10 Steps That Banks Can Take to Drive Their Digital Future

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More than a dozen years ago, I managed digital banking at a community bank.

Back then, keeping up with available digital solutions for customers meant attending our core system and digital banking provider’s user meetings and conferences. The major limitation we experienced was that we could only deploy technology readily integrated into our core and digital banking systems. If we brought in technology that wasn’t already integrated, we would be paying for the integration — paving the way for our competitors. In at least one situation, the rollout failed because our provider could not get the technology to scale.

Due to high costs and technical expertise, most community-based banking organizations have had to settle with being mostly buyers of technology. In contrast, many larger banks are viewed as builders of technology, despite the fact, that many of the larger financial institutions that have developed digital banking technologies in-house were net buyers as well.

With the growing adoption of application programming interfaces (APIs), banks are no longer limited to the binary choice of being a buyer or a builder of technology. Organizations that were previously constrained by integration limitations can finally own their own digital experiences — not by buying technology outright, but by building relationships with fintech firms. Increasingly, fintechs have shifted from wanting to disintermediate banks to partnering with them to provide the digital products, services and experiences that retail banking customers demand.

The biggest hurdle to taking advantage of these opportunities to partner with fintech firms as a way to manage your institution’s digital future is changing legacy mindsets in the community bank space. How do bank executives move from thinking of themselves as a “buyer of technology” to focusing on orchestrating and building partnerships?

Here are ten general steps to start this journey:

  1. Define explicit business objectives: Program goals, metrics of success, etc.
  2. Assign the person(s) responsible: Ideally, this should be driven by the CEO as the ultimate strategist for the bank, but day-to-day can be managed by a chief information or marketing officer, head of digital or another executive.
  3. Identify addressable gaps: Stay away from shining objects by identifying real gaps in the bank’s capabilities and addressing customers’ needs that the bank can close with a partner’s technology.
  4. Create a program to identify possible partners for each gap: This can be done through literature reviews, participating in conferences, innovation hubs, research firms or consulting partners, among others.
  5. Decide between build, invest or partner: Executives should categorize each partner into three options — build/customize a solution with them, invest in them for more strategic control and oversight or partner in the traditional contractual sense for the use of their product/service. A partner may fit more than one of these categories.
  6. Evolve resource allocation: Partnerships require organizational commitment, such as funding, networking opportunities and ongoing support.
  7. Build required technology and infrastructure: Develop the capabilities required to support your bank’s growing ecosystem, including APIs, cloud infrastructure, sandboxes and agile practices.
  8. Adjust planning practices: Fintech speed is counted in days or weeks, not months or years as banks tend to use. Apply agile thinking to planning, budgeting and testing.
  9. Iterate processes: Internal processes, such as vendor management, should support continuous iteration based on results. Additionally, banks should remain open to working with fintech firms to mature their processes.
  10. Revisit metrics: Make sure your bank is measuring successes and making appropriate adjustments.

Available technologies — such as APIs and cloud platforms — allow banks to step away from the shadow of their core providers. Banks now have an opportunity to own their digital futures and, more importantly, the digital experiences they offer their customers. Strategic partnerships allow financial services organizations of all sizes to compete and serve the needs of consumers by successfully leveraging the latest technology.

Finding Fintechs: A Choose Your Own Adventure Guide

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In my role as editor-in-chief, I attend countless off-the-record conversations with bankers who confess their experiences with financial technology companies. Sometimes, those experiences are anything but good, including a host of empty promises, botched integrations and disillusioned bank staff. It’s like the fintechs took off on the rocket ship but never made it to the moon, after all.

For one, banks and fintechs have a hard time speaking each other’s language. Banks, by nature and necessity, are focused on regulatory compliance. By contrast, technology companies tend to focus on growth, driven by nature and necessity to promise the world to their clients.

That seems to be changing. In the current economy and amid falling valuations for fintechs, many of them are focusing on profitability rather than growth for its own sake. And banks are changing, too. Small community banks, which we’ll define loosely as those below $10 billion in assets, historically have been reluctant to engage directly in partnerships with fintech companies unless those companies are offered by their core processors.

Traditionally, banks’ own policies forbid contracting with young firms that lack several years of audited financial statements, a fact that has excluded the vast majority of early-stage fintechs. But as fintechs mature in terms of compliance with banking regulations and as banks try to incorporate better technology into their systems, there is more room to meet in the middle.

This report is intended as a guide to help more banks take advantage of the offerings of financial technology companies to improve efficiency, customer relationships and to facilitate growth, and to do it in a way that mitigates risk.

First, though, I start with some terminology. Partnership gets batted around an awful lot. But what is it?

The Federal Reserve’s 2021 report, “Community Bank Access to Innovation Through Partnerships,” defines partnerships broadly to include traditional vendor relationships as well as more expansive arrangements that include shared objectives and outcomes, such as revenue sharing. We’ll adopt the Fed’s definition here, for ease of discussion.

In your journey to see what the universe may offer, Godspeed.

Banking is Changing: Here’s What Directors Should Ask

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One set of attributes for effective bank directors, especially as community banks navigate a changing and uncertain operating environment, are curiosity and inquisitiveness.

Providing meaningful board oversight sometimes comes down to directors asking executives the right questions, according to experts speaking on Sept. 12 during Bank Director’s 2022 Bank Board Training Forum at the JW Marriott Nashville. Inquisitive directors can help challenge the bank’s strategy and prepare it for the future.

“Curiosity is a great attribute of a director,” said Jim McAlpin Jr., a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner and newly appointed board member of DirectorCorps, Bank Director’s parent company. He encouraged directors to “ask basic questions” about the bank’s strategy and make sure they understand the answer or ask it again. He also provided a number of anecdotes from his long career in working with bank boards where directors should’ve asked more questions, including a $6 billion deal between community banks that wasn’t a success.

But beyond board oversight, incisive — and regular — questioning from directors helps institutions implement their strategy and orient for the future, according to Justin Norwood, vice president of product management at nCino, which creates a cloud-based bank operating platform. Norwood, who describes himself as a futurist, gave directors a set of questions they should ask executives as they formulate and execute their bank’s strategy.

1. What points of friction are we removing from the customer experience this quarter, this year and next year?
“It’s OK to be obsessive about this question,” he said, adding that this is maybe the most important question directors can ask. That’s because many technology companies, whether they’re focused on consumer financials or otherwise, ask this question “obsessively.” They are competing for wallet share and they often establish customer expectations for digital experiences.

Norwood commended banks for transforming the middle and back office for employees, along with improving the retail banking experience. But the work isn’t over: Norwood cited small business banking as the next frontier where community banks can anticipate customer needs and provide guidance over digital channels.

2. How do we define community for our bank if we’re not confined to geography?
Community banking has traditionally been defined by geography and physical branch locations, but digital delivery channels and technology have allowed banks to be creative about the customer segments and cohorts they target. Norwood cited two companies that serve customers with distinct needs well: Silicon Valley Bank, the bank unit of Santa Clara, California-based SVB Financial, which focuses on early stage venture-backed companies and Greenlight, a personal finance fintech for kids. Boards should ask executives about their definition of community, and how the institution meets those segments’ financial needs.

3. How are we leveraging artificial intelligence to capture new customers and optimize risk? Can we explain our efforts to regulators?
Norwood said that artificial intelligence has a potential annual value of $1 trillion for the global banking industry, citing a study from the McKinsey & Co. consulting group. Community banks should capture some of those benefits, without recreating the wheel. Instead of trying to hire Stanford University-educated technologists to innovate in-house, Norwood recommends that banks hire business leaders open to AI opportunities that can enhance customer relationships.

4. How are we participating in the regulatory process around decentralized finance?
Decentralized finance, or defi, is a financial technology that uses secure distributed ledgers, or blockchains, to record transactions outside of the regulated and incumbent financial services space. Some of the defi industry focused on cryptocurrency transactions has encountered financial instability and liquidity runs this summer, leading to a crisis that’s been called “crypto winter” by the media. Some banks have even been ensnared by crypto partners that have gone into bankruptcy, leading to confusion around customer deposit coverage.

Increasingly, banks have partnerships with companies that work in the digital assets space, or their customers have opened accounts at those companies. Norwood said bank directors should understand how, if at all, their institution interacts with this space, and the potential risks the crypto and blockchain world pose.

Eyes Wide Open: Building Fintech Partnerships That Work

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With rising cost of funds and increased operating costs exerting new pressures on banks’ mortgage, consumer and commercial lending businesses, management teams are sharpening their focus on low-cost funding and noninterest revenue streams. These include debit card interchange fees, treasury management services, banking as a service (BaaS) revenue sharing and fees for commercial depository services, such as wire transfers and automated clearinghouse (ACH) transactions. Often, however, the revenue streams of some businesses barely offset the associated costs. Most depository service fees, for example, typically are offered as a modest convenience fee rather than a source of profitability. Moreover, noninterest income can be subject to disruption.

Responding to both competitive pressures and signals of increased regulatory scrutiny, many banks are eliminating or further reducing overdraft and nonsufficient fund (NSF) fees, which in some cases make up a substantial portion of their fee income. While some banks offset the loss of NSF fees with higher monthly service charges or other account maintenance fees, others opt for more customer-friendly alternatives, such as optional overdraft protection using automatic transfers from a linked account.

In rethinking overdraft strategies, a more innovative response might be to replace punitive NSF fees with a more positive buy now, pay later (BNPL) program that allows qualified customers to make purchases that exceed their account balances, using a short-term extended payment option for a nominal fee.

Partnering with a fintech can provide a bank quick access to the technology it needs to implement such a strategy. It also can open up other potential revenue streams. Unfortunately, a deeper dive into the terms of a fintech relationship sometimes reveals that the bank’s reward is not always commensurate with the associated risks.

Risky Business
As the banking industry adapts to new economic and competitive pressures, a growing number of organizations are turning to bank-fintech partnerships and various BaaS offerings to help improve financial performance, access new markets, and offset diminishing returns from traditional deposit and lending activities. In many instances, however, these new relationships are not producing the financial results banks had hoped to achieve.

And as bank leaders develop a better understanding of the opportunities, risks, and nuances of fintech relationships, some discover they are not as well-prepared for the relationship as they thought. This is particularly true for BaaS platforms and targeted online service offerings, in which banks either install fintech-developed software and customer interfaces or allow fintech partners to interact directly with the bank’s customers.

Often, the fintech partner commands a large share of the income stream — or the bank might receive no share in the income at all — despite, as a chartered institution, bearing an inordinate share of the risks in terms of regulatory compliance, security, privacy, and transaction costs. Traditionally, banks have sought to offset this imbalance through earnings on the fintech-related account balances, overlooking the fact that deposits obtained through fintechs are not yet fully equivalent to a bank’s core deposits.

Moreover, when funds from fintech depository accounts appear on the balance sheet, the bank’s growing assets can put stress on its capital ratio. Unless the bank receives adequate income from the relationship, it could find it must raise additional capital, which is often an expensive undertaking.

Such risks do not mean fintech partnerships should be avoided. On the contrary, they can offer many benefits. But as existing fintech contracts come up for renewal and as banks consider future opportunities, they should enter such relationships cautiously, with an eye toward unexpected consequences.

Among other precautions, banks should be wary of exclusivity clauses. Most fintechs understandably want the option to work with multiple banks on various products. Banks should expect comparable rights and should not lock themselves into a one-way arrangement that limits their ability to work with other fintechs or market new services of their own. It also is wise to opt for shorter contract terms that allow the bank to re-evaluate and renegotiate terms early in the relationship. The contract also should clarify the rights each party has to customer relationships and accounts upon contractual termination.

Above all, management should confirm that the bank’s share of future revenue streams will be commensurate with the associated risks and costs to adequately offset the potential capital pressures the relationship might trigger.

The rewards of a fintech collaboration can be substantial, provided everyone enters the relationship with eyes wide open.

What to Look for in New Cash and Check Automation Technology

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Today’s financial institutions are tasked with providing quality customer experiences across a myriad of banking channels. With the increased focus on digital and mobile banking, bankers are looking for ways to automate branch processes for greater cost and time savings.

This need should lead financial institution leaders exploring and implementing cash and check automation solutions. These solutions can improve accuracy, reduce handling time and labor, lower cost, deliver better forecasting and offer better visibility, establish enhanced control with custom reporting and provide greater security and compliance across all locations, making transactions seamless and streamlining the branch experience. However, as bank leaders begin to implement a cash and check automation solution, they must remember how a well-done integration should operate and support the bank in its reporting and measurement functions.

Ask Yourself: Is This the Right Solution?
When a bank installs a new cash or check automation solution, the question that should immediately come to mind for a savvy operations manager is: “How well is this integrated with my current teller software?” Regardless of what the solution is designed to do, the one thing that will make or break its effectiveness is whether it was programmed to leverage all the available functionality and to work seamlessly with the banks’ existing systems.

For some financial institutions, the question might be as simple as: “Is this device and its functionality supported by my software provider?” If not, the bank might be left to choose from a predetermined selection of similar products, which may or may not have the same capabilities and feature sets that they had in mind.

The Difference Between True Automation and Not
A well-supported and properly integrated cash automation solution communicates directly with the teller system. For example, consider a typical $100 request from a teller transaction to a cash recycler, a device responsible for accepting and dispensing cash. Perhaps the default is for the recycler to fulfill that request by dispensing five $20 notes. However, this particular transaction needs $50 bills instead. If your cash automation solution does not directly integrate with the teller system, the teller might have to re-enter the whole transaction manually, including all the different denominations. With a direct integration, the teller system and the recycler can communicate with each other and adjust the rest of the transaction dynamically. If the automation software is performing correctly, there is no separate keying process alongside the teller system into a module; the process is part of the normal routine workflow within the teller environment. This is a subtle improvement emblematic of the countless other things that can be done better when communication is a two-way street.

Automation Fueling Better Reporting and Monitoring
A proper and robust solution must be comprehensive: not just controlling equipment but having the ability to deliver on-demand auditing, from any level of the organization. Whether it is a branch manager checking on a particular teller workstation, or an operations manager looking for macro insights at the regional or enterprise level, that functionality needs to be easily accessible in real time.

The auditing and general visibility requirements denote why a true automation solution adds value. Without seamless native support for different types of recyclers, it’s not uncommon to have to close and relaunch the program any time you need to access a different set of machines. A less polished interface tends to lead to more manual interactions to bridge the gaps, which in turn causes delays or even mistakes.

Cash and check automation are key to streamlining operations in the branch environment. As more resources are expanding to digital and mobile channels, keeping the branch operating more efficiently so that resources can focus on the customer experience, upselling premium services, or so that resources can be moved elsewhere is vital. Thankfully, with the proper cash and check automation solutions, bank leaders can execute on this ideal and continue to improve both the customer experience and employee satisfaction.

7 Indicators of a Successful Digital Account Opening Strategy

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How good is your bank’s online account opening process?

Many banks don’t know where to begin looking for the answer to that question and struggle to make impactful investments to improve their digital growth. Assessing the robustness of the bank’s online account opening strategy and reporting capabilities is a crucial first step toward improving and strengthening the experience. To get a pulse on the institution’s ability to effectively open accounts digitally, we suggest starting with a simple checklist of questions.

These key indicators can provide better transparency into the health of the online account opening process, clarity around where the bank is excelling, and insight into the areas that need development.

Signs of healthy digital account opening:

1. Visitor-to-Applicant Conversion
The ratio of visits to applications started measures the bank’s ability to make a good first impression with customers. If your bank experiences a high volume of traffic but a low rate of applications, something is making your institution unappealing.

Your focus should shift to conversion. Look at the account opening site through the eyes of a potential new customer to identify areas that are confusing or distract from starting an application. Counting the number of clicks it takes to start an online application is a quick way to evaluate your marketing site’s ability to convert visitors.

2. Application Start-to-Completion
On average, 51% of all online applications for deposit accounts are abandoned before completion. It’s key to have a frictionless digital account opening process and ensure that the mobile option is as equally accessible and intuitive as its web counterpart.

If your institution is seeing high abandonment rates, something is happening to turn enthusiasm into discouragement. Identifying pain points will reveal necessary user flow improvements that can make the overall experience faster and more satisfying, which should translate into a greater percentage of completed applications.

3. Resume Rate on Abandoned Applications
The probability that a customer will restart an online application they’ve abandoned drastically decreases as more time passes. You can assess potential customers’ excitement about opening accounts by measuring how many resume where they left off, and the amount of time they take between sessions.

Providing a quick and intuitive experience that eliminates the friction that causes applicants to leave an application means less effort trying to get them to come back. Consider implementing automated reminders similar to the approach e-commerce brands take with abandoned shopping carts in cases where applications are left unfinished.

4. Total Time to Completion
The more time a person has to take to open an account, the more likely they’ll give up. This is something many banks still struggle with: 80% of banks say it takes longer than five minutes to open an account online, and nearly 30% take longer than 10 minutes. At these lengths, the potential for abandonment is very high.

A simple way to see how customers experience your digital application process is to measure the amount of time it takes, including multi-session openings, to open an account, and then working to reduce that time by streamlining the process.

5. Percent of Funded Accounts
A key predictive factor for how active a new customer will be when opening their new account is whether they choose to initially fund their account or not. It’s imperative that financial institutions offer initial funding options that are stress-free and take minimal steps.

For example, requiring that customers verify accounts through trial deposits to link external accounts is a time-consuming process involving multiple steps that are likely to deter people from funding their accounts. Offering fast and secure methods of funding, like instant account authentication, improves the funding experience and the likelihood that new users will stay active.

6. Percent of Auto-Opened Accounts
Manual intervention from a customer service rep to verify and open accounts is time-consuming and expensive. Even with some automation, an overzealous flagging process can create bottlenecks that forces applicants wait longer and bogs down back-office teams with manual review.

Financial institutions should look at the amount of manual review their accounts need, how much time is spent on flagged applications, and the number of bad actor accounts actually being filtered out. Ideally, new online accounts should be automatically opened on the core without any manual intervention—something that banks can accomplish using powerful non-document based verification methods.

7. Fraud Rate Over Time
A high percentage of opened accounts displaying alarming behavior means there may be a weakness in your account opening process that fraudsters are exploiting. To assess your bank’s ability to catch fraud, measure how many approved accounts turn out to be fraudulent and how long it takes for those accounts to start behaving badly.

The most important thing for financial institutions to do is to make sure they can detect fraudulent activity early. Using multiple verification processes is a great way to filter out fraudulent account applications at the outset and avoid headaches and losses later.

The Battle for the Small Business Customer

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Increasingly, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are looking for digital banking and financial solutions to address specific needs and provide the experience they expect.

The preference for digital has allowed fintechs and big tech firms to compete with financial institutions for these relationships. While the broadened competitive landscape creates new challenges, this migration to digital channels creates new opportunities for banks of all sizes to compete and win in the SMB market. But first, banks need to think differently and redefine what’s possible.

Many banks have a one-size-fits-all approach to SMB banking. This approach is based on the shaky premise that what SMBs need are consumer banking products with slight variations. This leaves SMBs with two choices: Leverage the bank’s existing online retail banking products — an option that is easy to understand and use, but lacks the specific financial solutions they need — or use the bank’s more-complex digital commercial banking products. The impersonal experience most SMBs experience as a result of this approach can leave them feeling unsatisfied and underappreciated. But banks can capitalize on this underserved market by combining modern technology with a targeted segmentation strategy.

Businesses with fewer than 20 employees make up over 98% of American businesses, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s 2021 Small Business Profile. About half of SMBs feel their primary financial institution doesn’t understand their needs, according to Aite’s 2021 study, “Delivering the Experience Small Businesses Expect.”

Banks need to deliver more tailored solutions and experiences to differentiate themselves from competitors. To start, they should ask and honestly answer some key questions:

  • In what target markets (size, industry and location) can we compete and win?
  • What are the needs of the businesses in these target markets, beyond traditional banking?
  • What partners will we need to meet the needs of these account holders?

The answers start with the bank’s business strategy — not its technology strategy. Banks need to think in terms of outcomes first before creating the technology strategy that will help them achieve those outcomes.

SMBs Want Experiences Built for Them
User experience matters to SMBs; winning their business depends on providing fast, user-friendly, tailored experiences. They increasingly expect a single view of both their business and personal relationships with the bank.

But using nonbank firms has increased complexity for these SMBs. Banks have an opportunity to aggregate these relationships and provide a comprehensive set of solutions through fintech partnerships. They can tailor digital experiences that address the needs of each of their SMB by integrating their banking solutions with their fintech partner solutions.

Taking a customer-centric approach that pairs account capabilities to business needs allows banks to make their SMB customers feel appreciated, increasing loyalty. For example, a dentist practice may need products and services focused on managing cash flow, accessing credit and wealth management options. Gig economy participants can be focused on payments and nontraditional services through the fintech marketplace, such as bookkeeping or time tracking and scheduling.

The current leading digital services providers enjoy strong customer loyalty because they’ve created positive experiences and value for each customer. SMBs are leaving banks — or are deeply considering switching banks — because of these institutions’ inability to provide what they want: banking experiences and solutions that help them run their businesses more effectively.

SMBs need a compelling business case when selecting a bank; the bank must convince these businesses that it’s prepared to do what’s needed to meet their growing and evolving financial requirements. Banks that fail to focus on broadening partnerships and delivering a wider range of financial solutions through an extensible digital platform may have difficulty retaining existing business customers or attracting future new ones. As a result, these institutions may also find themselves with a higher-than-average percentage of less-valuable customers.

Conversely, those banks that offer solutions SMBs need, in an experience they expect, will emerge as leaders in the space. Banks need to understand the targeted segments where they can compete and win — and then deliver with a fast, easy, relevant, end-to-end digital experience. We’ve written an e-book, “The Battle for the Small Business Customer,” that offers an in-depth look at the factors shaping SMB banking today and ways banks can deliver a compelling business case.

Banks that can do this will be able to grow market share in the SMB market; banks that don’t can expect shrinking revenue and profitability. The time is now to redefine what’s possible in the SMB market.

FinXTech’s Need to Know: Debt Collections and Recovery

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The Covid-19 pandemic may have stalled debt collection efforts for two years, but a partial economic recovery — paired with a looming recession — could soon send unprepared borrowers and their loans to collections.

Missed payments on certain loans are already on the rise. The Wall Street Journal reported that borrowers with credit scores below 620 — also known as subprime — with car loans, personal loans or credit cards that are over 60 days late are “rising faster than normal.” Eleven percent of general purpose credit cards were late, as compared to 9.8% in March 2021. Personal loan delinquencies have hit 11.3% versus 10.4% last year, and delinquent auto loans hit a record high of 8.8% in February.

As a result, banks may be seeing an influx in their collections and recoveries activity. It may be an opportune time to enhance and better your bank’s collections practices — doing so could help at-risk borrowers avoid collections altogether, and give your institution the chance to show customers that they are more than the debt they owe. 

Debt collections practices and agencies generally don’t have a good reputation among consumers: A quick Google search will uncover countless 2-star reviews and repulsive anecdotes. And while the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA) protects consumers from harsh, unfair and threatening collections tactics, a good experience with a collection agency is far from guaranteed. 

Banks exacerbate the issue by not conducting proper and continual due diligence on the third-party agencies they work with. With over 7,000 to choose from, this can be difficult to execute, but is a necessary task that could be the difference between retaining a customer and losing one.

A technology company may be able to provide your bank with the high-touch element with consumers during the collections process.

Fintechs have a few things banks might not offer (or have upgraded versions of): Predictive analytics software, APIs, rules-based platforms, self-upgrading machine learning, among others. These technologies can and should be harnessed to find problem loans before they become delinquent and reach consumers within their preferred method of communication. Traditional collection agencies can have difficulties navigating within FDCPA protections — fintechs can use their enhanced technologies to thrive within the compliance. 

Some fintechs even offer their products and services underneath the bank’s brand, which could be a strategic move if providing educational services and resources could get a customer back on track with payments.

Here are three fintechs that can help banks with their collections and recovery efforts.

TrueAccord has two products of interest to banks: Retain and Recover. Retain is a proactive solution for delinquent accounts that works with borrowers to keep the account from moving to collections. Retain primarily uses text, email and voicemail and communication methods, as preferred to cold calling.

When Retain fails to resolve the payment with a customer, banks can turn to TrueAccord’s Recover solution. Recover is primarily a self-servicing software, meaning that customers engage with Recover, and not the bank, to find a solution. Again, communication is through SMS, Facebook messaging, emails or text.

In addition, TrueAccord is a licensed collections agency.

Birmingham-based FIntegrate offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution — Fusion CRS — for delinquency collections through charge-off recoveries and delinquency management. The software tracks and manages any type of account in any status, including but not limited to: commercial real estate loans, Small Business Administration loans, Paycheck Protection Program loans, deposit and share drafts, and consumer loans that are in repossession, bankruptcy, foreclosure, or have negative balances or become real estate owned.

Fusion CRS also assigns tasks, creates rules-based sequences and monitors special collection cases and statuses. It automatically generates letters, emails, texts, phone calls or other means of communication to account holders and other involved entities (such as a repossession or insurance company).

Collections technology can’t operate without customer information, which is where a company like Intellaegis can help. Its masterQueue product harnesses big data to gather, organize and track available data on a borrower. MasterQueue collects public record data and open source information from the web to track the borrower’s digital footprint and pinpoint a borrower’s whereabouts, online activity and associates.

The software then scores the data that represents the likelihood of locating the borrower based on its quantity and quality — users can then go down the list and attempt contact.

Consumers are spending more than during the pandemic, and debt levels are increasing in tandem even as rates rise and a potential recession looms. Technology can not only help banks handle the influx of overdue and delinquent accounts, but can aid in preserving and enhancing vulnerable relationships with customers as well.

Breaking the Legacy Mindset

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For banks, the status quo can often stymie innovation. Even if executives have the desire to try something new, their institution can be incumbered by entrenched legacy systems.

But taking a chance on something new can open up institutions to the possibility of achieving something bigger. The decision to choose a new path is usually very difficult; loyalty and security can feel hard coded in our DNA. But sometimes it comes to the point where you realize that the thing you are doing over and over is never going to produce a different, game-changing outcome.

The adage of “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” continues to ring true in many ways in the fintech space. It refers to the idea that making a safe bet never got anyone in trouble; choosing the industry’s standard company, product or service had little repercussions for the executives making the decisions — even if there were newer, cheaper or better options. It was safe, the company was reliable and little happened in the way of bucking the status quo.

The payments industry has a number of parallels from which we can draw. The electronic payment ecosystem is more than 40 years old; while there has been innovation, it has not been at the same pace as the rest of the technology industry. Some bankers may remember “knuckle busters” and the carbon paper of old. Although banking have since shed those physical devices, the core processing behind the electronic payments system largely remains the same.

These legacy systems mean the payments industry traditionally has had extremely high barriers to entry. This is due to a number of factors, including increasing risk and regulatory compliance needs, high capital investments, a technology environment that is difficult to penetrate and complex integration webs between multiple partners. This unique environment increases the stickiness of mature offerings and creates a complex set of products and long-standing relationships that make it difficult for new products or providers to break through.

The industry’s fragmentation is also a blessing and a curse. While fragmentation gives institutions and consumers choices in the market, it hinders new companies from emerging. This makes it challenging for companies to gain traction or disrupt existing solutions with new and creative ways to solve problems and address needs. Breaking into the market is still only step one. Convincing banks that you can simplify their processes and scale your solutions is an ongoing challenge that smaller fintechs must overcome to truly participate — and potentially disrupt — the industry. The combination of these factors fuels a deep resistance to change in the banking industry.

Fintechs aren’t legacy companies — and that is a good thing. Implementations don’t need to take months, they can be done in weeks. Customer service isn’t challenging when communication happens openly and quickly. Enhancements are affordable, and newer platforms offer nimbleness and openness.

In order to succeed, fintechs must find ways to innovate within the gray space. This could look like any number of things: taking advantage of mandates that create new opportunities, stretching systems and capability gaps to explore new norms, or venturing out into entirely uncharted territory. And banks do not have to fit into the same familiar patterns; changing one piece of the puzzle does not always have to be a massive undertaking.

What within your bank’s walls just “works”? What system or processes have been on autopilot that could chart a new path? What external services are your customers using that the bank could bring in-house if executives thought outside the box? Fintech can complement the bank, if you select the right partner that expands your ecosystem. Fintech can change user experiences — simplifying them to deliver a truly different outcome altogether.

Take a chance on fintech. It will be epic.

The Race to Perform

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Last October, I journeyed to Austin, Texas, to watch my first Formula One race. Like many, Netflix’s wildly popular Formula 1: Drive to Survive drew me in. That docuseries dramatically increased the popularity of the sport in the United States, with plenty of drama on track and off. 

Inevitably, the show takes viewers inside a showdown between two cars jostling for points, separated by mere milliseconds. While being out front has its advantages, so too does drafting your competition, waiting for the chance to pull ahead. Indeed, the “push-to-pass” mechanism on a race car provides a temporary jolt of speed, allowing the hunter to quickly become the hunted. Speed, competition and risk-taking is on my mind as we prepare to host Bank Director’s Experience FinXTech event May 5 and 6 in the same city as the Circuit of The Americas.

Much like Formula One brings some of the most ambitious and creative teams together for a race, Experience FinXTech attracts some of the most inspiring minds from the deeply competitive financial services space.

Now in its seventh year, the event connects a hugely influential audience of U.S. bank leaders with technology partners at the forefront of growth and innovation. Today, as banks continue to transition towards virtual or digital strategies, fintechs become partners rather than just competitors in the race to succeed. 

We’ll look not only at fintechs offering efficiencies for banks, but at fintechs offering growth and improved performance as well. As fintech guru Chris Skinner recently noted, “If you only look at technology as a cost reduction process, you never get the market opportunities. If you look at technology as a market opportunity, you get the cost savings naturally as a by-product.”

We’ll consider investor appetites, debate the pros and cons of decentralized finance and share experiences in peer exchanges. 

Throughout, we’ll help participants gauge technology companies at a time when new competitors continue to target financial services.   

Most Formula One races are won on the margins, with dedicated teams working tirelessly to improve performance. So too are the banks that excel — many of them with dedicated teams working with exceptional partners.