Community Banks to Fintech: We Need You
When Terry Earley, the chief financial officer of Yadkin Bank, a $7.5 billion asset bank in Raleigh, North Carolina, gets to work each morning, he sees an online dashboard showing him all the details of the loans in his bank’s pipeline, what is closing and when, and more. “If you don’t know the information, you can’t manage your company,’’ he says.
Upgrading from cumbersome Excel spreadsheets, he can easily see which lenders are pricing loans lower than others, and quickly react in terms of lender training and managing the bank’s loan portfolio. “A lot of times we try to manage [by] anecdote,’’ he says. “But what does the data tell you? The information is key.”
Like a lot of other community banks, Yadkin is increasingly using partnerships with technology companies to improve its operations and better meet customer needs. At Bank Director’s Acquire or Be Acquired Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, which wrapped up yesterday, Earley and other bankers talked about M&A and growth strategies, as well as how they were using technology to improve profitability and efficiency. In Yadkin’s case, the bank signed up with PrecisionLender, a pricing and profitability management platform, when it became a $1 billion bank several years ago. Then, it partnered with technology company nCino, which operates a secure cloud-based operating system, when it became a $4.5 billion bank, to get access to a quicker commercial lending origination platform. [For more on how banks are using the cloud, see Bank Director digital magazine’s Tech Issue story, “Banks Sail Straight Into the Cloud.”]
Even investors are getting excited about the plethora of off-the-shelf software available to help smaller banks become more competitive with larger institutions. Joshua Siegel, CEO of asset manager StoneCastle Partners, said he thinks banks have a lot of room to improve efficiencies with technology and take out back office costs, as well as offer better customer service. The software to do this is becoming increasingly available and affordable to do so. Siegel was happy to see banks as small as $150 million in assets offering online personal financial management tools superior to what regional banks are offering, because the regional banks are sometimes held up trying to develop their own software in-house.
While some financial technology companies are directly competing with banks for small business loans or payments, such as payments provider PayPal or online lender Kabbage, other financial technology companies want to sell their technology to banks.
Instead of only seeing the potential threats, there are reasons for the industry to see financial technology as a tool that can help them compete with bigger banks, which control most of the nation’s deposits. Small banks can use software to speed up their lending operations and the time it takes to open an account, and make the entire experience of doing business with a bank easier and simpler.
Somerset Trust Co. in Somerset, Pennsylvania, is using a fintech company called Bolts Technologies to quickly validate identities and open accounts for new customers. Radius Bank, a $1 billion asset bank in Boston, Massachusetts, is using a variety of partnerships with fintech companies to support its branchless bank, including a robo-advisor software company called Aspiration.
“From a cultural perspective, we look at whether they share our values,’’ said Radius Bank CEO Mike Butler. “It needs to be true partnership. If we’re just in it to try to make money off each other, then it’s not worth it. But if there is a benefit in terms of both of us wanting to create a better customer experience, then you have a great partnership.”