“Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast” with Clay Adams of Mascoma Bank (NH)

In our eighth episode of the season, Clay Adams, President & CEO of Mascoma Bank (NH), joins Vin, Zach, and Joe Kennerson. The guys dig into Clay’s background in the private sector and on the Mascoma Board before emerging as the bank’s CEO, Peter Drucker and Daniel Pink, the role of AI and stablecoins in banking’s future, and how Mascoma Bank created its own SaaS platform (“Stratum”) designed to modernize the technological environment of financial institutions.

For more insights and ideas, visit DCG at DarlingConsulting.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

Transcript

On the Balance Sheet® S4 E8 – “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast” with Clay Adams, Mascoma Bank (NH)

 Transcript

 [Vinny, 00:17]

 Welcome to On the Balance Sheet, season four, episode eight. And today we are joined by Clay Adams, president and CEO of Mascoma Bank, located in New Hampshire. And while Clay may be running a mutual bank, this is not your average mutual bank, right, Zach? 

[Zach, 00:33]

 Vin, 1,000%. And I think that's where folks look up Mascoma Bank and think, oh, it's in New Hampshire and they’re a few billion dollars. They are the antithesis of a sleepy mutual savings bank. So, I think it was a terrific conversation with Clay, a lot of really thought-provoking discussions, especially on the tech side, and just some of his philosophies in banking. And we're joined also by our colleague, Joe Kennerson, who works directly with Clay and his team over at Mascoma. So, really an awesome interview, and I think everyone's going to really enjoy it. 

[Vinny, 01:01]

 And Clay's a real dynamic guy. So, without further ado, Clay Adams. 

[Zach, 01:08]

 Welcome to On the Balance Sheet. We are very, very pleased to be joined today by a special guest, Clay Adams, president and CEO of Mascoma Bank in the great state of New Hampshire. And Clay, thanks so much for joining us today. We just wanted to start out like we usually do with most interviews. Could you walk the listeners and the folks on the other side through your journey before you got into the banking industry? And then also, what drew you into the banking industry, into your role today as the president and CEO of Mascoma Bank? 

[Clay, 01:43]

 Sure thing. Bounced along the East Coast a little bit. I went to college in New England. Lived in D.C., worked for an economic consulting firm down there. Went to business school and then spent about the next 15 years in management consulting. First with a big firm in Boston and then moved up to where I am now in Hanover, New Hampshire. Ran a firm for about 10 years. It was an employee-owned firm. Consulting firm, wrote quantitative methods and modeling. And along, I became a customer, commercial customer of Mascoma Bank. And I remember my first commercial loan officer, because we were doing an e-purchase buyout of the founders. He said, oh, maybe someday you could be on a bank board. I said, bank board? Why would I want to be on a bank board? And lo and behold, a few years later, I don't know, five or six years later, I joined the board of Mascoma Bank, was running another company at the time based up in this area. And then I did that for about five years. And toward the end of that five-year period, one of my colleagues on the board, an external colleague, said when we had, shortly after we heard that our founder was, sorry, founder, our CEO at the time, might as well have been a founder, he was 27 years in the role, was retiring. He said, hey, you should do this. And I said, I'm not a banker. And he's like, that's why you should do it. And so, I thought about it. I kind of ignored it at first. And I thought about it, talked to my wife about it. He approached me again. And it's the best decision I ever made. I'm super happy, very aligned with my values and focused on community. And that was, I joined the bank in 2016 as management. So, five years, plus five years on the board.

[Zach, 03:20]

 It's a really cool way into banking because a lot of times folks got into the industry right away and did a management program or something like that. And you kind of went the other way coming from as a business owner or as someone in the community into the board seat and then as a CEO. Clay, can you just kind of describe too, what's the history of Mascoma Bank? I mean, it's a 126-year-old bank. Do I have my numbers right there? 

[Clay, 03:43]

 A mutual bank based in Lebanon, New Hampshire. And like a lot of mutual banks and community banks around New England, we had a local community need. And there was a group of people who put their own capital to work. And that capital has now grown, obviously, over a century. And we're leveraging that and putting it to work. And so, I think we started, like a lot of community banks, we started small and stayed small for a long time. I think in 1990, we were a couple hundred million in assets there. And my predecessor, Steve Christie, said to me, and this is the classic, he might not have used these words, but better to be lucky than good. So, we happen to be in the shadow of Dartmouth College and the shadow of Dartmouth Hitchcock, which is the Dartmouth Health, is now the largest employer in the state of New Hampshire. So, we won, I'll say, the geographic lottery in that this area grew as those two institutions grew. We made some good decisions along the way. And so that's kind of what was our initial, I'll say, spurt of growth. We probably went from 200 million to about a billion and a half when I took over almost 10 years ago. 

[Zach, 04:45]

 And Clay, since then, you guys have continued growing. What are the areas that you guys have been really looking at growing and whether on the balance sheet, off the balance sheet? Because obviously the growth has continued, certainly since you've been aboard. 

[Clay, 04:56]

 Yeah. Yeah, there are a couple of dimensions. We're now just about $3 billion. We're pretty well balanced between residential and commercial on the balance sheet. A couple other dimensions of growth, we have a few subsidiaries. One of those is an RIA. So that's growing nicely, nice source of non-interest income. And then we have a community development entity, and that's a Mascoma Community Development, and they do specialize in tax credit lending. And so, the historic and low-income tax credits, which is not that unusual. What is a little bit more unusual, and I'm only aware of one other bank in New England that does new market tax credits. And those are, it's an allocation of tax credits we apply for from the U.S. Treasury. Actually, the recent tax bill that passed made that permanent, which is great. So, I can stop bothering our members of Congress to reauthorize, and it is a typically much larger banks buy those tax credits, and they are intended to be put to work in underserved communities to create job growth. It's been great for some rural parts in New England. The third subsidiary, which is also a little unique, is a technology subsidiary, Mascoma Technologies, from which we're going to commercialize some software we developed for our own use. And then the only other dimension of growth I'll say is like we are historically based in what's known as the Upper Valley, which is once again around Lebanon, New Hampshire, Hartford, Vermont, Hanover. But now we go up and down the Connecticut River Valley in both New Hampshire and Vermont. We also have, we've branched up into Burlington, Vermont, about 90 minutes northwest of us. And we also have a business development office in Portland, Maine. So, kind of spanning the three northern New England states. 

[Joe, 06:29]

 Hey, Clay, Joe Kennerson here. Thanks for coming. One challenge you hear a lot in our industry is around succession planning and finding good talent. And I've been fortunate enough to work with Mascoma on the ALCO side for about 20 years, and during that time, I think I've seen the entire senior management team retire. And I know you were included in that transition. I also know that you've been a big part of bringing in good talent to Mascoma over the past 5 or 10 years. You want to speak a little bit about the challenge in doing that in community banking and the success that you've had there? 

[Clay, 07:06]

 Sure. And it's, you know, I'd be hard pressed to say I've batted a hundred on all those decisions, but I think we've been right much more often than we have not. Succession is critical to any institution. We spend a lot of time talking about it. And so ironically, and as you point out, we've brought in some really good people, mix of people from banking, but also non-banking, but we're also working very hard at creating succession from within the organization, which I think is probably the default and the nice way to go. And, but we have to do that in a very diligent manner by, and we've just kind of completed our annual process of that. And now we kind of update it throughout the year, but the big one and reported to the board on like succession plans for people and my direct reports, but also, we're now dipping down to the next level and, like, creating succession plans for the, for that level of people and engaging those managers. But I think it's, to me, it's been a nice blend of both people have been here for their careers who are on the senior team, but also people who are coming from non-banking. Because I do think banking can be a fairly, I'll say, provincial industry where, as I think you pointed out earlier, Zach, a lot of people come, they join banking right out of college, and they stay there. And again, why my colleague on the board said, well, the reason... I think you're not a banker, that might be good. So, it's to me, it's if you can bring both those, marry both those things. I'll also say, I think that as a mutually owned bank, I think it's probably in some ways is, some ways isn't a little easier to recruit. I subscribe to a perspective I heard by an author, Daniel Pink, probably 15 years ago, like the modern workforce, I'll call it, which is now I'm dating myself, but really want purpose, autonomy, and mastery. And if you can give them those three things, then I think they're going to be much more engaged and happy. You have to be able to recruit to that, but also retain people with those things as well. And a mutually owned bank naturally has that. You have to be competitive on compensation, of course. But, you know, we've been also, in a rural area, rather permissive about work location. I'm an in-the-office guy. I'm here five days a week. That's my preference. But recruiting to a rural area of specialized talent, particularly tech talent, it's not going to always work. So, you have to be accommodating of those things. Our CFO lives in Newburyport, right down the street from your offices. And he's up here a night a week, not every week though. And it's fantastic. But we're also already spread out across three states. So, we can do this. We're not all in the same place all the time. So, and there are trade-offs. 

[Joe, 09:35]

 Clay, I'd love for you to educate our listeners on what you guys are doing on the tech side with Mascoma Technologies. 

[Clay, 09:41]

Sure. Yeah, I think it started again from, I came to this kind of from other industries. And when I first became a member of management, probably the biggest surprise I had was the, I'll say, the mediocrity of legacy banking technology. And I hired, six months later, our chief technology officer, and he and I had worked together before software development background. And we made a lot of changes, kind of just infrastructure wise and more efficient, more cost effective. But then we started looking at alternatives to the, I'll say again, the legacy core banking paradigm. And our thesis at the time several years ago was like, wow, there's really good fintech stuff coming up. Why can't we replace all the services that are available on a core operating system, which is really a general ledger at the end of the day, with best-in-class fintech? Account opening, teller platform, digital banking, so that you're not beholden to whatever the core provider offers you. It hadn't been really done before, certainly at a community bank level. I think things are more bespoke at the tier one banks and, of course, the largest. And so that's been the journey we're on. We're most of the way through it and have along the way, I guess, which is why we now have a tech subsidiary. We developed a software which we're calling Stratum, and that software is really what connects all these different services, all these different fintechs together, so they talk to one another. And I think the best way I can describe it, it's the hub of a bicycle wheel. And the spokes go out, and the data flows through the hub and then it gets routed to the right places where it belongs. And we didn't set out to commercialize software; we had set out to kind of make sure we, Mascoma Bank, were relevant technologically speaking in the future. We have great service for our customers, but how do we match that with really good technology? But then also, there was some altruism here too, and that we wanted to provide other community banks a roadmap, like, hey, you can do this. And there wasn't a good alternative to stitch this stuff together on the market. We tried some big enterprise platforms that are really, really good, but they weren't purpose-built for banking. We still had to program them, and we have developers on staff now. And so, as we've been working with fintechs, as we've been working with talking to other banks about our journey, we are, they're kind of like, when can I buy that? And a fintech might say, wow, if I can connect into your software once and then it routes to all these other things, I don't have to connect with it every time I go to a different bank, or I don't have to connect to their legacy provider if you've already done it. And so that's kind of where we are now. We're signing our first customer in the next couple of days. We've been running it ourselves for a year and a half, really, really successfully. And our plan is to raise capital for - the bank's been funding it up until now. And then our plan is to raise capital for this in ‘26. 

[Vinny, 12:28]

 Clay, this is Vinny. Thanks again so much for your time. I wanted to drill down, if you will, on one of the things you focused on earlier, some of your other initiatives. But speaking more broadly about – you have like a B Corp designation. And for our listeners, they might be interested in what that is and then how that kind of ties into – it seems in a lot of my research that you folks have, you go a long ways in terms of helping out folks around the state in terms of affordable housing. So, curious if you could just sort of elaborate on both of those things for our listeners. 

[Clay, 13:02]

 Yeah, I think it's one of the reasons I'm so professionally happy here is because I was raised in a family that was really community focused and my own values are that way, and I think the values of this organization have been that way for 126 years. And we do 10% of our pre-tax earnings goes to philanthropy. We have a separate corporate foundation that has grown nicely over the years. I didn't set that up. That's been in place for 30 years, but eighth wonder of the world compounding and additional contributions have helped that grow. And I think we look to ourselves as being part of the solution of some of the problems that our community is facing. And so, housing is one of those. We have expertise in that as a bank. And a B Corp is something, you pointed out, it's something we became in 2017. There are several thousand of these internationally. Not that many banks in the U.S., but it's really about... The criteria, at least the original criteria, they're changing them right now. The original criteria were customer, community, employee, environment, and good governance. That basically describes a mutual bank. We weren't doing a whole lot of environment for the first hundred years, but no one really was either. But like community, customer, employee, like that's a mutually owned bank. So, it's just, to me, it was a more modern framework for describing what we do and have been doing for over a century. And it's also easier to say, it's like, oh, it's like what Patagonia does. It's like Stonyfield. It's like Seventh Generation. It's like Ben and Jerry's. Like they're all purpose-driven, and that comes back to the question Joe asked about recruiting. It's like employees, a lot of employees like a purpose-driven organization, you know, that serves the whole community, the whole broad community in every way possible. 

[Zach, 14:42]

 Clay, I feel like Mascoma, when you look at them, we started out talking about how it's a 126-year-old bank here in New Hampshire. I think some bankers might look and say, hey, it's probably a slow-moving type of bank. And clearly, in the last 15 minutes, the listeners will understand that it's not that. With what you mentioned about the B Corp and the purpose-driven component of it, Mascoma Technologies. Given your background, what are some lessons you may have learned, whether it was in the consulting world, whether it was at the company you ran before, Mascoma? How did that prepare you for this? Because this is not your run-of-the-mill, mutual, sleepy savings bank. 

[Clay, 15:22]

 No, we're not. If anything, I can probably be accused of trying to do a little too much, but I never want my board to feel like they're going to push me. So, I think I've learned things about myself. It's really great if my, I'll say, community-based values match that of the employer. I've worked for big publicly traded companies. I've worked for family-owned businesses. And like, if the way I feel about how we invest in our local communities is not the same as those businesses, like, I remember one I worked for in Boston 20 some years ago, the names of the conference rooms were the same as the company's values. But it was like, it was ironic. You're sitting there in the conference room and, like, it's the, whatever fun, fun is a value. I'm like, no one's having any fun, so let’s quit joking around. But I think having those, you’ve got to live your values. If you're going to state them on a wall, you got to stand by them and operate that way. That's, I've learned that a lot about myself as a leader. I think you got to practice empathy. You’ve got to practice transparency, particularly in a mutually owned bank. Or I, like I said, I ran an ESOP employee-owned business for a decade. And that's like, those are, if you show up with some of those things, then you can get the strat, you can sell the strategy. You can describe tough financial situations, and you will have trust, a basis of trust from your employees, your board members, your customers, and people will, will follow. 

[Zach, 16:39]

 It makes perfect sense. And there was a, Vin was in on this, we interviewed a CEO last week, they'll be coming out soon. And one of our colleagues mentioned the quote was a culture eats strategy. Is that what it was, Vin, or culture beats strategy? 

[Clay, 16:52]

 Yeah. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. I think it was, Peter Drucker is one of the original strategic thinkers in kind of modern business says that, and I've used that quote hundreds of times. And I totally believe that. And you got to, if you have a healthy culture, there's not going to be backbiting. There's not going to be that kind of stuff. It's like people are there to kind of help one another and help the whole entity succeed. 

[Zach, 17:17]

 It's a good quote. Clay, wondering, too here, as we transition maybe a little from Mascoma to the overall industry, we're just curious. You're clearly someone who's forward thinking and you guys are doing a lot of neat, interesting things at the bank and in the community. What do you see as, we'll start with threats and then we can go to opportunities after, but what do you see as the biggest threats to the banking industry next 1, 3, 5, 10 years? You name your timeframe. 

[Clay, 17:43]

 Yeah. Uh, so this is going to probably be cliche because probably everyone you're interviewing right now saying these types of things, but I think stable coin and crypto in general has a big potential risk. There was a paper, an ABA paper I read last week that I think there are 19 trillion in deposits in the banking industry. And this paper was putting out that 2 trillion of that could go out into stable coin. And that's what we lend against. That's our business. And so, if that happens, and it depends on how the guardrails are set up for all this. I know the ABA is working hard on that, not making it eligible for FDIC coverage or interest or a bunch of things like that. I think that that is a risk. We see that in New Hampshire where we're based. There's a public deposit investment pool, municipal dollars going to that pool. It was almost, I think it was at the beginning of the year, it was like $750 million. We could leverage those 10 to 1. And these are being invested by municipal taxpayer dollars everywhere but the state. And so, I was like, that's like money that community banks can put to work. And there's such a multiplier on that return. That is one, I think, is stable coin, depending on how that plays out, if it does drain deposits. I mean, margins have been dropping. Obviously, you guys know that better than anyone else. I think that trend is going to continue. It's just going to be more competitive. AI is both a huge threat. And I, actually to our team this morning, I have some members who are like pushing on what we can do with AI. Others who are just like, never give it a thought. I was like, I need everyone, every business line to come back with ideas of how in 2026, you're going to be using AI more in your business. And like there were a bunch of fortune 500 CEOs started using their out loud voices a couple of weeks ago and said, this is, we could see a dramatic reduction in our workforce over the next, in the next several years. And so, we need to become more efficient. It's an impossible labor market where we're based. So, we're not going to necessarily have the people either. So that could help us. The threat on that is, is that, and I'm on the ABA core committee, and there are, I don't know, 12 or 16 of us that are on that, and I'm on a subcommittee, the core of the future. And we've been doing some future visioning, like what can happen? And we did one of these sessions, I don't know, two weeks ago. And it gets pretty dark pretty quickly. What if AI creates an AI agent, your own CFO, for you as an individual. And it talks to other AI agents with other banks, non-banks, Chime, Amazon, who knows? It's just your dollars, you set up the tolerances you want and it auto kind of allocates your own personal capital where it wants to go to the highest and best use. You're not calling your community bank branch manager and saying, roll my CD forward. I think that, again, this will just put more pressure on margin, and I think it has the risk of potentially disintermediating the community banking space more than it already is. 

[Zach, 20:42]

 Two huge issues, I think, right? And, Clay, I'm wondering, I mean, how have you guys looked much yet or talked much about tokenization? Not your own stablecoin but just tokenized and deposited. Any early thoughts on that? 

[Clay, 20:55]

 Yeah. So, the way I'm looking at it right now with our CTO is that in this new tech stack we're building, we need to be able to accommodate digital currency. And, like, we don't have customers banging down the doors for this, but we need to be prepared for when they want to, so that we can have that slide into our payment rails and the global payment rails and be ready for that. And I think that's how we're looking at it right now, which stable coin is going to win out. I don't know. It's the same thing. Like Bitcoin is the, is the king of the hill. There's not, it's, and I think there's probably going to end up being in different flavors, dominance by one, one or one or maybe two. And I'm by no means an expert in that space. 

[Zach, 21:35]

 I feel like we're all trying to learn. I think that's one of the areas, right? And at least you guys are looking at it. I know Vin's the editor of the DCG Bulletin, and I believe it's the next month in that we're coming out with one on stable coins. Not because we're experts, but because we think people need to be thinking about it. 

[Clay, 21:50]

 Totally. Thank you for doing that. We got to get more information out there. And I think it's, it's a total brave new world on this. 

[Vinny, 21:55]

 And there's a lot of sort of various differing views, if you will, you're citing some stuff you read on ABA and that, you know, that's what a lot of folks are looking at. I saw an op-ed, I think it might've been a week and a half ago now and saying how banks must basically issue their own stable coin. And you're sitting there going, yeah, hold on here. Like, I don't know if that's the case just yet, but it's not premature. If nothing else, get your kind of, get your ducks in order and start to figure out what this thing is and how it might influence your business moving forward. Clay, you know, you kind of went through some threats and then you sort of intertwined a little bit of opportunities, but how about for Mascoma, specifically, what do you view as really big opportunities? I mean, you probably touched on some of them already, but I'm just curious as you look ahead, for your business. 

[Clay, 22:48]

 Yeah, I think for us specifically, I mean, the whole reason we did this tech modernization, which has been frankly an enormous headache. I mean, that's like business is hard work, and that's what we signed up for, but we've been breaking trail. So, it's, and I think it'll be easier for other banks to follow. I think there's opportunity for us to be digitally relevant for customers. I mean, how many customers are coming in our branches to open accounts now if they're under a certain age? Like now our deposit account opening is less than five minutes. And so, like, we got to modernize ourself and future proof ourself to be able, I think that's an opportunity for us. And to set up that tech stack in a way that what we were just talking about to be able to transact with different currencies, if that's what our customers want. I do think that for us, the Mascoma Technologies, the stuff that we're doing, has really great promise. I think it's, we're onto something and then, you know, but it's a tech startup. It's like a restaurant, a lot, most of them fail. And so, but I think that that's something that we have a board of very, some very technology savvy, very experienced technologists who have, you know, from the venture space have had startups. So, we have some really great counsel and guidance in this that I think is setting us up for success. And I think that if you marry what we have as community banks, and I think by and large, almost all community banks have this really strong service culture, and you marry that with really good technology, I think that can be a winning hand going forward. And then I feel better as a rural bank, I think this is an opportunity because the big super regionals, they don't really play in these markets anywhere near as much as they once did. So, it's kind of opening the playing field to community banks. And we're in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont. It's rural. I think it's an opportunity for us from a market perspective. 

[Vinny, 24:33]

  And simultaneously, correct me if I'm wrong, Clay, but from working with other institutions and you're sort of in that geography, there's been more, there’s been some population growth in the wake of COVID as folks have kind of moved out of those urban population centers. It's almost like the piece; the size of the pie might be getting bigger for somebody like Mascoma. 

[Clay, 24:54]

  It's certainly, well, yes. And I'll say no, because like Vermont, it's actually now proven out. Those people, those numbers have left. Since COVID. Like they moved up here. People have been called back to work. You know, it's not, things are, housing is crazy expensive up here. I mean, it's just like... It's tight in a lot of parts of New England. It's just, I think I read something yesterday, New Hampshire is like the 12th most expensive renter's market in the country. And the county where we're based is the most expensive in New Hampshire. So, it's not an easy place to live. It's cold. A lot of people notice that. New Hampshire, Southern New Hampshire in particular, is growing quite nicely. And so, we're doing more down there now, too. 

[Vinny, 25:35]

 Yeah. One of the questions I sort of volleyed around with Joe and Zach and they said, well, I don't know if you should ask this, but I'm sort of curious if you think New Hampshire is overbanked or underbanked or both. You know, you look at a market like Portsmouth and for our listeners, it's a very, I guess, an affluent area. It's really growing at a significant clip, a beautiful place. And virtually every institution within 30, 40, 50 miles is there on the water, on the water as well. 

[Clay, 26:04]

 Yeah, it’s beautiful, yeah.

[Vinny, 26:05]

 And then yet you get up into the Northern, you know, kingdom, if you will. And, and that in those areas, it's, there's less competition. I'm just kind of curious what, what your reaction would be to that statement. 

[Clay, 26:17]

 Um, I think there are some overbanked areas and we see the deposit, uh, pressures and I know your D 360, you could see that all day long. Like we don't have, even Concord, Main Street. Like you can't, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a community bank. Um, And I think Portsmouth is kind of like that as well. We're not in either place. We have business interests down there, but we don't have a branch. And when I was interviewing for this job, I kind of put my management consulting hat on and I took a step back and looked at all the census data and all the growth stuff. And you look at Northern New England, the three growth areas are Portland, Burlington, and Southern New Hampshire. I think that's, and that's still 10 years later where the real growth is. And so, Coost County, Northern Vermont, New Hampshire, the Northeast Kingdom, Northern Vermont, it's gorgeous. And, and yet there's not a whole lot of economy up there. 

[Vinny, 27:06]

 Yeah. I guess, Clay, I'd be remiss if I did not bring up that you are our first podcast guest from the great hometown of Westchester, Pennsylvania. And we just discovered that both you and I went to the exact same high school. So…

[Clay, 27:21]

 That's right.

[Vinny, 27:22]

 I'm guessing you probably had a Super Bowl party this past February. 

[Clay, 27:27]

 I have a Super Bowl party, and at the risk of divulging something personal about myself, I told my daughters, who are high school, college age, I said, if the birds win a second Super Bowl, I'm going to get an Eagles tattoo. They forgot, but I didn't. 

[Vinny, 27:46]

 Oh, boy. I didn't go to that extreme. I only have a seven-year-old, so I didn't go there yet, but... 

[Zach, 27:52]

 Hopefully they're not listening to On the Balance Sheet. 

[Vinny, 27:56]

 Something tells me they're not. Clay, thank you so much for joining us. Joe, Zach, any other concluding words? 

[Zach, 28:03]

 We're good. Clay, thanks again. This is terrific. 

[Joe, 28:07]

 Thanks, Clay. 

[Clay, 28:08]

Zach, Vin, Joe, great talking to you guys. Thanks a lot. I appreciate you guys putting the podcast on and inviting me to be part of it. 

[Vinny, 28:17]

 Welcome back. I'll tell you, Zach, that was an awesome interview with Clay. He, I think, is not your run-of-the-mill typical executive at a mutual bank. You've got somebody who really is forward-thinking. 

[Zach, 28:33]

 Yeah, Vin, absolutely. That's one of probably my many takeaways here was just the conversation around Mascoma Technologies and how you have a $3 billion mutual savings bank who's sitting back saying, hey, we got to stay relevant. And they come up with almost a startup for their core kind of general ledger software, right? And now they're commercializing it. And that's an opportunity that they saw with technology and then they lean into it and invested in it. And now it's, it's a really cool piece of, of that bank, which is a deposit taker and a lender. And now they have this piece of it. And I would encourage folks to look at Mascoma. They have a whole page on their site dedicated to stratum. That's really cool. You know what they're, what they're doing there. And I think that probably delves into some of the other things, too, he talked about with the threats. It was AI and it was stable coin, that type of thing. And I think those could be opportunities, too, that he mentioned, but I think he's very on top of, hey, we got to be looking ahead at this type of stuff and not be caught off guard because things are moving fast, right? And Clay seems like somebody who's willing to move fast and to pivot and to make sure people are all in. I thought that was really cool for the size of the bank they are. They're not JP Morgan. They're not some big tech bank, right? So, I think that was a really awesome what they're doing there. 

[Vinny, 29:52]

 Yeah, Zach, all of those - great points. And it kind of balances that with the community-based values culture. He talks so much about how to bring folks in and sort of how to give them autonomy and how important it is. They're a huge player in affordable housing. They do a lot of different things for their communities. And as he mentioned, they're kind of more rurally based. And so, again, it's sort of the marriage of forward thinking, with the service culture of a community institution. So, that to me was kind of a really interesting balance that they have there. And I'll be keeping my eyes on them. And I guess I'd be remiss if I didn't mention, it was really cool to find out that Clay and I grew up probably within one mile of each other. So that's probably the last podcast guest we'll have that I'll be able to say that about, but thanks so much for listening. And we've got plenty more great episodes coming your way here on On the Balance Sheet. 

[Dana, 30:56]

 On the Balance Sheet is a podcast produced by Darling Consulting Group. All views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests are solely their own and may not represent those of DCG or the affiliated business. Qualifying any financial or investment references made during the recordings is highly recommended as they may not be reflective of the current markets. More information about Darling Consulting Group can be found by visiting our website at www.darlingconsulting.com or emailing us at info@darlingconsulting.com. Today's music is provided by Michael Ramir and can be found on Mixkit.

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