Introducing Mascoma Technologies - From Legacy Cores to Agile Banking Platforms

Episode Summary In this episode of Wrestling Payments, Joe Casali from NEACH sits down with Raphael Reznek and Ingrid Hebert from Mascoma Bank and Mascoma Technologies to explore an incredible success story: how a community bank built its own fintech platform from scratch. After years of vendor disappointments and legacy system limitations, Mascoma took the bold step of building in-house—and the results are remarkable. Raphael shares how their custom platform now runs multiple cores in parallel while providing real-time access to customer data, transforming operations from manual letter-sorting to automated efficiency. Ingrid reveals the cultural transformation that made it possible, including "Pivot Tuesdays" and Agile methodologies that kept stakeholders engaged. This episode proves that community banks don't have to wait for big vendors to innovate—they can lead the charge themselves.

Guests-at-a-Glance

Raphael Reznek CTO, Mascoma Bank and President, Mascoma Technologies A visionary leader who spearheaded the revolutionary in-house platform build, merging compliance with cutting-edge infrastructure to give community banks unprecedented control. LinkedIn

Ingrid Hebert Director of Service Delivery and Implementation, Mascoma Technologies The operational mastermind behind Mascoma's cultural transformation, driving internal platform builds that perfectly align technology with banking operations. LinkedIn

Key Insights

Building Your Own Path When Vendors Fall Short Mascoma's journey proves that sometimes the best solution is the one you create yourself. After years of vendor promises and legacy limitations, they built a data hub that integrates old and new systems without the risks of total replacement. Their platform now processes transactions that once required manual sorting (imagine a semi-truck full of letters!) and provides real-time visibility into data quality issues. The breakthrough insight: you don't have to choose between legacy stability and modern capabilities—you can have both.

"Pivot Tuesdays" and the Power of Agile Banking Mascoma transformed not just their technology but their entire culture. By embedding compliance, risk, and operations teams into every development stage, they created powerful feedback loops that led to faster pivots and stronger buy-in. When malformed data started filling their new exception queue, operations wasn't frustrated—they were thrilled to finally see problems in real-time. The lesson: successful banking innovation comes from building systems with the people who use them, not just for them.

A Scalable Model for Community Banking's Future What makes Mascoma's approach truly exciting is its scalability. Their platform already supports other institutions, especially during mergers, allowing banks to consolidate systems without starting over. Instead of "staples and gum" integration, banks can plug into a shared data hub that runs multiple cores and unifies digital tools. This isn't just internal efficiency—it's reshaping what's possible for community banking.

Transcript

Introducing Mascoma Technologies - From Legacy Cores to Agile Banking Platforms
NEACH - Wrestling Payments 

Season 3, Episode 14

[00:00:00] Ingrid Hebert: when we were building it, we included the risk department, we included compliance, we included retail. So throughout the internal development cycle, there was feedback. There was this feedback loop with bankers in mind, and that was a big difference from every other partner that we tried or platform because they had a potential platform that we can implement.

[00:00:24] Ingrid Hebert: But there was a lot of rework that had to be done. To take banking into consideration and make it work for us as a community bank.

[00:00:32] ​

[00:01:01] Joe Casali: And welcome to wrestling Payments. I have very special guests today and a really fantastic story. It's something I'm really curious about, and I'm gonna, gonna let the guests introduce themselves and then go from there.

[00:01:15] Ingrid Hebert: Hi, I'm Ingrid Hebert and I'm the director of Service Delivery and implementation at Mascoma Technologies.

[00:01:23] Raphael Reznek: Hi, and I'm Raphael Reznek. I am the CTO of Mascoma Bank and President of Mascoma Technologies.

[00:01:31] Joe Casali: I am so glad you said those, both those things together because, NEACH is a member organization. We have member banks, but you, you threw in. Mascoma Technologies and it's a really interesting story. first of all, what is Mascoma Technologies?

[00:01:48] Raphael Reznek: Do you want me to take that Ingrid?

[00:01:51] Ingrid Hebert: Go for it. It's your brain child.

[00:01:53] Raphael Reznek: Okay. Mascoma Technologies is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mascoma Bank and we it so that we could, share the technology that we've built integrate with, modern platforms at Mascoma Bank, with other financial institutions.

[00:02:14] Joe Casali: And that's the story. Right. That's so interesting because, in today's FinTech world, people are out looking for solution providers and who does what piece of it and who does another piece of it. Or maybe you're with a, you know, traditional FinTech and they have a whole product offering, but you said. No, we're gonna do it ourselves. Can you tell me how did you get to that decision? What are the forces around that?

[00:02:43] Raphael Reznek: Well, it we started looking at decomposing our tech stack and attempting to compose some something new, adding components, adding fintechs or having some form of decision in what products we were purchasing and what products we could offer to our customers. And it's. It's very difficult for a small community financial institution to do that.

[00:03:07] Raphael Reznek: The tools were just not there. And there are providers that can make it difficult for you to incorporate other, platforms. So we, we started decomposing it and really determined that it was a bit of a Jenga tower. You pull the wrong block and the whole thing comes tumbling down. So what we did is, We stopped trying to decompose it initially and, and determine that perhaps we should look at how we can inject new platforms into the current ecosystem while still running the current ecosystem. So if we wanted a, a new generation core, what we wanted it to run alongside all of our other platforms as if it were part of the existing tech stack. We, we would have to inject that into the existing text stack. So that's how we approached it. And, the goal was giving choice back to ourselves. Give the ability to choose that, know, it's an automatic no currently, and we wanted to make it a decision. So maybe it's a no, maybe it's a yes, but we at least have a decision to make or a choice in the matter.

[00:04:25] Joe Casali: And

[00:04:25] Raphael Reznek: how it came about.

[00:04:26] Joe Casali: what gets you to that point? Because I'm familiar with the way it is, not really deeply familiar with the way it is, but generally familiar with the way it is, you know. You usually see fintechs pop up and say, I want to enter the banking space, or the, the traditional guys saying, we're gonna add these new services.

[00:04:48] Joe Casali: We're gonna acquire this one, we're gonna build that internally. This is a, this is a big build decision for a community bank. How, how did you get there? What advice could you offer others considering the same thing?

[00:05:03] Ingrid Hebert: for us. I think it has been a journey. We're at like year six of this journey where when we started we thought, well, maybe we can partner with someone else to, to build this. So we looked at potential platforms that said they could do what we were looking for, and you know, two years down the road we find out, well, it's not exactly what we were looking for.

[00:05:28] Ingrid Hebert: So then. We readjust, we pivot. We said, okay, can we build this internally? And then you go into, okay, let's, do we have the right team members to build this internally? Do we probably need our own development team? And slowly but surely we came to the realization that if what we wanted is not out there yet and we needed to build it.

[00:05:53] Joe Casali: Fantastic. Anything else on that point? Raphael?

[00:05:57] Raphael Reznek: Yes. I would, would add to what Ingrid just said in that, the tech itself is, is not necessarily novel. It exists in other industries. There are plenty of tools, even online tools, where you can sign up and connect two systems or three or 10, and they integrate. You know, there's so many platforms that integrate with Salesforce, for example, and it's not necessarily a headache to make it happen. So we wanted to, to bring that type of technology into our institution. But the, the actual novel component of it is combining that technology with the regulatory requirements, the compliance and the governance necessary to operate within a, community fi. So that's, that's really what we did is we combined more modern technology or modern technology with the community fi knowledge. And so it's not, what we built is not a point to point integration tool you might find, existing out there. It's, it's really a data hub governance, compliance, and. Regulatory oversight in mind, knowing that as an fi we're, we're being audited all the time and we have to be able to support, what we say is occurring, with an audit,

[00:07:21] Raphael Reznek: so, or an examination.

[00:07:23] Raphael Reznek: So it's, built with that capability in mind.

[00:07:27] Ingrid Hebert: And when we were building it, we included the risk department, we included compliance, we included retail. So throughout the internal development cycle, there was feedback. There was this feedback loop with bankers in mind, and that was a big difference from every other partner that we tried or platform because they had a potential platform that we can implement.

[00:07:51] Ingrid Hebert: But there was a lot of rework that had to be done. To take banking into consideration and make it work for us as a community bank.

[00:08:00] Joe Casali: Right. I mean, regulation is huge. It's a, a FinTech could probably dodge as, and correct me if I'm wrong, Dodge a little bit of the, compliance, they're gonna put it on ultimately the financial institution. But in your case, you, you incorporated that. Did you, when you were doing that piece, and don't you know if I ask any questions, I'm gonna ask questions, feel free not to answer any secret sauce questions. but did you have regulators involved in that part? was there a, Hey, here's what we're gonna do. Do you see any problems with that?

[00:08:34] Raphael Reznek: Absolutely. We, personally meet with the regulators, on a, almost a quarterly basis.

[00:08:41] Joe Casali: Great.

[00:08:42] Raphael Reznek: regulator in particular,

[00:08:44] Joe Casali: Sure. and, where was the, like the, the nugget of the beginning? what was the, straw that broke the camel's back? That one thing that made you say, you know what, there's gotta be a better way. Let's do it ourselves.

[00:08:59] Raphael Reznek: it was when our, chief marketing officer came to me and said, Hey, I. This is when I first started with the, the with Mascoma Bank. And I have, I don't have a banking background, I have a technology background. So our chief marketing officer came to me and asked a question about our debit cards and wanting to implement some programs around local purchasing.

[00:09:22] Raphael Reznek: And, just some, some things we wanted to do to apply, to, to what our customers were doing, at point of sale. we started digging in and I call it the, the Frankenstein model. You can bolt some stuff on. It's generally a batch operation. You can, you're reactive, so you're getting data a day, two days a week, a month later, after the customer, after the transaction is, is old. and you're not, that you're, you're not involved in that customer experience. So we, we determined that we don't want to be involved, a week after it's happened. We want to be involved as it's occurring. That's when we can best serve our customer. And because of the super tight coupling between our card processor and our core provider, we couldn't insert ourselves. It was always after the fact. So we. Determined that we needed to be able to insert ourselves, into the transaction as it's occurring, meaning we had to be aware of the transaction as it's occurring and be able to act. That was really the sweater thread we started pulling on and just kept pulling on it and pulling on it and pulling on it until, you know, there's obviously you're left with that bear. Core system and the transaction engines and how they interoperate and how, we do or do not have access to that data. And in most cases we do not.

[00:10:57] Joe Casali: So, I can ask you this question because, you came in, And this might be a, this, this might make the, uh, the, the prera. most of the time people don't think about how payments work, how they flow, how, how the systems operate. And we even had a class called, it's not magic. Did, were you surprised coming into the, the banking system that weren't more automated and interconnected and easy.

[00:11:26] Raphael Reznek: Yes, yes. Prior to coming into banking as a customer of the banking system, I had this preconceived notion that it was all modernized and automated, and I had nothing to worry about.

[00:11:41] Joe Casali: Surprise.

[00:11:43] Raphael Reznek: Right.

[00:11:44] Joe Casali: Surprise.

[00:11:46] Raphael Reznek: Pulling, pulling the curtain back and taking a look. It's, it's very scary

[00:11:51] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:52] Raphael Reznek: how, how many systems it takes and how many, many different organizations and people have to put their hands on the data for it to flow properly and how much manual effort there is in the, system.

[00:12:07] Raphael Reznek: All of this, there's a, a tremendous amount of process debt that has been built around these. Legacy systems, I'll call them because of the technical debt.

[00:12:18] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:19] Raphael Reznek: So there's just debt that just keeps, you know, compounding at the financial institution and, and pretty soon you have people manual processes and they're not sure why they're doing them.

[00:12:30] Raphael Reznek: That's just, that's the way we do it. So yes, I was quite surprised.

[00:12:36] Joe Casali: Ingrid, were you around when, when he, when Raphael came on?

[00:12:41] Ingrid Hebert: I came. In about a year or two after he did. I've been in banking for about 16 years. I've always been surprised, though, with the decisions that bankers have to make. So there's a lot of potential platforms out there with new technology, but when you're considering a new vendor, you're left with, well, do we wanna have integration within our backend systems or do we wanna have a good customer experience?

[00:13:10] Ingrid Hebert: And oftentimes you couldn't get both with one platform, you had to make a choice, like the customer has a good experience, but then you have a backend where that requires a lot of manual intervention. Or you have the backend systems integrated into each other, digital banking into core, into payments. But then the customer experience looked like it was still, we're still in the nineties.

[00:13:32] Ingrid Hebert: So, coming into Mascoma and seeing what they were trying to achieve and all of the new technology and the frame of thinking, like, you don't have to choose one or the other. We're, we're going for both. We're going for everything.

[00:13:49] Joe Casali: Can, can, let me interrupt. Can you, what is the vision?

[00:13:53] Ingrid Hebert: Yeah. think for me coming in and being in in this for five years, I think the vision is having the ability to not compromise. So as a financial institution, a small community bank, being able to, see a FinTech out there or a new platform and being able to easily integrate that new platform or system into, into your current environment.

[00:14:24] Ingrid Hebert: Not have to compromise on customer experience, not have to compromise on automation, on, security and access to your data and your customer's data.

[00:14:36] Joe Casali: Excellent. Okay. Excellent, excellent. so let's talk about, so I have to tell a story, right? So we have to talk about, you know, when, when Luke has to kill the the death star. So when, when did you think, oh, we're in trouble? Did you ever think, uh oh, we're in trouble?

[00:14:55] Raphael Reznek: I, I think there were several moments.

[00:14:58] Ingrid Hebert: Yeah.

[00:14:59] Joe Casali: And what, what happened to take you out of that? Was it? I'll just leave it open. What, what happened? did someone come into the rescue? did you solve your own problem?

[00:15:09] Ingrid Hebert: I can't tell you how many times we've pivoted. 'cause you know when Raphael said in the beginning we were looking at cards and that card payments rail and how do we improve that? And initially that was our. Ultimate goal, like having our own platform for card and card processing. And we moved further into that path and said, well, that's only a piece of the customer experience and a piece of access to our data cards is only a small piece that sits over here.

[00:15:43] Ingrid Hebert: How do we get to like the center of it all and then pivoting from cards to, okay, how do we, Become the place where everything coming into our core or our systems touch base with us before it flows out somewhere else.

[00:16:01] Ingrid Hebert: Raphael.

[00:16:02] Joe Casali: anything else? that's, I mean, that's, if you're not a banker or you're not in payments or you're not in finance, that was exciting. anything to add to that, that was excellent.

[00:16:12] Raphael Reznek: No, I think Ingrid described it quite well.

[00:16:15] Joe Casali: And then, what did, who did you find? Did, did, so sorry. We tell a, a StoryBrand here and part of the story is who's the guide? You know, are the hero because you've, you're going through the, the challenges and the development. Who was your guide through this? Was it regulators? Was it. I would guess it wasn't fintechs because they said, yeah, we can do that. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, we can't do that.

[00:16:42] Raphael Reznek: I think that's been part of the issue, Joe, is that there are not really a lot of people that can guide one through this and in fact not. Yeah, and we've have found zero people who have, in a community fi implemented a platform that allows for multiple cores to run behind the scenes and to give the fi access to the data before it even hits the core. But we haven't found anybody that, that's actually done that in the community fi.

[00:17:15] Joe Casali: Are, are there, sorry. Are there many at all that do similar?

[00:17:20] Raphael Reznek: There are a few. Yes, I would

[00:17:22] Joe Casali: Okay.

[00:17:22] Raphael Reznek: there are, there are some, you know, the larger institutions build their own, data hubs. there are some smaller ones that have been successful. I know of a few, that have built, somewhat of, what we've built, but it's, internal. It's, they've not commercialized it or attempted to commercialize it.

[00:17:43] Joe Casali: Excellent.

[00:17:44] Raphael Reznek: But there, there are a few that have done some of what we've done.

[00:17:48] Joe Casali: Okay. and along the way, Were there any surprises? And when I say surprises, good surprises, things that you found that, oh, hey, if we just do this one more thing, this all flows together, anything like that?

[00:18:05] Raphael Reznek: Yeah. I would say one of the, good surprises we found is that when we, I. Built out, some of our, change data, capture data broker capabilities. This is what synchronizes, systems that you can manage multiple cores with a single pane of glass. And we've moved our, customer system of record out of the core. but we still have to keep it synchronized. So as you can imagine, we've been on our legacy core for over 30 years. data, in that system was not necessarily governed well. So we, built our system of record outside the core in Salesforce, we built the integration into the synchronization data governance, so that when social security numbers and addresses and everything came across, it wasn't, if it was malformed or the correct content. would drop it into an exception queue for operations to take a look at. So we got it all set up, we turned it on, and all of a sudden the queue is filled thousands of records and the, the product and development team was like, oh goodness. Operations is gonna be super angry. What we found out is that they were thrilled because they've never had anything that's told them that the data was malformed. So now anytime there's malformed data coming from the core, it gets dropped into this exception queue and they can fix it, and then it's solved. They don't have to, we don't have to boil the ocean. They get to do it iteratively, and they're now made aware. So it was a lack of awareness in the past, so they were super thrilled. And it's now a, a really cool feature in the system you can now practice data governance against your core or cores.

[00:20:08] Joe Casali: you touched on so many things there. That was, uh, I followed along. I, I don't know if you saw me clapping when everything popped out. That was, that's great. You know, for the, for the. who don't listen a lot. Governance is how you, how you organize your data, what are the rules that you follow along with the data. It wasn't like someone in charge of it, who's the governor? And so just, just to be clear that that was fantastic because you got it right where it needed to go. so much so you just distracted me from my, where I was going next. Um, governance. Oh. so I don't wanna be telling stories here. but folks unfamiliar with legacy systems, I think it may be, see if this analogy works. we need to update our systems. It needs to happen now. It, it's, it's, there's a new regulation, a new notch of rules, something that needs to be put in effect. we just patch this right now. be okay for a little while, and then that gets forgotten, and then the next rule change comes along and the next thing changes, and we could update everything, or, or we could just make it so it works. It is 50 years of patches and gum and, and staples. so coming out of at it fresh, which is, you know, for all the, all those decisions along the way where you're like, well, well. It's a lot of wells to take in at once, so most people just say, well, we'll just do another patch. This is, this is a fantastic approach. because the, the, you know, the, the standards haven't changed as far as file formats, card formats, but the technology certainly have changed and the, I mean, card add-ons, there's, there's so many APIs and, MasterCard send Visa, direct, all, all the other things. unless you're up to speed, you can't take advantage of you're, you're, and then you find yourself, I think you mentioned this in the beginning, you're finding yourself doing a procedure because you can't do it that way, but you can have a person in the back, you know, filling in the dots and, and crossing the T's. yes. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:22:23] Raphael Reznek: Yeah, absolutely. So it's, you know, if you think about non-banking systems, if you think about, other organizations that have access to. Microsoft's full capabilities, Amazon's full capabilities, Salesforce, all of the AI that exists. Imagine if you could apply AI in, financial institutions to your data.

[00:22:49] Raphael Reznek: Like you have access to the data, so you can apply AI to it. You can apply AI to connecting the systems. So the, the issue is really not that it couldn't be done, the issue is the amount of time and resources it would it takes to integrate financial institutions. We're, we're talking, we're not talking weeks and months, we're talking years It takes to integrate systems.

[00:23:14] Raphael Reznek: We need to compress that. We need to compress it into days able to connect systems in a financial institution. And, and that's our goal is to compress that into days by. Having access to the latest technology, APIs and then fronting. You know, for example, one of our legacy cores, has event streaming.

[00:23:35] Raphael Reznek: So it will, publish events, that occur within the core system, that takes upwards of 15 minutes for an event to be published. And in most cases, the data that was changed. Or added is not a part of the payload of the event. So we have to, to bring that legacy core up to our specifications, we have to build of these tools for consuming the event, listening for to the, to the event stream, the APIs for polling, and in some cases actually polling the database to build our own event driving capability with that. Legacy system and we have to do that often. We have to front end, know, other systems so we can serialize de serialize batch files and turn them into transactions that run across the APIs. So we have to do this so that we can implement quickly. We need to get that velocity to value to something respectable.

[00:24:39] Raphael Reznek: For an fi it,

[00:24:41] Joe Casali: Hmm.

[00:24:41] Raphael Reznek: you know, there are many fis that are constantly implementing. Not getting a return on the system they've implemented because they implement it 70% of the way and then they have to jump to the next thing because they don't have time to finish that value out of that existing, the system that they've just implemented.

[00:24:58] Raphael Reznek: So we, we want to compress that time and make it much easier to implement these new platforms.

[00:25:05] Ingrid Hebert: Especially for smaller financial institutions that don't have development teams that are, don't have the resources that. Large financial institutions have, it's hard to stay competitive as technology moves really quickly at a smaller financial institution. So I, part of what we're driving towards is being able to support community mutuals.

[00:25:29] Ingrid Hebert: In the area and, you know, throughout the nation to be able to stay competitive against those larger financial institutions that have the resources that they don't, and the platform that we're delivering allows them to stay nimble and deploy new technology a lot easier and, and quickly.

[00:25:46] Joe Casali: So soapbox. if you're not the industry, you're just listening for fun, the community bank. Is more than just another bank. It's a, it, it's connected to a neighborhood, a, a city, a town, a a county. And they're involved in the account in the county. So you may say Big Bank has all of these features and services. Yeah. But they don't, they don't really know you. They don't know where the needs are. And it's, this is a, this, you can't read this on paper. This is a real. Ingrained thing. so what you're saying is so important, especially for the folks that don't know, a, from a, things that people don't know. you compare processing transactions to something physical, like the number of transactions you process a day. Is it like a mailbox, I'm sorry, a mailbox full, a mail truck full. An 18 wheeler full, how many, how do I think about how many transactions are flowing through the organization?

[00:26:56] Raphael Reznek: So our organization would be like a semi-truck full of letters,

[00:27:01] Joe Casali: Okay.

[00:27:01] Raphael Reznek: have to manually pull each one out and sort it.

[00:27:06] Joe Casali: I, I, that's, that really, that question really was for me because I. I know what you, the banks do. I never imagined it. How, how much is that? Um, really interesting. I wouldn't wanna be on that trailer. any other, any other, trips along the way? Any other, challenges? And then let's, we'll talk about the successes.

[00:27:27] Raphael Reznek: There's always the, the challenges that. You know, the risks involved are, are great. You know, can the, can a vendor deliver? Can an internal team deliver Can the bank consume what we've built? Right? Are we prepared for that? Are the disclosures ready when we are ready to launch Online? Account opening is everything lined up. It, it takes a lot to change. You know, 120 5-year-old institution who's. Used to doing things a certain way, and every institution is like this. They're used to doing things a certain way operationally and, and, change is not something financial institution is good at because you want consistency in the processing of transactions,

[00:28:13] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:13] Raphael Reznek: So any variance in that variance is what is required for innovation. But you don't want variance because you don't. You want that transaction to, To flow all the way through and not be impacted by any variants. So I would say our, one of our, one of the things we focused on early, and it was still difficult for us, was, change management

[00:28:40] Ingrid Hebert: And building a culture. Yeah, and building a culture around change that's comfortable with change. 'cause culture is really ingrained in banking. If you come into a financial institution and has had the same. Core system for 30 plus years. There's a lot of, this is how we do things because we've always done it this way.

[00:29:00] Ingrid Hebert: So just opening up the conversation around the agile frame of thinking and comfort around change and evolving through that as we develop the technology, making sure that the culture within the bank is staying in sync with that.

[00:29:18] Joe Casali: I, I'm so glad you got there. That was, I, I, it was one of the questions I forgot, but you remind me as you were speaking, you know, and I'll give this example, ai, you mentioned AI earlier. I think AI has so much potential. I talk to members about ai, I don't get eye contact. I get a lot of looking away and a lot of, mm-hmm. A lot of just nods. From this endeavor, it changes hard, you know, I've been doing my job, I'm good at my job. I know what I'm doing. How, how did you, and I imagine there was challenges, I don't want to ask about 'em, but how, how, what was the, the shining building on the hill, or what was the, the, an incentive that brought people along?

[00:30:09] Ingrid Hebert: I think it was a mix of things. A lot of of the departments were used to, oh, if we need a new feature or a new platform, we can go to a vendor, get something that's pre-built, we configure it, we deploy it, and we're done. So getting into the habit of, oh, we're gonna build something. It's gonna be small, it's not gonna have all the features you're looking for.

[00:30:30] Ingrid Hebert: We're gonna iterate on that and slowly it will build it into what you want, but it'll also be nimble so that. By the time we deliver it to you, it'll be what you need now, and as you move forward, we can change it and adjust it as needed. So just thinking around that, that delivery process for the departments was challenging.

[00:30:54] Ingrid Hebert: I think just the fact that they have to be part of the building of the platform, the building of what they're looking for, and. Them sitting down to think about, well, what is it exactly that I need? Because we don't necessarily wanna recreate the systems that we've been using for 30 years. But it's hard to walk away from that when that, when that's what you're used to.

[00:31:20] Ingrid Hebert: So there's, there's been a lot of, training, a lot of involvement from the, education team, uh, and really buy-in from the leadership is the most important because. If not, if everybody's not on board, then it's hard to talk about it and get a positive feedback. You need to hear it from everybody within the team, a consistent message.

[00:31:44] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm. And you used the word earlier, and I don't know if you were. Just using the word or you were using, are you using agile development? So that, I mean, I, I don't think of that word with banking, much because you know, like you have a conversion. There's, there's a lot of things that happen and then you convert. agile is the idea that we're gonna build these three features and then we're gonna add three more. Then we're going to, and to the point where. you could keep developing it over time, but you could get it to where you want it to be. Right.

[00:32:21] Ingrid Hebert: Right.

[00:32:22] Joe Casali: That was a good guess. Excellent. Um, that's really interesting.

[00:32:27] Joe Casali: and that, how was that accepted yet?

[00:32:30] Raphael Reznek: that. So when I joined the institution in 2017, first hire was an agile coach. So we, I. We knew that we would have to change the culture and change the way we operated. We just didn't know how we were going to do it. so we had to practice and fail a lot and recover, fast, if you will, and

[00:32:54] Joe Casali: Yep.

[00:32:54] Raphael Reznek: try again.

[00:32:55] Joe Casali: Yeah.

[00:32:55] Raphael Reznek: we ended up, changing a lot of the terminology in, agile and, and Scrum because people took it as a. Technology thing.

[00:33:09] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:10] Raphael Reznek: you have someone in account maintenance or account servicing, and they're like being told to sprint and to have standups, and they're like, well, that's a technology thing.

[00:33:20] Raphael Reznek: So we changed all the terminology. So instead of sprints, we have hikes. So we're located, you know, in Northern New England. So we have mountains. So we hike and we have summits, and we have fire towers. So we changed the terminology to try and increase the acceptance. Then we, we discussed and it's, you know, this is not a set it and forget it.

[00:33:39] Raphael Reznek: This is constant. It's every day we have to practice. And a lot of, you know, we have to explain like, what, what does it mean? So we, we use the example of our team, you know, we have some stakeholders come to us and they say we need a car to go from point A to point B.

[00:33:58] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:58] Raphael Reznek: And you know, traditionally you would. Immediately start on the project, get the requirements, however long that takes and build, start working on that car. And after a couple years, you deliver the car With Agile, we start with a razor scooter and we give them the Raiders razor scooter, and they're like, great, but you know, it's gonna rain. So you know, a razor scooter with an umbrella.

[00:34:21] Raphael Reznek: Maybe we, we move to a bicycle, maybe a, an electric bike. We work on it for six months and after six months we get to this point where they have an enclosed electric bike, and then they say to us, you know what? We've realized we can just take the bus. So instead of spending three years and delivering a car and having them tell us what they're taking the bus, we've

[00:34:44] Joe Casali: Right.

[00:34:45] Raphael Reznek: months

[00:34:46] Joe Casali: Nice. Yeah.

[00:34:47] Raphael Reznek: we're all better educated for it.

[00:34:49] Raphael Reznek: We've learned a lot. The stakeholders have learned a lot, and we haven't wasted three years.

[00:34:56] Joe Casali: Nice. Very nice.

[00:34:57] Raphael Reznek: people took to that.

[00:34:59] Ingrid Hebert: And there's a lot to be said for the journey of learning and that failing fast, and I wouldn't necessarily call it failing. It's like. Learning opportunities because with every project or every path forward that we chose, like when we started on the cards, we learned a lot. We learned a about how our systems integrated with the card network, what we were doing, what we were manually doing, that we didn't wanna do.

[00:35:23] Ingrid Hebert: Our data where resides, how is it changing and where, and when we pivoted from that project, it's like, okay, we need to put this down, but we've learned all of this and now we're choosing a different path forward. So each pivoting moment was still a learning experience that fed into the different path forward.

[00:35:45] Ingrid Hebert: So it was, it was still very beneficial. The five years that we spent and we've pivoted so many times, we got here to a product that truly, feeds the need.

[00:35:58] Joe Casali: Let, let's talk about that for a second. So, would you say you've succeeded and. Where are you? I, if I recall our earlier conversation, you are, you are going to use it, but you are also gonna help others.

[00:36:15] Raphael Reznek: Yep.

[00:36:16] Ingrid Hebert: Yes.

[00:36:17] Raphael Reznek: Yep. Yeah, we've, we've been operating the data hub for almost a year and a half

[00:36:23] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:25] Raphael Reznek: we, we process roughly on average, north of a million. API calls a day. 1.3 million is the last time I checked with the platform, with Stratum,

[00:36:38] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:36:40] Raphael Reznek: we are implementing the, Salesforce based, bank ops, which is, you know, the single pane of glass for account maintenance. Customer maintenance, product maintenance. also our customer 360. So all within the same platform. our call center operates it, so all of the interactions with the customers are built in. And then marketing is, uh, also on Salesforce. So it creates a little bit of that virtuous cycle so we can take that customer activity and have that impact, marketing and et cetera. so we're right now in the process of implementing, a card scheme and card So that is where we start our certification process at the end of the month, and we will hopefully be live on the new platform in September.

[00:37:30] Joe Casali: excellent. when you say Salesforce, does that mean, do I don't know if you have treasury services? Do they have access too? Lovely, lovely, lovely. All in one place. Uh, and, you, you're located up, up in New Hampshire.

[00:37:47] Raphael Reznek: We are,

[00:37:48] Joe Casali: do you have, this is, this is where the secret sauce starts coming in. do you have other, other folks looking around?

[00:37:56] Raphael Reznek: we do. We, we hope to implement at three institutions in 25.

[00:38:00] Joe Casali: Wow. 25. That's this year. Geez.

[00:38:04] Raphael Reznek: Yep, yep. We're in process three currently, and then we're going to be, we're working on, you know, what 26 looks like, for us as far as, other institutions we're, we're working with quite a few at this point. they're, they all have varying use cases. It's, some are implementing new gen cores and they wanna operate. in parallel with their existing cores. So when you log into, for example, when you log into our digital banking, there's a potential that you could have an account on our new core and accounts on our old core, but you'll see all of the accounts as if there were one core. And so there are institutions that want to be able to do that. basically build new products that they can't on their existing core. And then there are other institutions that want. To implement the bank ops and the management pane and, you know, the single pane of

[00:38:58] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:59] Raphael Reznek: be able to implement their SOP and policy into the workflows. and then others want to connect. they're doing m and a, so the out of the gate, they want to consolidate a GL and then they wanna start consolidating the external platforms. Go to a single digital banking platform instead of having two or three.

[00:39:22] Joe Casali: That's fascinating. So, so. I didn't plan on going down this road, but I come in, I, I've just acquired another institution. I wanna say, I want this to be easier. Moving to your platform makes it all easier. Just bring it all in. No.

[00:39:42] Raphael Reznek: Yes. So it creates a centralized. Repository of your data then allows you to, know, one of the, one of the first things one could do is create a consolidated general ledger between the two cores.

[00:39:56] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:57] Raphael Reznek: And then the other thing one could do is just start, choosing your peripherals, your peripheral platforms like your digital banking, your B-S-A-A-M-L.

[00:40:07] Raphael Reznek: You can say, I want to use this single platform for both institutions. So as long as platforms are integrated with stratum, our data hub, you connect that second core to it, it now has access to those peripherals. You don't have to code that core to all of the other peripherals. You, it to the, you map it to the data model in Stratum, and now once you map to that data model, else that's mapped to that data model is now available.

[00:40:39] Joe Casali: And not to,

[00:40:39] Raphael Reznek: have

[00:40:40] Joe Casali: yeah.

[00:40:41] Raphael Reznek: mappings.

[00:40:42] Joe Casali: Yeah. Not to be dumb, but like, if you guys didn't exist. And, you know, not getting markety at all. all the decisions that I made where I have gum and staples and, you know, elastics connecting everything together gets multiplied times two. And you're trying to figure out how, how my staples fit with your elastics, as opposed to saying, let's both go here. Right?

[00:41:09] Raphael Reznek: correct.

[00:41:10] Joe Casali: Yeah. Okay. and we know the, the staples in the gum happen today. I mean, it, it, or, well, we know, but doesn't know. just, you know, messages like, oh, that, that'll be posted later or it'll show up tonight. Um,

[00:41:27] Raphael Reznek: Right.

[00:41:27] Joe Casali: yeah. Excellent. biggest lessons learned from the whole process.

[00:41:32] Raphael Reznek: my. we will sometimes say that we've been successful due to nativity.

[00:41:42] Joe Casali: Love it.

[00:41:43] Raphael Reznek: didn't, we didn't know we couldn't do this when

[00:41:45] Joe Casali: Love it, love that attitude. I do that attitude. I do not run a bank. So, alright. Uh, I love it. I do love it. I wish there was more of it. It's so legacy. You know, the first time you hear that world it's like, oh, that's nice. It's old. But no, it's, it's not that kinda legacy. final, final words, any, any thoughts for the audience? I.

[00:42:10] Raphael Reznek: I would say, just don't take no, don't accept no for the answer or don't accept, just because that's how we've always done it. Question,

[00:42:21] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:22] Raphael Reznek: everything.

[00:42:23] Joe Casali: Excellent.

[00:42:25] Ingrid Hebert: And I, I would say that in, in this journey, we've learned that it's not just the legacy core providers, but just a lot of. There's a lot of industry standards and industry mentality around what banks can and cannot do, and where fintechs stand, and often we've heard like, this is the first time that we've seen a bank do this, or banks don't do this.

[00:42:57] Ingrid Hebert: So we've pushed against the grain quite a lot. And it's been a really fun, cool experience. And, it's paying off, it's, it's nice to see what we can do as a financial institution and it's really cool to see people react to what we're able to do. 'cause they're often surprised.

[00:43:20] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean it's, it's, I can't remember another institution. can't remember one doing it. But you do say they're out there. One final, final word on the, the whole people thing. 'cause I think that's, I don't wanna overlook the amount of change, you introduced as far as into a bank. It just seems, you know, not to flow. and I imagine, you know, I do imagine there were people that are, that were like, yeah, I'm done. I've done what I've done for, for as long as I've lived. It's time, but. For the folks who embrace it, it's what a great learning experience.

[00:44:00] Raphael Reznek: Yes,

[00:44:00] Joe Casali: yeah. Yeah, it's great.

[00:44:03] Ingrid Hebert: Yeah. And the people, the people alongside you during the journey make a huge difference. 'cause it's hard. It's not easy,

[00:44:10] Joe Casali: mm-hmm.

[00:44:11] Ingrid Hebert: learning as quickly as we have in the short period of time. Five years seems like a long time, but where you are in the thick of it, it's. It's a constant, we call, we call Tuesdays Pivot Tuesdays because often things change.

[00:44:26] Ingrid Hebert: But, going through that journey with the right group of people makes a huge difference. So people matter.

[00:44:32] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm. Excellent. All right. Well thank you for joining me.

[00:44:36] Ingrid Hebert: Thank you.

[00:44:36]