said. This is 100% digital, 100% human experience where customers are used to this Robinhood kind of experience—like Amazon—and the gap that banks have because of legacy cores and things of that nature is being filled with fintechs and all this new technology. So from my perspective, what I'm seeing is customers really want that type of experience and need it too.

Stu Richards (06:05):
And what would you say is the ideal end-to-end customer experience?

Mark John (06:10):
I really want that type of experience.

Stu Richards (06:13):
I have you on that. How far do you feel most banks or credit unions are from it? Maybe there's quite a bit of work.

Mark John (06:21):
Well, once again, the 100% digital, 100% human experience. So from prospecting, integration of marketing to online banking channels, looking at that and saying, where are the gaps with booking to core? Also, getting the client onboarded is still a big issue for small businesses.

Stu Richards (06:56):
And Danielle, how would you take that in terms of the ideal end-to-end?

Adrian Ade Kabal (07:00):
I will say the first thing that comes to mind for me, because I manage our digital accounts and digital lending, is like you said: you get them in the door, right? You've got your top of funnel and how quickly can we convert them? Where are they dropping off different aspects of the application and how can we interject to optimize that experience? But it doesn't stop there because what people expect nowadays is instant decisions. I need to know right away: am I approved or am I denied? If I'm approved, it goes even further than that. They then expect to be able to log into their online banking right away and have their payment source verified in their account. And even if you do that part well, it's still not good enough.

(07:44):
Because people tend to leave their financial institution within the first—if you're lucky three years, but oftentimes it's most vulnerable in that first year. So you have to put your efforts into immediate outreach. Whatever that looks like for your institution; for us, what it meant was we've reallocated resources to where someone gets a phone call right away, and they don't expect it. I think that's been the most surprising thing is people think, "I placed my application online," and they never expect to hear from a human. And that has changed the game in the weirdest of ways. The amount of people who actually pick up the phone surprised us. And then even from there, those that didn't, when we did some outreach via email, the response that we got back was so amazing and we're seeing more growth there than we have before.

(08:30):
So yeah, they started with you digitally, but there's always been this misconception that they don't want to talk to a person. It couldn't be further from the truth. It just makes it feel that much more personal.

Stu Richards (08:40):
Yeah. And Danielle, what's Midwest's ideal customer experience? And before you do that, hey, customers are still getting your statements next.

Danielle Bateman Girondo (08:49):
Oh, goodness. We stopped the faxes. No more faxes. We did stop the faxes, but we do still have a number of paper statements that go out. For us, we really try to meet our customers where they're at in the journey, and that varies by segment. From our perspective, I want to make sure that there is consistent delivery of our brand promise across channels. So that means whether you're in this region or that region in person, or whether you're coming in through our digital channels, I want to make sure that there's a consistent level of outreach, expectation, and onboarding. For us, making sure people can go in any channel that they want is important. So we're really letting the client lead and trying to make sure it's consistent across all channels.

Stu Richards (09:48):
Great. Mark, I'm going to throw this on to you. Where do you see the role of AI or data analytics in improving the customer experience?

Mark John (09:57):
Well, it's critical, right? Understanding who your client is and the whole household is critical to a user experience and the experience of the whole relationship. So data and making sure that's segmented properly is key. We hear the terms gen AI and AI. If you don't have that in order, the AI experience and the utility that AI can bring is not going to be there. So focusing on data cleanliness and the Client 360 view that's circulated throughout the institution in all systems, cores, and databases is critical. That's the first step to an AI strategy. And then once that's in place, policies and procedures are critically important. And then you can layer on top of AI. The really low-hanging fruit of those use cases is marketing—touching these clients in a way that they understand so you can cross-sell them a personalized product type—because AI can understand the data once it's cleaned and understood.

(11:25):
So that's one piece. And then the next pieces would be efficiency plays that could bring down your efficiency ratio at a bank for things like automated generation of account opening and things of that nature. That's really where AI can play a role today.

Stu Richards (11:54):
And Adrian, how's Fairwinds using AI or data analytics, especially for—

Adrian Ade Kabal (11:58):
There's some things here. We obviously have some vendors who have started to integrate AI solutions within their platforms, but I would say some of the more fun use cases recently have been from people being curious about what our members are doing—wanting to study their behavior. Here's a recent example: we just took a month's worth of searches on our public site to see what people are going to our website to look for. And what we found was kind of cool. We found over 3,000 interactions in just one month that were product or service or acquisition related in some way. "Tell me about your rates. I want to learn about this type of loan." And those are, in my mind, kind of like unanswered calls we never would have paid attention to before. Would I ever sit there at my desk with a potential customer calling me and not pick up the phone?

(12:47):
I wouldn't, but that's what we're doing when we have all of these people coming to our site and we're doing nothing with it to translate that into some sort of an acquisition. So that for us is very eye-opening. It's one small piece of what AI can do, gathering all that information together and telling you where there are some insights. But now how do you take that across the threshold to, "Here, you just asked me about my rates. Here they are, but would you like to open an account? Would you like to apply for something?" Having that right there at their fingertips where they don't have to go looking for it is a big piece. And then I'll echo the efficiency part. Our contact center gets 40,000 calls that come into our member support team. And what we have started doing is looking at our agent's productivity—and I'll connect this to the member experience in a moment.

(13:39):
Anyone who's worked in a contact center before knows it's like a treasure trove of information about your members, and it's only as good as what the agent marks as the reason for that person calling. Humans are obviously fallible and they're trying to move on quickly to the next call. So here's where AI comes into play: it's listening to those calls. It's not only pulling out a transcript of exactly what happened back and forth between the member and the agent, but it's wrapping it up and giving it topics based on what it heard, not what the agent remembers as the most important thing in that conversation. One thing that does for us is it shaves off at least 15 seconds per call for after-call work. When you multiply that by 40,000, you're talking FTEs that now you can reallocate toward other more high-impact, high-value interactions with your members, or you can simply use that to increase your service levels.

(14:39):
Meaning I'm answering that phone faster—in 30 seconds—and I'm providing a much better experience to the people coming in. So the efficiency plays work on both sides there.

Stu Richards (14:48):
Are you guys thinking about a voice assistant?

Adrian Ade Kabal (14:50):
We have a voice assistant already. And I will say there are improvements that need to happen in AI there. We have an intent-based voice assistant, so it does help contain quite a bit of our phone calls, but it can do more. We're moving to generative AI for that, and then eventually Agentic AI where it can have a little bit more of a conversational interaction, which I would be more comfortable putting our high-net-worth clients through. They don't want to talk to a bot if they can tell they're talking to a bot. So it has to evolve and improve.

Stu Richards (15:23):
Yeah. Great. And Danielle, tell us about the use of AI or analytics at Midwest.

Danielle Bateman Girondo (15:30):
So what was interesting, I'll share. We're about a $3 billion bank. About 24 months ago, we started partnering to look at doing predictive analytics on the marketing side. We partnered with a data analytics firm in an anonymized way to really say, how do we leverage AI to get very surgical? And one of the key learnings was that we didn't have a big enough database to be able to do that in a really scalable way. If I have all of these solutions and products and I want to really understand everyone, we just simply weren't getting to the good stuff. So we had to pivot and we ended up bringing on some really good data appendage folks that do this across organizations and industries to help us append our data. We now have lookalike modeling and we're stepping into more of the AI.

(16:39):
What I think is important there is in that crawl, walk, run approach, we might have skipped to the walk and stubbed our toe a little bit. So we took a step back and said, okay, how do we leverage what other people are doing? Is it as surgical as if we had done something completely custom? No. But it got us 80 to 90% of the way there, faster, better, and a more holistic solution. So for the smaller or more mid-size banks and credit unions, that might be something you might consider.

Stu Richards (17:16):
Yeah. So is that for analytics? There's not a customer service component of AI like—

Danielle Bateman Girondo (17:22):
So we do have that. We do look at it through our call center, right? But that was just the use case on the backend data. Through our call center, we're absolutely leveraging things in a very similar way because, again, every time they're raising their hand with a question, how do you take those questions, provide an answer, provide a blog to help your SEO, provide an FAQ, and then feed that into your training so that your team goes, "These are some of your most frequently asked questions. Let's make sure we're upskilling our frontline and client-facing staff to make sure that they know those questions too consistently."

Stu Richards (18:06):
Yeah. No, that's a great application. And what are you seeing, Mark? I'll ask you in terms of simple high-impact ways to use technology to better understand customer needs.

Mark John (18:21):
That's a great question. I mean, there's a lot of applications. AI is one of them that we're talking about here. I'll just kind of go back to the data component, right? Making sure the data is reliable and complete. And if it's not, or if you have a smaller data set, you can append this with GenAI or other companies that provide these types of data sources. To answer your question on what's the application of this, it's cross-functional. If you think about the flywheel of the customer life cycle, "Hey, I'm coming in through the website, I'm talking to a chatbot," there's an AI application for that. And then there's rich information that you can data mine and then put into those language models. You can put your policies and procedures into there as well, which is critical. And from there, through the whole onboarding lifecycle, if AI is touching all of those different components and learning and gathering those rich insights, over time you have this rich set of information that you can create efficiency plays from.

(19:48):
I like to think of it as a life cycle of the entire onboarding journey with curated pieces for efficiency. We mentioned policies and procedures. One thing we did at Ameren Bank is we looked at, "Hey, these are our policies and procedures. Let's put it into an AI language model." Then we can test and automate the testing through APIs and RPA technology, and that increased the efficiency in the audit area. Thinking creatively about certain pieces of that life cycle and how you can impact the users on the backend—not only your clients—will overall improve your customer experience.

Stu Richards (20:33):
And Adrian, how is Fairwinds using technology to assess the solutions you're offering them?

Adrian Ade Kabal (20:43):
Right now, I'm not going to lie, it's siloed and segmented by how the person happened to give us that information. They're leaving breadcrumbs everywhere they go, even in the digital space. So it's like, okay, going back to the searches, if people are searching constantly for Zelle and we didn't have Zelle—that was actually one of the key drivers to us getting Zelle—why are so many people searching for this? When you scour through their closing survey, "Hey, I closed out my membership. Well, why?" Are you taking that data and doing something valuable with it to allow them to tell you what it is that they need simply by looking at the friction points? And going back to the AI scrub of any of your phone calls or any of your digital channels and chat logs, when you're looking at those, if we can put them into our AI system to extract what it is they are saying about a topic—

(21:36):
Let's say payments, for example, money movement, or external transfers. Show me all of the calls that have come in in this timeframe about external transfers and tell me the sentiment of not only the member, but also of the agent. Then I can sort by those that have the poorest sentiment and I know that that's an issue I need to address. I need to be a dog with a bone on that. It's really just about taking the time to be curious. A lot of us don't do that. We get these systems set into place and we literally just forget about them. "Ooh, we got that done. Mark that off the list. We did a great job." But there's so much to learn about our members by pulling all that information together. We can do a better job of it.

Mark John (22:14):
I may add that it is critical to be curious about the data you receive and not let it just sit there, because data tells a story. If you come up with those storylines prior to looking at your data, it will really help you create the linkages so that you can tell your executives, "Hey, this is what's going on." So you can get the buy-in for additional spend or whatever the case is to improve the overall customer experience because all of this is about digging deep.

Stu Richards (22:51):
And Danielle, how's Midwest using technology to assess customer needs?

Danielle Bateman Girondo (22:56):
So if I take a big step back and think about the tech stack, that tech stack is so critical. At least with many smaller regional banks, I think that's the critical failure point today.

(23:18):
We can't do really amazing things with data if we don't have the right tech stack. I was actually sharing with someone outside—I've worked with companies at transition periods throughout my career. I did a stint in investment banking, some time in casinos, and some time in hard discount groceries. When I came to community banking seven years ago, I said, "It's like trying to get data off a floppy disk." I was doing this 20 years ago in the casino industry. So while we all talk about AI and the possibilities—and yes, it's there—I think it's also okay to recognize that you have to be foundational with your tech stack. What is your core provider going to provide? Where are you going to bolt on really great FIs? Once you get that holistic look, then you can more intentionally say, "How are we going to use this data for onboarding or service for training?" But I think there are a lot of people that are in this space of, "I'm hearing all this great stuff about AI and I still can't get my data off the floppy disk."

(24:43):
So if you're in that space, take the step back and go, "How do we get our tech stack right?"

Stu Richards (24:50):
Yeah. No, we absolutely see that in our research among SMBs. The bigger ones, their biggest challenge—one of the biggest challenges—is just siloed data or mismatched data and getting the infrastructure in place to make anything of AI.

Danielle Bateman Girondo (25:06):
So many people are just on Excel spreadsheets still, right? We're talking dashboards in real-time, and especially the small business owners—they are so proud of their 20-tab spreadsheet. So you've just got to meet people where they are.

Stu Richards (25:23):
Great. Mark, different topic for you: Fintechs. They tend to be really good at the online experience, and I'm curious how you see banks or credit unions partnering with them to make the most of that without losing the trust that banks and credit unions bring to their small business customers.

Mark John (25:42):
Yeah. And absolutely, they're great at the online experience, but as we said earlier, this is 100% digital, 100% human. So I think they're evolving. Silicon Valley is really great at customer experience. We have our iPhone and Uber app and all of that, and it's very intuitive and easy to use. So that was the first thought: online and digital. As we move into omnichannel and into the branch—because that hasn't been going away, it's been deprioritized, but it's not going away—PNC is actually expanding their branch footprint. These fintechs are creating those types of experiences for in-branch as well. You can start online and finish in-branch, or you can start in-branch and finish online, and also create experiences within the branch with a fintech provider.

(26:42):
A lot of the core system providers are doing acquisitions because they have this monolith of a core system and they need to create an ecosystem around it and then fold it into their core to provide the experiences that the FIs want because they're realizing that there's this huge gap. So I think going back to what you said around your tech stack being extremely important—it's foundational. That doesn't mean you need to move off of your core, but it means you need to be intentional about how things talk to each other, where the data is stored, and making sure that data is accessible everywhere. Then you can take a step back and assess where you need to improve customer experience and look at a fintech for onboarding, for example, or look at a fintech to do automated risk with AI if you have a problem with underwriting loans.

(27:41):
I would start with drawing out your tech stacks, honestly, from a business standpoint so people can understand it, not just the folks in IT, and then say, "All right, well, here's our strategic objectives. How does this fold out with either capabilities that we currently have or our core system provider has, or let's look at the market and figure out where the gaps are." And that's essentially how people should access these things.

Danielle Bateman Girondo (28:21):
I think that's an excellent point. If only your IT team understands your tech stack, you're more than likely going to stub your toe. All business owners have to understand how that tech stack serves the strategic objectives and the gaps you're trying to close. A lot of us have historically had that tech stack live in IT. Given everything we've talked about, we've got to migrate it so it's a business owner imperative.

Mark John (28:55):
We have to realize that banks and credit unions are no longer just banks and credit unions—they are also technology companies. So the disconnect between IT and the business and operations needs to be more cohesive.

Stu Richards (29:13):
And Adrian, I'd love to hear how Fairwinds has either learned from fintechs and their digital experience or how you might see partnering with them to take advantage.

Adrian Ade Kabal (29:25):
Yeah, sure. It happens in a few different ways. We have partnered with some fintechs that we then integrate into our systems. As I mentioned before, there's other vendors that we already have that bring on fintechs and then have their own integration built in through there. But one of the things that we look at when we're doing a vendor search of any kind, especially the big ones like digital banking, is how open are they to us being able to integrate other fintechs that we might want to partner with, and then also how open are they to allowing us to customize and develop some of our own things to totally differentiate our brand. So we need to partner with people who are flexible for that. It includes our core. It includes cards and payment systems and digital banking as our top three.

(30:15):
On the account origination side, we have partnered with a fintech that has changed the game for us in terms of being able to approve new members for membership in real-time. We were able to reduce our manual review by like 80% on the account origination side. So there is a lot of value in partnering with fintechs for the right services.

Stu Richards (30:36):
Exactly. And Danielle, what's been your experience?

Danielle Bateman Girondo (30:39):
So my favorite use case actually was six years ago. We were opening up our digital bank, which is Rising Bank—it's our national brand. And we did not know how to do digital online account opening. So we brought in a fintech and they were absolutely amazing. Our in-branch experience at the time took us an hour with paper to open up accounts. That moved to less than four minutes online. Bringing in the right fintech in the right place in the stack is imperative, but you've got to know what's important to the customer. That online digital client, number one—we were national and we didn't have locations nationally. There was no way they were going to spend an hour opening up an account. To get that down to three to four minutes was imperative.

(31:50):
So we made sure we invested there. There's some other things I didn't care about as much and there might be a little bit more friction there still.

Adrian Ade Kabal (31:59):
Circling back to our topic, I think it was the first question that you asked about the changing expectations. Here's some interesting ones we have heard where members have communicated their friction points. When it comes to funding and payments, it's so critical. There's an expectation that if I tell you what bank I am funding via ACH for my brand new account with you, once I get into the online banking, I should be able to fund from that same exact bank and not have to reauthenticate myself again. When you're looking at fintechs to partner with, you can add a really great account origination system that flawlessly allows them to move money. But if that is not the same fintech you're partnering with when they get into online banking, you're creating an entirely different experience and unnecessary friction for them. We have heard that over and over again.

(32:47):
So it's caused us to sit up and listen and we're going to make some changes regarding that. It really needs to be seamless throughout all of your different channels. That's what they expect.

Mark John (32:57):
Yeah. And if I can add to that as well—we're talking about a lot of the technology that goes into this—one of the software components is the customer journey and visualizing that customer journey so you could take a step back and see it on screen and say, "Well, this is where we need to zoom in and this is what we need to prioritize." Because if we look at the bank and we see account opening in one area, it might be different in another. Maybe that's okay sometimes, but if you zoom in and look at one specific area and you have different flavors of how that's being opened, you really need to crawl everybody into a journey that is visualized first and then supported by technology.

Stu Richards (33:43):
Okay. One final question and then we'll open it up to the floor, but I'm going to start with you, Danielle, because you mentioned the data. What do you see as the organizational or cultural issues that defeat banks and credit unions from optimizing the digital customer experience? How would you get past those?

Danielle Bateman Girondo (34:07):
I think we talked about it a little bit earlier: it's that data infrastructure and tech stack. You've got to have people where you can access the data. But one of the biggest barriers that I have seen is when I'm talking to my BI team or my data analytics team and they are like, "What are the requirements? You need to tell me in very technical terms." It's almost like you need a translator to go, "Hey, here's the business need. Here's how that ladders up to the strategy. I need someone who can help me translate that." I don't understand the 64 variables that you guys are working with, but I know I need them to be consistent. I know I need the data clean and I know that it has to help drive decision-making. For us, it has been taking it from "this is a data thing" to "this is a business imperative."

(35:22):
And once it really got laddered up in every strategic workstream, we got a lot more traction. Does that help?

Stu Richards (35:31):
Yeah. Oh, that's great. Adrian, same question.

Adrian Ade Kabal (35:35):
Yeah. I think for us, it's a couple of things. One is we don't need an ROI for everything. You don't have to have an ROI for everything. Sometimes you just have to make improvements because you can't always measure the member experience. You'll be able to measure it when they leave because of it—you'll be able to measure in terms of complaints—but trying to convince where we need to put our investments in digital innovation, sometimes the roadblocks are needing to have an ROI or the fear of fraud. That is a legitimate fear that we should have in some regard, but what are we going to do to mitigate that? As you're expanding and growing, you can sacrifice opportunity because you're afraid or you can set thresholds to say we're going to grow in this area—whether it's a new niche for lending or a digital channel—you just need to make sure you've got your risk thresholds appropriately laid out.

(36:40):
Saying, "This is where we're willing to play and then these are the non-negotiables that we won't budge on." If we know what our structure is and where we're playing, I think we'll be able to move a little bit faster rather than having the same discussion over and over again. It's really just about 그 structure and agreement upon where we're going and what we're willing to risk for the opportunity.

Stu Richards (36:57):
Okay. We have an expert panel. Now's your chance to ask questions about the digital experience. Any questions? There's one.

Audience Member (37:11):
Hi, I work with a credit union out in San Antonio. And my question—what I didn't hear was pushback, if any. When you're creating these digital channels and quick decisions, obviously there's a credit risk there. Do you have pushback from your credit team or underwriting team? I know you've talked about IT hurdles, but what are your hurdles that you have with your risk officers or credit officers when it comes to these digital quick-type answers?

Adrian Ade Kabal (37:48):
Yeah. For us, we have to bring them in early. And I know a lot of times people try to keep risk out until the end because you don't want it to impede your progress, but you really do have to bring them in early. We have a project management office that has created a structure around that where any new initiative that's going to come before the project team needs to have a full risk assessment done on it. Obviously, it depends on the breadth of the project, but for something as big as additional credit risk taken on by moving more quickly or automating some decisioning, they are a part of it from the beginning. They understand that their role is to grow the assessments so that an appropriate business decision can be made, but that they are not the ultimate decision-makers.

(38:36):
But having their buy-in early and knowing what obstacles they want us to work around helps us to move a lot faster.

Mark John (38:44):
Yeah. And in sharing, there's a strategy around how you're going to market, whether it's small business and what the personas are that you're attacking. Maybe you want a human in the loop so there's not a completely automated decision. Telling that story upfront is also very critical and making sure it's tied to your overarching strategy. We talked about how not everything needs an ROI, and I agree with that. However, things need KPIs that roll up to your overarching bank strategy. If you have an initiative that doesn't do that, there's a gap and you're going to tread water out of the gate.

Danielle Bateman Girondo (39:29):
For us, number one, I agree 1000%—bring them in early. But we also stage-gated it. So we started with deposits; we didn't start with loans. We got people comfortable with that, and then we started opening up the gates and we were very intentional about saying when things were auto-decisioned versus not. How is that feeling? We kept telling that story. Your credit and risk folks by their nature tend to be more risk-averse—they ended up in that profession for a reason. So help bring them along and help them understand how we can open those fairways. We have to take the guardrails off, but we can widen those fairways a bit. That's how we found some success.

Mark John (40:24):
Yeah.

Stu Richards (40:26):
That's great. Well, we're at time. Thank you very much. I want to thank this wonderful panel. You guys are great. It was a pleasure.