Addressing capability gaps through fintech partnerships Encouraging fintech engagement through open APIs Best practices for a streamlined operations and integration Panelists: Herman Man, Chief Product Officer, BlueVine Sathish Muthukrishnan, Chief Information, Data and Digital Officer, Ally Financial Inc. Josh Pape, Executive Vice President and Chief Banking Officer, Citizens Bank of Edmond Clayton Weir, Co-Founder, Product & Strategy, FISPAN [toggle title="TRANSCRIPT"] <div class="transcript-scroll-box"> 01:45Thanks everyone for joining this session case studies on getting digital transformation back on track thanks to s&p global market intelligence for sponsoring the session and now we have a brief passage from them. 01:56 s&p global market intelligence 01:58 comprehensive Consistently reliable. Our datasets give you 02:02 history point in time, sector specific and real time insights. They also give you an edge and the confidence to capitalize on 02:11 opportunities 02:12 s&p global market intelligence, essential data for informed decision making. 02:21 So as a novel coronavirus, swept across the country this year, it completely altered modern life. businesses closed their doors, consumer state home and many lost their livelihoods. The financial services industry in turn reacted as best they could to help consumers stay on their feet. But innovation marches on. And in many cases, new technology has helped consumers and businesses through troubled times. Whether it's standing up PPP solutions or launching new new budgeting tools. I'm joined by a panel of experts that can shed some light on how their institutions are keeping digital transformation. Top of Mind. We have Josh Pape, the Executive Vice President and Chief banking officer at Citizens Bank of Before his current role Justin almost six years at Chicka shock community bank. He also spent more than four years at Bank of America and he served in the Air Force as an aerospace ground equipment mechanic. I'm joined by Herman man, the Chief Product officer at Blue vine. Herman spent more than 13 years at Microsoft, including almost four years as the principal engineering manager for the company's commerce division. Prior to working at bluevine, he served as vice president of product and partnerships at zero and accounting software company. Herman also participated in a panel discussion at Bank innovation ignite in March, so thank you for not being sick of me and being here today. We have Satish with Krishna, the Chief Information data and Digital Officer at Li t spent seven years as a Software Solutions Architect at United Airlines, after which he spent more than 10 years with American Express on MX he led the financial service giants digital capabilities for his business lines around the world. And before joining Li in January, he spent two years at Honeywell Aero face as a chief digital and Information Officer. So we do have two aviation experts on this panel. I promise that's a coincidence. Finally, we had Clayton were the co founder of five span, a company that helps banks create better experiences for commercial clients. Clayton leads products right into the partnerships with grps and marketing. He previously founded VC tech, hyper growth accelerator and fin tech industry cluster. Thank you all for being here. So much just a reminder to everyone watching to submit questions through the event platform, and we will do our best to answer them. So I'd like to take the time to go around the virtual room here and have everyone describe their role in their own words. Josh, how can we start with you? 04:39 Well, sure, thanks for having me to hear today. As the chief banking officer at Citizens Bank of admin, functionally on a day to day basis, I lead our commercial, mortgage and retail business so our customer facing lines of business and serve as chairman of our executive loan committee. In my own words, describing Enroll now. And today in a COVID-19 pandemic, I really leaned in on doing my job trying to be a best in class number two, world class CEO, which has allowed us to really operationalize and execute on her visionary leadership approach generation. 05:18 Satish, you want to join us? 05:22 Thank you, Rick for having me. In my own words, this is a dream role for somebody that is a geek at heart, and entrepreneur at mind, I get the opportunity to lead the digital data technology and security organizations for all of ally across all businesses. If you think about it, from a digital standpoint, we get to design the experience. You get to deliver the capability using cutting edge technology. We get to measure the success of those capabilities through our data team and also protect those capabilities through the security organization. So I have an end to end, responsibility and play field. In in driving my driving medal at ally. 06:04 Herman, you want to go next? 06:05 Yeah, sure. Thanks. Thanks for having me again. Rick, great to see you virtually this time. 06:12 Yeah, I'm in Seattle anymore. 06:13 Yeah. So Herman man, I'm the Chief Product officer at Blue vine. I joined about a year and a half ago. And really what compelled me was building a small business banking platform dedicated to them. And so I head up our product team here. Basically, I lead our product vision, our strategy, our design, and our execution, really just focused on on delivering that banking platform for small businesses. 06:43 And Clayton, you want to go next? 06:46 Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us for today, Rick. So I mean, my job is outside of just being the guy that they send to speak on panels, I guess, what office we have. I have responsibility for our I guess product strategy. And vision as well. So I work really closely with our bank partners, maybe more importantly, the businesses that a bank to try and build the future of, of how commercial banking gets consumed. 07:15 Fantastic. So thank you all for touching a little bit on your roles. Josh, less of you and I spoke Citizens Bank of Edmond was implementing PPP solutions for small businesses through technology from tesselaar. Can you talk about what kind of long term innovations the bank is taking away from the PPP, and then Herman Satish Clayton, maybe the three of you could also weigh in on what innovations you guys are taking away from the pandemic? 07:40 Yeah, well, our biggest solution that we were part of a solution or a team of companies that we responsible for originating was PPP dot bank, which is a website. It's a free resource that any PPP loan recipient can use to go through and basically digitize and help simplify some of the calculations involved with the PPP loan forgiveness side of that process. That was really collaborative s collaborative effort between Citizens Bank of Edmond, our team here tesselaar, ftld, and Mark Cuban, all gave in some way to that effort. And really, we're super proud of it. We're proud of our team here and a little community bank and small town Oklahoma. We're the first Oklahoma company to be named as a finalist for a finovate Award. But what we realized was the focus during the whole PPP effort that was rolled out, beginning in early April was there was a lot of focus around the origination side and Tesla really came to the aid of a lot of community banks on that front. But we began very early getting questions about the forgiveness piece of that process pretty pretty early on, and that process can be very intimidating to small business owners. It can be very cumbersome To go through the calculations and make sure that you have the right supporting documentation. So really, that innovation was just a response to a need that we saw not only with our customers, but we were getting engagement through social media, email, phone call text from around the country, community bank counterparts, and so forth. So it was an effort to basically provide a free resource to the public there is it doesn't archive or store any data, there's no obligation. Again, it was just a good faith effort to do some good and what is otherwise a pretty intimidating and sometimes rough time for small business owners, in terms of long term innovations that came out of the PPP process all together. Gosh, there's so many innovation we believe it Citizens Bank of admin comes through solving a problem for for people and the customers you serve and people in the community that you see at the grocery store. And so, during this pandemic, our customers needed to navigate PPV loans without being able to come into brick and mortar. So we leaned into innovative around our communications platforms in order to be able to deliver literal 24 seven assistance to those people trying to navigate that process. So long term just as the response to the PPP forgiveness need was there long term I think you'd see us continue to have some of the same just nimble approaches to a dynamic environment you know, PPP dot bank was stood up and 10 days from concept to what was available. So our goal is to continue to remain nimble and flexible in a dynamic environment. But the provides a consistent service to our customers in an ever changing environment. We've done that through curbside banking direct chat feature that can come to an associate on their phone, our COVID-19 Relief Program, citizens Care's overdraft program and 24 seven emergency call back support. So we just want to continue to lead into responding to the needs of our customers. They're giving them quick access to whatever that need is used properly. We see us roll that out and other areas, other ways that we can give around the clock access to our customers during a dynamic time. And so the key for us is being flexible and nimble as a small organization that's something that we really take pride in continued leadership development buy into the team so that when a need arises, everyone knows our why why are we doing this? What's our mission and ever the call to action and the response to the need is really quick. And all this just like the PPP bank innovation, it's it's the right thing to do for our customers and the public but it's going to continue to allow us to perform best in class and innovation in the long term for a community bank like us is an opportunity for for us to compete, and in many cases outperform and shine in an industry that has a lot of larger competition. 11:49 Satish Do you have anything to add? In terms of you know what Josh was talking about? I know your your allies doing a lot of different things during the pandemic. You guys have been very busy. So What are some of the takeaways that that you're, you're gonna move on from this. 12:05 I'll just give you a couple of takeaways. One is the potential of our internal employees. This gave us a platform to completely unleash that. That's number one. And number two is innovation. And your roadmap that describes it to be multiple years or multiple months can be accelerated. I'll give you two three examples. One is our deputy CIO, figured out how to get thousands of headsets when we needed it the most. You never know somebody from security has the potential to go shopping crazy like that and finding it at the time of me. We had an employee create a self reporting app for COVID within a few hours, but more importantly, from a business standpoint, we were able to set up a 100% Digital deferral program for our auto and Home Loans over a weekend and The customers didn't have to pick up the phone and collars. Instead, they went online, and were able to execute that within a few steps. And we satisfied a very large customer base. So those are things that we did. And I'm hoping to capture that in a box and carry that innovation forward as we think about new capabilities. 13:20 antastic Herman bluevine has been just super busy during the pandemic, I'd like to hear a little bit about about what are some of the innovations are taking away from this? 13:29 Yeah, absolutely. We, you know, one of the first things that we did when we realized this and the pandemic was hitting was obviously we we do lending, you know, as a main business. And so we were able to go for see a lot of the patterns that were happening here. And so the first thing that we did was we equipped ourselves well to handle PPP with the paycheck protection program when that got launched, to make sure that we would actually be a participant of that and we're able to reuse our platform. Because we built it in such a way from day one, that all these different pieces you see, we have factoring, we have line of credit, we have term loans built on the exact same platform. So we extended that and built PPP automated within a week. And so what we were able to do was to service $4.5 billion in funding, we were able to help 155,000 small businesses and help save 470,000 jobs as part of this platform. And so we continue to innovate on this to actually reuse a lot of our algorithms for underwriting as well as identity verification, so that we can go lower fraud. And so that was our focus in doing that. What we've taken away from this is that the common platform that we've invested in over the years has really paid off, not only for PPP, but for future things that we're now building, including our checking account, and other banking services like Bill Pay that all sit on this common platform has allowed us to really go innovate leverage the benefits as we build on each separate product. And so that's that's our learning there. 15:07 Um, Clayton, you know, what are you seeing from some of your banking clients? I know that fi scan does a lot of stuff in that's wrong. 15:13 Yeah, it was really interesting. So I mean, when you think about it from a bank perspective, I think the first challenge was obviously getting everybody kind of working remotely safe and sound right, which there were some gargantuan efforts for some of the sharks. Um, and then secondarily, obviously, on the commercial side, the sort of TPP is has been addressed became this massive, you know, an imminent need that needs to be resolved. So, you know, from our perspective, it was it wasn't the best thing for five spins business probably ever at the start because it sucked up, you know, a ton of oxygen within the bank, but, um, you know, what Satish said about putting that that ethos and that kind of different ways of working in a box to some extent, you know, moving kind of four or five, six months later now. It feels that that's happened. At least a little So our banks do seem to work a little bit differently. And just you know, there's it's sounds pi b. But you know, everybody being a box kind of the same size on the zoom screen, I think within the banks has changed the culture made it made the way they solve problems differently. And ultimately, you know, all these heroic efforts that you just heard to get something like PPP out from scratch. I think it fundamentally changed. It popped the bubble in terms of what could be done right. So now it's obvious what we could do if we have complete certainty and conviction and what needs to be done simultaneously. I think what needs to be done is more evident than ever, right that the digitization of these experiences for all consumers of financial services are important. That's, you know, maybe overseen maybe there's been like a decade advancement in the timeline of digital experiences and in this handful of months and it really strikes me that our banks are working differently. And probably more effectively when it comes to digital into evolution than they were before. 17:07 So Herman is alone SMB FinTech lender on this panel, can you talk about how blue bonds operations changed during the pandemic? Because I know there was a lot of pivoting. And then for everyone else, maybe we can kind of talk about how your institution can rapidly adjust to changing circumstances as SMB lenders did during COVID-19. But let's start with Herman and just I want to hear a little bit more about about your experience. 17:29 Yeah, in terms of operations and what we did, I mean, our as I'd mentioned, our platform was really built from day one, to be able to go service, everything and so we had things built in a really modular way, albeit for risk and underwriting all the way through to product and product delivery. And so our teams really rallied behind there to actually go deliver on that service. And so whether it be the sales team, our marketing team to actually go come together, we are able to unify as one team and And to push that forward. So that that's basically our model. And moving forward as we do things. You know, we've had a lot of learnings in terms of how we scale things. I think cities talk a little bit about the, you know, the platform itself, the digital platform, but then also the human platform and the human capital. And we've, we've really through this, learn that much more in terms of how we operate and how to more efficiently operate. And so we'll take that forward as we build new products as well. 18:29 Satish Do you want to build on that at all? I mean, Harlan was talking about the importance of the human capital, like we were talking about, were there any other takeaways from ally in terms of how to like rapidly adjust during these these incredibly rapidly changing circumstances? 18:44 Yeah, the the human capital, well said Herman. It has become an important cog in the wheel for us as we continue our digital journey. I'll give you two examples. One was, Josh briefly touched on this as we were trying to move people work from home. We knew we had to quadruple our VPN capacity. How do you test that? How do you test if it's even working? So there was a common cry to our employees to say, Hey, can you even implement this past midnight? Can you log in to see if it works? We had over close to 900 people employees within technology dialing in, to help us test that out, you know, imagine, as self motivated individuals trying to help the company. That's that's one good example. The other thing that I would say is we accelerated our artificial intelligence journey, knowing that our customer care agents would be taxed, but we want to be serving our customers like we did pre COVID. So how can we take some of those mundane calls and have it be enabled by by chat bots? Again, we accelerated it, but we wanted our employees to test it and thousands of employees across the company, self nominated and help us Test eliminate the errors, so we were able to launch it quickly. So, through this process, we learned that as much as we rely on external customers, you can rely on internal customers to help guide and advance your progress. 20:15 That's interesting. Mike mine all from my panel this morning, I spoke about a similar process where all of the associated banks employees all had to log in at once to like, test out if their server capacity can handle all this remote work. So it was an interesting, that's an interesting thing that you say when you say that that's something that you guys also did. It's like a volunteer effort. It sounds like almost the after, you know, the very obscure our plate and I'm wondering, Is this something you're seeing from your clients as well? How are people testing out the remote work capabilities? 20:47 It's a good question. I mean, what realistically five spends customer base was ultra tier one banks like the trillion dollar banks. And I mean, effectively those banks have been you know, in a product and technology base has been working, distributed, effective. Remote for some time. So it hasn't hasn't changed at tonight? I don't think on that front, it's probably different. It's probably different classes of institutions that have felt more. And it's probably more so in other departments of the bank, right, you know, call centers and things like this where on mass you're having to move it. So it hasn't we don't have a as direct of a line of sight to that. 21:20 Josh, can you talk a little bit about Citizens Bank of admin, how it's been pivoting? And specifically if you have anything about remote work to add to what was a teacher was talking about and hermana what we heard this morning. 21:32 Yeah, I think it'd be somewhat consistent with what we've heard. One unique thing about our bank is nobody has an office at our bank already. You know, I'm Executive Vice President, Chief banking officer and I don't have an office, most of our employees are equipped with laptops and we have plenty of docking stations around the bank. So the the idea is that even before all this, the idea is that if I need to sit down and work with our mortgage team on a Wednesday, and The commercial team on a Thursday we're set up to where I can adapt and move around the bank and be nimble. So we already have that going for us inside the walls of the bank. really early on in the pandemic, when really the first I believe was the first reported case of Coronavirus happened in the United States, we made the decision to go ahead and start moving employees out in pockets in an effort to test. So let's take the commercial loan officers for example, have them move out of the bank and work from home. And so we did that in phases so that we could troubleshoot with a few group of employees and then we could build upon that until we were at full capacity outside of the bank. We actually had our Customer Care Center associates still to this day, some of them are in their home offices or in their living room driving it ends for our customers that may come in and we've we've transitioned some back into the bank as we've kind of learned about the health risk and how to do that in a safe and safe manner. But But something else that I think gets a little bit lost as we talk about just the mechanics about how to work remotely. We really focus early on on employee engagement in a remote setting. You know, it's it's tough, especially as a small bank like ours, where we're used to all being here together, we're used to having all employee meetings or team meetings here in the mornings, it was tough to still keep our employees engaged. So we implemented things very early on, like, you know, maybe a remote happy hour or offering remote yoga sessions for employees, encouraging them to go for a jog or a walk during the day. So we really tried to be intentional about not only testing the capability of the bank to functionally work remotely, but how do we keep our team motivated, bought in I talked a little bit earlier about keeping the team bought in so that they can adapt and so that really looked a lot like yeah, testing out remote capacity. But it looks a lot like keeping our employees motivated, engaged as a leader. You know, that was that was challenging, but we had to get very innovative about ways in which we communicate with the team, whether it be recording a daily morning message and sending that out to staff, select staff and so forth. So from from an employee remote capacity, it certainly was all the things we've heard. But we also tried to really build on that from an experience knowing that our employees were going through things as well not only our customers, but you know, they may have spouses, partners, friends, family that may have gotten laid off or or may have health concerns and so we really want to be mindful that not only because it's the right thing to do for your employees, but but it keeps them engaged. It keeps them on mission and understanding the why the organization 24:43 fantastic. So Satish I wanted to touch on something I know ally has continued moving into new fields during the pandemic, notably getting into Home Improvement financing in June through a partnership with authority brands. Can you talk a little bit and I'm sure everyone else can weigh in on this as well about how an institution can simultaneously pursue new business lines while dealing with something as disruptive as COVID-19. 25:07 You know, we all can agree that world has become resilient during this period. Right? Early on, we, as an executive team realize that this is not a marathon, it's going to be a series of sprints. So traditional resilience may not work, we need to have adaptive resilience. And that is having the willpower to execute your long term strategy, even when you're going through these ups and downs. For us. Our long term strategy is very simple. Are we being the best ally for our customers financial needs? Are we introducing capabilities and products that has great growth trajectory to serve our shareholders and finally, execute that through great technology and culture? The technology piece, I added it to our to our strategy, and we looked at looked at authority brands. It ticked all those boxes. Not only that, it also helped us serve the service providers, as well as the consumers is 60% of the US population cannot handle $1,000 emergency. So how can ally be in the midst of it to help our customers during these trying times, and we proved it out in the healthcare industry. So we wanted to take it and roll it out in the in the home improvement space. So we had test tech technology that we were able to roll it out at the right point in time. But the more important thing here is as a digital native organization, we've been able to bring in the front end digital experience, which included paperless signing up, less than 62nd pre qual for these applications, as well as digital servicing after you are approved for the loan. So essentially, we are trying to be the best ally for our customers, but also creating value that is very hard for anybody else to match. 26:58 Fantastic Herman I know Obviously, Vine has pursued a lot of new business lines while also trying to stay true to their their core mission. How have you guys been balancing that? 27:09 Yeah, one of the things that we saw and if I take a step back, our vision was always to be that that business banking platform for small businesses, we realize upfront and early that small businesses often are neglected. When it comes to banking relationships, right? You either make them as commercial or you make them as retail customers, but seldom do they view them as a small business entity. There's 30 million of these small businesses in the US and we want it to be a part of something special to really help them out. And when I do say small businesses, I've said this before, I'm talking about the main street small business I'm talking about my general contractor, I'm not talking about the Andreessen Horowitz funded small business, right, those are startups and those are quite different. And so our vision was always to be that And so what we did was as we continue to build this out, as I'd mentioned, you know, we built everything as a platform, we built out the next thing that that really made sense for them, which was to be a checking account, provide a checking account for these small businesses that were dedicated for these small businesses in particular, and also build build pay services that sat on top of it as well. And so we ended up doing that during the pandemic as well. So as we were building out our pieces, as needed, and as Tisha talked about, with AI and everything, we repurposed a lot of those algorithms for underwriting on these accounts as well. And on the bill pay services. So we've been doing that. The other one thing that I'll learn is a lot of these customers have also spoken to us as well as part of this and what they've actually told us says, Hey, we tried to get a PPP loan from some of the larger banks and were neglected. And you bluevine actually came through. And as a result of that, and in a recent survey, we even saw probably about 50% of these small businesses actually said that they would switch over to some form of banking service with a bank provider that actually gave him the PPP funds. So through this, you know what, what actually resonated and reminded us as if we meet the customer where they are. And we listen to the customer and actually solve their needs, and treat them as a real customer and just not another number. That's going to go a long way. And that's what we've been able to go do on our end, to fulfill that customer experience. But also, you know, from a technology standpoint, to remember to continue to build with that platform in mind, so that the customer gets the benefit all our products that we serve as one holistic platform. 29:41 Run, it's not everyday that I have the Chief Product Officer of blue buy in here. So I would be remiss if I remiss if I didn't ask, what's the state of the checking account with blue light and I know it was pretty close to being done. Could you just fill us in on where that's that? 29:54 Yeah, absolutely. So I'm really excited to say that we actually ga are checking account in July. So for context, you know, when we last spoke in September, we were in beta. And we had a few thousand customers run with us in beta, we were going to go launch in q1 of this year. And then of course, COVID hit and that derailed a few things, right. And we focused really on TPP at that point. Since then, we've actually got everything back in order. And we launched in July RGA for our checking account. So it's a no fees, 1% interest on our checking account, modern digital mobile app, all that stuff. And we also launched our bill pay services that are dedicated to small businesses as well. So they're able to, for example, use their credit card to go pay for bills, even if the merchant actually doesn't accept it. And so things like that, where we built in that and workflow that is dedicated for small businesses, this is now live. So we're really excited by that. 31:00 Great Clayton, is there anything you wanted to add about? How you're seeing clients pursue new innovations while also trying to balance something as as disruptive as COVID-19? 31:12 Yeah, it's interesting. I, it seems, from my perspective, that the, the especially the bigger banks have made a bunch of space, right. So I think COVID was, you know, really bad probably for a lot of experiments like that, where, you know, banks that would have a large portfolio of small kind of projects, I think I'll probably a lot of those got set aside, right, you know, as the focus drew into the core and just to being operational and servicing your clients. But, um, what we've noticed, at least with our existing customers, is they've really leaned into the digital projects that are important. So us being one in me, I think, ultimately what has happened, right was that kind of forced focus of the start of COVID allows everybody to reshuffle their backlog and focus on in one what's important and then I think secondary Really just the change in user behavior and demands and requirement has brought so much more, you know, clarity to what needs to be done for banks and on what is profitable. So are profitable framework, but what you know where the opportunities lie. And so I just think it's, you know, maybe banks have gone a little bit deeper on a little bit less in this period, at least has been our experience. 32:26 Was there anything you wanted to add to that? 32:28 I'm sure. You know, as far as pursuing new business lines, I don't I don't think that's directly the approach. I would say that that our focus was what we really focused on was being kind of the economic first responders to small businesses and consumers in our communities. I believe Herman said, you know, when you meet people where they're at and the needs they have, you know, there is opportunity in that and so that's not why we do it, we didn't respond economically. Just Just capitalize on some sort of opportunity, but doing the right thing always leads to good things for an organization. So We really just try to every day, wake up and say how can we best serve the people that are in front of us, again, that we see here in our grocery store that know us and know our tellers and so forth. So not as much pursuing new business lines, but pursuing just doing the right thing and advocating for our customers. You probably if you follow anyone in our organization on social media, and specifically our CEO, Joe Cassia, we're huge advocates of what the small business community needs. And someone a moment ago mentioned, businesses located on Main Street, and we're literally on, you know, the main street of here and small town, Oklahoma. And so advocating with those small business owners, that general contractor I believe Herman said what they need and trying to be a voice and use our contacts as much as we can within legislative communities FinTech communities, about what are the needs that we have, but I think, you know, being able to capitalize on opportunities that might be in front of you as well. So like the mortgage business, obviously during this, this Time with, you know, rate environment that was already low, but is now seeing just really unprecedented rates, keeping your team and your customer facing associates not always in kind of the dark days. I mean, I think all of us in the financial industry have had some, some tough days throughout this pandemic, as as we've gone through with our customers, but keeping your team motivated when those bright spots happen, and when there is opportunity to be able to be in the right position, you know, mentally and emotionally and again, going back to our employee engagement, how do we keep our team motivated and looking for the opportunity in the good in this and not just constantly looking at the challenges ahead of us? So, you know, the mortgage business as an example, it wasn't a new line of business, but we were able to capitalize on some opportunity. They're here in our in our small town and we're proud of that. 34:55 I'm Clayton, I wanted to ask you, how have you seen fire spam or how Fire fans seen its banking clients react during the covid 19 pandemic? Are there any commercial bank processes undergoing a digital shift that we might not expect? 35:10 It's good question. I don't know, if there's necessarily unexpected ones, it's probably the opposite, right? It's it just accelerated some of the expected things. So if you think about all the things that maybe would have been nice to have six months ago, right, if I'm a, you know, medium or large sized business, so, you know, the ability to add new accounts or to, you know, make changes to my service offering or get onboard the new products at the bank, like those things, still had a lot of pen and paper in them, right. So I think it's put further pressure on there. Even just the way businesses transact with each other, right, you know, 50 something percent of you know, American bills get paid through checks in the mail. And all of a sudden, that went from just a not a particularly efficient or optimal way to pay to kind of an impossible one, right is was even possible to get, you know, two people together in a room to sign checks and so on. That kind of payables and receivables side like it, it just massively increased the pressure on the banks to, you know, to allow their business clients to operate by having, you know, the appropriate digital or remote experiences deliver those things. And so you know, that it's just none of those were in obvious it just everything could use a catalyst to happen a little bit faster. And I think that that has happened and I'm guessing that, you know, cats kind of out of the bag on that, I don't think that that's, you know, I don't think people are gonna re adopt checks, you know, at in mass once the world goes back to to normal, whatever, whatever normal looks like. 36:36 So are you saying that you think that the one of the lasting implications will be sort of this shift away from checks into more digital channels? 36:45 Yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know that I want to be have that as my famous last words. First, the chap has to be a very, very resilient method of payment for a number of reasons, but certainly Kent is certainly certainly a positive, you know, tailwind for for digital payments to really rich sort of, you know, vendor, vendor buyer relationships on on the correspondence side. And so I just think the operating environment of like a finance department in a big business is certainly going to be persistently changed it you know, what fewer checks is going to be one outcome of that. And I think higher expectations from their banking partners is going to be another. 37:30 Well, if I see another check, I'm going to blame you 100%. say they told me this was ever going to happen again. I wanted to open a question up to the group. And maybe we can all talk a little bit about how digital initiatives have changed since the start of the pandemic, what's become more important, what's become less important. Let's start with Josh. 37:50 So I think this kind of segues into answering that and it's it kind of goes back to the last question you asked a moment ago about processes undergoing digital shift. You know, it says Bank of Edmonton unapologetic, unapologetically proud of the work we've done. So I'm going to brag for a minute on, we actually have a patent pending on some small business banking technology where it's an unmanned bank facility. So a, we talked about kind of the digitization or payment, shift and payment away from check to digitize services. But there's still going to be businesses here on our small street in Edmond, Oklahoma that are that are cash intensive. And so we actually have a patent pending on technology that will allow a bar owner to come in at 2am with enrolled access and exchange $100 bill for $101 bills or to make a change order with rolled coin without there needing to be a bank associated present but in a secure manner. And so we've we've had that technology for a while and our customers really enjoy that. I think in this environment. When you look at how can we still offer what are the services that we can offer when we start moving employees out? What Other services that can be more challenging to offer, what are we gonna have to give up if we shut our lobby down for an example. And so I think for us that that innovative technology that we that we've already operationalizing and executing, it didn't necessarily become more important. But it showed, again, the ability to be prepared with innovative technology that was meeting a customer need before, you know, bar owners and coffee shop owners had a need for change orders at 6am or 1am, or whatever the case was, but now an environment where banks are trying to protect their employees and their customers and have somewhat of a more limited in person offering that really enhanced what a value that was for us. And so we're super proud of that. And I think it had its opportunity to shine and still is, throughout this process where we can we can not see a gap in service to high cash volume businesses throughout this which which is a challenge for a lot of banks as their as their drive throughs stack up or they may have limitations on cash limits and the drive thru and so forth. 39:58 Is that something that bank Built in house, Josh, 40:01 that's right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, we are Team A few years ago, again, just being quick and nimble had had customers in a urban core, the city wasn't reasonable reasonable for them to drive to Edmond, Oklahoma to be depositing cash. It just wasn't a right ask of us. And although we're willing to do it, so quickly adapted to how can we make this work? How can we provide a solution to a cash intensive business that wants to bank with us? It's not reasonable for them to transport that volume of cash? How can we offer that to them without you know, again, being a smaller bank, having the personnel resources to go staff, another brick and mortar location and so you can stand that up and operationalize it within about 500 square feet. And so again, it's something we've been using and that we've had customers take advantage of, but it's been fun throughout this process, our small business owners who have concerns about you know, your your lobby is limited, I'm going to have to wait longer to get, you know, my change orders and so forth. So it's been a great opportunity to educate them on that that technology that we have here at our main location as well, and how they can take advantage of that not have a disruption in their day to day operations. 41:16 Very cool. Well, we look forward to seeing where that goes. Satish. Can you talk a little bit about how your digital initiatives have changed since the start of the pandemic, what's become more of a priority and what might not have become as much as a priority. 41:30 So I would say we introduced something new called COVID speed, that that essentially changed the trajectory of how fast we launch capabilities. What has become important is the ability for us to pivot and also to be scrappy. And if you have to understand what is relevant to customers, not what you think is relevant to customers as an example, for a mortgage customers, predictability of a closing date has become the Top Most priority as opposed to a rake now, so you can keep keep selling them on rate, and lose out on predictable closing date. So you losing our own customers, we had to understand that. And given that we are 100% Digital organization, we're able to make those pivots and give what our customers think are critically important for them. So I can give you a number of examples like that, but, but the ability to prove it and being scrappy, and understanding what the customer really wants has become top most important for us, not the not that we always have to be buttoned up and figure out everything before we rolled it out. 42:37 Can you talk a little bit more about some of the specifics as COVID speed sounds pretty interesting. How did the bank come up with that and what does it What does it look like on you know, on the ground floor? 42:47 Yeah, let me give you give you an example of us rewriting a loan. So we we launched the digital capability to defer your loan or your mortgage. If you're rewriting it, it's a contract. Usually what it takes is about 30 to 45 days for us to collect the documents, interact with the customers and then go through the loan process underwriting and then finish. As we launched the digital disruption, the sorry, the digital deferral, it made it a point to go and completely digitized that into an operation. Now, that happens within a day. So think about doing something between 30 and 45 days and narrowing it down to a day that required critical thinking that require out of the box thinking and phenomenal execution from the team to reimagine how you can digitize something that takes 30 to 45 days and bring it down to a day. 43:41 Interesting, so Herman, maybe you want to build on that? Is there anything that it over a bluevine has become more or less important since the start of the pandemic or what digital initiatives are sort of shifting? 43:52 Yeah, yeah, I touched on this earlier, like, the biggest thing for us was we were launching or a checking account. It was one thing that we had heard From our customers that they wanted, it was something that just logically made sense for us to go do since the pandemic has hit. And since COVID has hit, you know, the PPP customers have been telling us loud and clear that that's something that we shouldn't need to do. And so really excited that we launched this, as we built more and more services in with our bill pay services, you know, they've asked for how do we actually get something that is dedicated for small businesses here, where it's incorporated as part of the core asset, that is our checking account as well. And so it's been really interesting for us because a lot of our vision and what we wanted to do was already what we were doing, but with the pandemic and with everything hitting, things really changed here such that customers now not only demand convenience, and not only the man a certain level of experiences, they're also needing it just for safety and health reasons. And so what we found is the investments that we've made here where they could add Go online and get a small business bank account with underwriting all done within 30 seconds. And that is actually an advantage now and so we've been able to utilize that and more importantly less for us but more for the customers so that we can go service them or they need in what they're expecting as well. 45:20 Clayton, anything you wanted to build off of on that or talk about, you know, how you're noticing digital initiatives sort of shift and what's becoming more important and less important? Um, yeah, I don't 45:30 I mean, I don't know I think I think I talked a little bit at the start of it. I don't really have a profound realization on this but it just, I think, you know, it went from just to summarize it and he just said it and you know, went from a nice to have to a must have and I just think that that's what's changed a lot of these needs or priorities on these digital touch points, you know, over the last few months is it wasn't it wasn't an option it was was necessary to allow people to be saved. Allow them to, you know, conduct their affairs, run their business, whatever it might be. And I think that's the biggest change. 46:06 There's another question I have for the group. And that revolves around innovation teams and innovation operations. Can you guys talk a little bit about how the pandemic has interrupted the work of your innovation teams? And how your institutions are reacting to that Clinton since you last? I want to start with you on this one? 46:24 Yeah, no, it's good question. I mean, we've noticed actually, her I feel like we've noticed, I think, in the kind of four years we've been in, in, in this business is actually seems to have been a shift at least with the banks we spend the most time with, where innovation is kind of maybe gone from being out on an island and there being these really specific teams to it, maybe coming a little closer to the core business with, you know, where the actual kind of meat of the action has happened, and I'm guessing that that's gonna happen more and more, I think, you know, some of these things like the shift to remote work and executing people up and everything that banks have had to get done has made everybody a part of an innovation team, right? And that I mean, it's one of those things, right? If you actually are innovative, it's probably not a word that you would ever use day to day, you would never, it would never be spoken. And I think that might be the journey that this these banks are on, right. We're just everybody's gotten a real taste of what it is to innovate and to execute at COVID pace, and I think it might just be more permanent within some of these core teams in a bank. 47:29 Or do you want to follow that? 47:32 Yeah, for us, you know, we we've we kind of pride ourselves on what we've built and how we think about problems and the speed of execution as a FinTech, we have to, because frankly, that is our our, our differentiator, our Nate differentiator from other incumbents. And so we've been able to continue to capitalize on that and continue to do that. And so what I've said what I'll say is that like everything else that quite And Josh and Tisha said here is there's been a lot of learnings through this process where we ourselves have learned that there's even a more efficient way that we can go do things. And so that that's one great thing that we've learned on the human in the process side, and then on the innovation and you know, we will continue to go push the envelope or it makes sense. I think one thing that we do, and we're very clear on is we want to meet the customer where they're at. And so while we are building digital banking experiences, our goal isn't to revolutionize the way that they do business. Look, they've been doing business for 10s 20s of yours. And it'd be foolish of us to come in here and assume that we have a much better way of doing things if you only use blockchain right, or if you use Bitcoin instead of your actual currency. So we're, we're not foolish from that standpoint. And we'll continue to innovate, to go improve the workflows by which they operate so that makes them more efficient. But but you know that that's basically our modern trend will continue doing that. 49:06 So to use, would you have anything to add to that? 49:08 Yeah, I'd say for us, we have adapted the mentality that innovation is not someone's job. It's, it's everyone's responsibility. And the way we are doing that is I want to double down on in the in the investments. Now, when we are going through this pandemic, so we come out stronger than where we were before. And obviously, the The goal is to be stronger than your competitors. And when you have this mentality, you you got to do two things. One is a, personally as an organization, technology organization, we said we'll adapt a higher execution risk, where we might have said in the past that oh, this, this is too much risk for us to execute. Let's go do it. This is an opportunity for us to be scrappy, and figure things out. So let's do that. And two is let's partner with our business folks to figure out what are their biggest opportunities. And you wouldn't imagine the number of automation opportunities that are coming out of it. So bad, you might have had a centralized innovation or a standalone innovation team looking at these opportunities. Now everybody's looking at it. So one, one recent example, which was launched in a week was our, from our folks found out that our customer care representatives call our customers to say, Is this a rep, repeat? Repeat check that you want to deposit or repeat wire that you want to execute? Even even though we have seen the behavior in the past? We automated that call. Just getting a quick yes from from our customer through an email. And now we reduced 25,000 calls to our customers. So that's a quick one week innovation that happened. And when you roll out innovation across the organization, those are those are magic moments that happened. 50:55 Yeah, that's interesting. One of our speakers this morning also mentioned that you know, if Innovation is the job of everyone in the institution, not just one, one specific department or one specific person. And I just want to follow up Satish. The automated call that you spoke of was that done through, you know, chatbot technology. How did the bank actually make that run? 51:17 It was to robotic Process Automation digitizing a process that was manual. Hmm. 51:22 Interesting. Well, that's very, that's a lot of calls saved. Josh, do you want to follow up on that? What sort of Yeah, how the work in Citizens Bank amendment has been affected and how, how the bank is reacting to that. 51:35 Yeah, I think consistent with my counterparts on the call today, I mean, we don't we don't have a specific innovation team is Bank of admin. If you're on our team. In one way or another, you can provide innovation to a process a procedure. You know, innovation is not just technology, it tends to get thought of in that lens. Very often and certainly is technology a lot of times to help innovation things but it's not always technology you know, I always tell myself or tell people about myself I don't even actually like technology that much I can't tell you what model of iPhone I have. I can't tell you what model Android my wife uses. I barely can can say blockchain. And so there's there's a lot of things technology centered that you know, I don't hold a candle to my counterparts on this panel but, and a lot of our employees don't either, but what we can do is think outside the box on on other things. So an example might be if, whenever we had a digital yoga session or a remote yoga session, we have a team member who runs our vault 405 community co working space and incubator that's really not, doesn't have a lot going on during the peak of the pandemic. But we're super passionate about yoga and health and wellness and knew how to host a remote session or whenever we're communicating on an ongoing basis with PPP applicants about the status of their the status Their application and the status of the 22 or 23, Interim final rules that were issued around that program, who's a good writer? If we have a teller that's not in person assisting customers at this moment? Are they a good writer? And can they help us? who's good at research? You know, there were times when Jill and I were here at the bank. And there were so much news and information and updates coming out, back in March and April. I mean, it was it was near impossible to lead teams execute and keep up with and so who's good at research that can really concisely consolidate that information for our executive team to go over every day and pull highlights from so you know, innovation oftentimes is technology, but it's not always technology. And so I think reiterating that with our team, instead of the expectation that you know, we're here to to get through this together. We're here to look for the opportunity. We're here to pull out talents that that some of us didn't know you had or that you might not have even known you had. And that was really that's really what I looked at my job as during this time is to Unleash the innovation of the team spoke really early on about being kind of a best in class number two, and you have a really innovative visionary leader. And I tried to support her with a lot of the operational execution things so that she could cast that vision. But also spend time with a team and innovative way in a remote setting to find out what their talents are that we might not use them under a normal day to day banking environment. So again, we don't we don't have a separate innovation team, just just like everyone here said, I mean, it really is the job of of every person and you do not have to be a tech guru. And I'm living proof of that. To try to use your innovative muscle. 54:39 Digital, you'll get a pretty cool, 54:41 if I will, like one one less. One other thing I would add in here as part of as part of looking at innovation, and I think as part of the byproduct of, of COVID here is that it's been focused and I think you're hearing this across the panel, right? We've been a lot more intentional on what we are doing and frankly, what Not doing so whether it be focused on solving PPP for a customer or in our case like the checking account it also means employee well being and spending cycles on employee well being in connecting with them and making sure that we have whiskey Wednesdays together, right where we have fireside chats and things like that. So it really is like part of innovation is also part of just saying what you're not going to do so that you can focus your efforts to get the things that you want to do done really well. 55:28 Whiskey Wednesday 55:31 pretty pretty interesting. 55:32 Sounds like that It is Wednesday. Yeah, 55:36 it is. It is Wednesday and while we call it whiskey Wednesday cuz it right there's a good w in there are welcome to bring any any beverage they want. But the whole idea is just to get together through social our and just connect and talk. 55:52 Um, Josh, you brought up something that that's interesting and it leads me to my next question. You talked about how During these sort of disruptive times, it's important to find employees who are who are good at things that they might not that only that might be their primary job for whatever reason, because maybe they can't do their primary job at that time. Maybe they they're a teller who can't go to a branch or they're a loan underwriter that doesn't, or whatever it might be, and finding what else they can do to help you out. For everyone else on this panel, can you maybe talk a little bit as Josh did about what types of people or departments if at all, you've had to sort of redeploy it to help you keep pace during these rapidly changing times? When you want to start? 56:38 Yeah, um, you know, for us, we've been able to just we've been able to go stick to the the roles that the people have now for a time in period as you're ramping and working on PPP. We did have other people helping right as part of managing our queues right as we did underwriting, and a big part of that is there's so much because of the SBA was so unclear as to what the policies were in the underwriting policies where we weren't able to go automate a lot of the things upfront. And so we needed a lot of manpower to initially get that going. And what was great was there was a we're all in to help small businesses to get this across. What's also really motivating from that, and not really, you know, the direct answer to your question, but what was really exciting about this as well, that we learned was our our employees actually had a huge morale boost by talking to these customers, when they realized that what they are doing actually made a huge difference to the lives of these small businesses. Um, true story. My my son's best friend's parents are my son's best friend's parents. She was actually looking for a loan, couldn't get a loan from from a big bank had waited for months, and literally came to me at the last minute and said, Hey, is this something that move on can help with and we were able to help with And that's that's one of those great stories that comes across where, where our employees get really motivated by this. And so they're very happy to basically play third base when they're set to be an outfielder for their career. They're willing to go go play different bases and play different roles to help these small businesses. And so that's a learning that we had. 58:20 Interesting. And Clayton, have you seen anything either advice man, or with the clients that you work with in terms of redeploying people to to better fit the needs during the sort of disruptive times? 58:33 So selling meat there that not so much, not so much in our kind of segment? I think in the large kind of commercial the, I mean, the business didn't change, right? It wasn't as disruptive as all of a sudden, you know, in a retail, you know, kind of your whole branch network and all that happening. So I you know, in fact, in our business, it really everybody was became more busy at what they were doing because the volume of like end users that we were trying to onboard was up so it was really all hands on deck. But kind of as a largely as a continuation of kind of what they've been doing before 59:06 the T shirt, have you noticed anything or is allied bank sort of had to retrain people for different roles. 59:11 I tell you one that is close to home. 50% of our employees and colleagues have never worked from home, before the pandemic. And and I see the CR colleagues as internal customers, when we had to move them home, we had to figure out how we would deploy computers, imagine and deploy it to them and their different locations. We had engineers, software programmers within my team, you know, we put them on a plane on a private jet and we went they went to the locations to physically image these laptops and hand it out to our customers to our internal employees so they can serve our customers. I can't think of a better example than people just being brave enough and courageous enough and fungible enough to go out do that for Li as a company. 1:00:00 Interesting. So Clayton, I put you on the spot earlier. And I think it's only fair to do that for everyone that was a sort of lightning round to to close this out, because we're almost out of time here. But, you know, obviously there's a lot of digital shifts happening right now, through through a variety different of different business lines. Out of all those shifts that we've seen happening, whether it be increased digital payments, increased mobile adoption, whatever it might be, what do you think will last beyond the pandemic, if and when life you know, sort of normalizes? What do you think's gonna stick? And play? And we already kind of grilled you on this. But how about we start with Josh, and we'll just go from there. 1:00:37 A few, a few examples kind of mine, you know, very quickly one we were we were one of the first if not the first bank to implement curbside banking, for customers to do non cash transactions from the comfort of their vehicle that has been well received by our customer base and I think something that we could see maybe not the exact same format that we see it today, but that we could see Some version of delivery to our customers in person. And that manner, I spoke a little bit about some of the proprietary technology that we had and was being used by customers. But we've now entered into an environment where we're identifying a lot more opportunity for that top notch technology to be leveraged for the good of our customers and their continued operation. And that being, you know, how can we continue to service high cash volume? customers in an environment that may look different for quite some time? We just aren't sure yet. But I think the biggest one that will that will stick with us is the way the way in which we communicate with our customers, we being quick and nimble, being able to identify targeted communication. So an example might be every customer in the bank wasn't a ppb candidate or didn't have a PPV loan. So how do we carve out ppb customers specifically to communicate directly with them? How do we carve out customer seeking loan relief to communicate directly with them and so being able to adapt to the needs of our customers, identify Who's gonna have that need and communicate, communicate very quickly, about where we're at as an organization, I think is something that will, it's going to stick around, we need to be able to access a banker, almost 24 hours and we have a 24, seven emergency callback support that we've had through this time, so that if somebody was stranded in the middle of the night without their debit card working, that we could come to their aid, whether it be getting their debit card troubles, troubleshoot the debit card issue, or maybe it meant, you know, getting getting transportation to that customer, that might have been stranded until the next day when we could do better troubleshoot. So I think being accessible under any environment almost at any time is the new standard in this new environment that we're in but but having a personalized approach to that. Not always an automated approach to it. 1:02:55 Interesting, Herman you want to follow that up with your any kind of long term predictions 1:03:00 Yeah, I think Clayton had touched on this. I do think, you know, with with COVID coming out, I think the people are now more more custom more familiar with digital services in general. Right. So whether it be digital payments, whatnot, I think we're gonna see a bigger share of digital payments coming across on the consumer end, that means more of Apple Pay, that means more of Google pay, as opposed to previously before. You know, I'm just thinking about my experience as I recently went into a home retailer, where, where they still required me to take my credit card and put it into the machine versus just taking my Apple Watch and tapping that, that that becomes an experience now that I think customers more used to. So that's one thing that I would say, the other is as part of this, you know, and we've seen this not not obviously not a pandemic like this, but we've seen this and other recessions like Airbnb, Slack, and companies like that, that have come forth during recessions. It changes the way that people operate. Right? Think about the experience with Uber that came out through the last recession, versus Austan getting a taxi, how that has changed. I think the expectations of people will just change as a result of this as well, as people actually get more used to these digital experiences. And as more companies build that digital experience, but also build that offline great experience that Josh is talking about, as well. I think the expectations of, of consumers of clients, whether it be small businesses, or enterprises, or actual consumers, will have that elevated expectation. And I think it'll be important for for, you know, technology providers and services to meet them where they're at. So whether it be a mobile banking experience or a great online experience, I think that's, that's what's going to resonate and lead with them. So we're going to push the envelope there. I think 1:04:53 you touched on the shift away from checks, but if there's anything else you wanted to touch on before we wrap up our session here 1:05:00 Yeah, I mean, I think it's maybe important to operate it one notch higher than just like the specific I think technologies or like banking products that are going to change. I mean, it's, it totally is the cultures of banks have changed, right? The focus on solving problems, I think is that that process or that mindset, that way of working is a little bit crisper. And the expectations, you know, just reiterate again, what Herman said, of consumers and small businesses, and everybody has changed. And I think at the intersection of those two things, is going to be the whole next wave of bank innovation, right, that happens, and it's probably going to be a really good thing 1:05:39 to teach and you have any last thoughts? 1:05:42 I just say, digital adoption, and the accelerated pace at which adoption happens is here to stay. And frankly, as a 100% Digital organization, I'm thrilled with it. 1:05:55 And how fantastic Well, thank you all so much for being here. This was really a great panel, please In Josh kernza t shirt. This was just fantastic. We really appreciate you joining us. This concludes our session. Thank you again to s&p global market intelligence for sponsoring. We will take a brief break and we encourage you to meet with attendees and our sponsors until our next session. Join us in session five at 4:15pm. Eastern Time for an on demand discussion on coloring inside the lines integrated compliance into design thinking sponsored by end contracts. See you then. </div> [/toggle]
