Into the Depths: Busting the Myths About FinTech “Tech” Readiness

Episode Summary

Many financial institutions feel stuck, believing technology myths hold them back from innovation. In this Wrestling Payments episode, host Elyssa Morgan talks with Brian Anderson, VP of Banking Transformation at Finzly, about busting these myths and competing in today's payments ecosystem without waiting for core systems to catch up.

Brian explains how institutions can shift from core-reliant to core-complimentary thinking, transforming payments from cost centers into strategic revenue drivers. He details how API-driven platforms create flexibility and new customer opportunities, helping smaller institutions build stickier relationships and compete with larger banks and fintechs.

The conversation emphasizes that technology decisions are business strategy, not IT projects, requiring C-suite buy-in to reframe investments as essential for competitive advantage.

Guest-at-a-Glance

Name: Brian Anderson
Role: Vice President, Banking Transformation
Company: Finzly
Expertise: Helps institutions innovate through best-of-breed money movement strategies
Connect: LinkedIn

Key Insights

Core-Complimentary Revolution
Stop waiting for core providers. Build ecosystems using APIs to integrate specialized solutions, enabling rapid fintech capability deployment without system overhauls.

Payments as Profit Centers
Transform payments into revenue drivers. One bank generated 40% of income through payment services, creating sticky relationships and non-interest income streams.

Middleware Magic
Gain ultimate control with middleware solutions that prevent vendor lock-in while providing deeper money movement insights and switching flexibility.

Transcript

Wrestling Payments - NEACH - "Into the Depths: Busting the Myths About FinTech “Tech” Readiness"

[00:00:00] Brian Anderson: there's a lot of banks that will rely on their partners for their API solutions and maybe not have a middleware.

[00:00:05] Brian Anderson: They'll have a direct connection between a Finzly and their core banking system or whoever and their core banking system. That is good. Also still limiting because now the plug and play is between your two providers, not with the bank or credit union in the middle.

[00:00:21]

[00:00:50] Elyssa Morgan: Thanks for joining us, everybody as part of this special series of NEACH's Wrestling Payments podcast, FinTech Shark Week. In this episode, we're gonna tackle some of the biggest myths holding financial institutions back from innovating and competing in today's rapidly evolving payments ecosystem.

[00:01:05] Elyssa Morgan: So we're diving into the realities of core provider relationships, exploring how institutions can kind of maintain those connections while building flexibility through API driven platforms and payment hubs. will say, from breaking free from the kind of, we're stuck with our core mindset, to transforming payments from a cost center, hopefully into a revenue driver.

[00:01:25] Elyssa Morgan: And this conversation is all about practical strategies for staying competitive without waiting years for core systems to catch up. So joining me today, really excited to have

[00:01:34] Elyssa Morgan: Brian Anderson, the Vice President of Banking Transformation at Finzly. Brian, you wanna introduce yourself and tell the listeners a little bit about the work you and Finzly are doing in the payment space.

[00:01:43] Brian Anderson: Oh, thanks Elyssa. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be part of dispelling some of the myths out there and making sure that all of the, credit unions and banks that are in our space and in our world are, you know, learn what that, what's the art of the possible, and innovation today. It really has changed dramatically over the past decade.

[00:02:02] Brian Anderson: my role here at Finzly is to help. You know, open the eyes of the financial institutions that we work with to the possibilities of, innovating and, adopting a best of breed strategy for money movement. for us what that means is money movement means just about any kind of movement of money from one account to another, however way may get there.

[00:02:22] Brian Anderson: And so, Finzly, I've been here now seven years trying to help. the financial institutions out there understand what can be different. we are not a core provider. We partner with many core providers who provide essential services, really critical core banking services to the credit unions and banks.

[00:02:40] Brian Anderson: And we integrate, very smoothly with them to try and automate, and maintain a focus on. Straight through processing and a reduced operational overhead for anything we do. And so from an innovation perspective, we're excited to hopefully reveal some of those things that we've done to help, the banks and credit unions, earn more from their efforts in the money movement space.

[00:03:04] Elyssa Morgan: Excellent.

[00:03:56] Elyssa Morgan: Great introduction, Brian. Thanks for that. So let's get right. Into the myths here.

[00:04:00] Elyssa Morgan: one of those being folks feel too tied to their core to really innovate at speed, right? They feel locked into their core providers, say roadmap, and that's valid. But you know, innovation doesn't always have to run through your core. Sometimes it's, really about building around it, and there's so many solutions out there that can help these

institutions solve for member and customer payments needs today, right now and then in the future,

[00:04:26] Elyssa Morgan: how are you seeing institutions successfully navigating this kind of mindset shift from core, reliant to core, complimentary, and what opportunities does that kind of open up? I.

[00:04:37] Brian Anderson: Right, and I think this, this mindset shift occurred, you know, started occurring. Probably at least 15 years ago, if not longer. but when it really started accelerating in, in our sector is the banks and credit unions, you know, used to, it was easier. You could take all in one from your core provider, especially when you're a smaller institution.

[00:04:58] Brian Anderson: You don't want to have to vet too many vendors and you want to rely on solutions that you can count on. But then they realize as soon as they want to do something different or new, or they have a customer or a member that comes in with a unique, need. It's hard to respond when you're, when you have to rely on the core for everything.

[00:05:15] Brian Anderson: I mean, not everyone can be great at everything, right? And the core providers are good at many things, but sometimes there are areas, at where people have innovated and I see, I. Good institutions, one that are forward thinking and innovative, try to pursue a more best of breed approach. and, and to the credit of the core banking providers.

[00:05:34] Brian Anderson: Those core banking providers have been migrating to an open strategy, meaning opening up APIs and other ways of integrating with their services to allow. Companies like Finzly and others to come to their financial institutions and then partner together to make the world more innovative. one way where I see, different institutions doing this is because of the world of modern cloud computing.

[00:06:00] Brian Anderson: I. what we would call microservices based applications or apps, right? In apps in your app store, whether it's a mobile app store or

[00:06:07] Elyssa Morgan: Yep.

[00:06:08] Brian Anderson: or another platform, where rest APIs, which is a common language, APIs are easier to build, to adopt, adapt, and, integrate with other systems you have. Ways of taking platforms like a digital account, opening platform or di better digital banking experiences for your customers and members, or better mobile banking experiences?

[00:06:30] Brian Anderson: for us, better payment experiences, being able to automate the process of, delivering, even transferring money from one account to the other. While doing it in a compliant and integrated way to all the other systems at a bank or a credit union that are important, whether it's anti-money laundering or fraud checking, or OFAC screening, all of those things should be something that are an automated operational experience and the customer should never know that they happen and the customer should only understand, I wanna move money from here to there.

[00:07:02] Brian Anderson: And everything's good. So they, in order to get to core complementary, which I think is one of the things you shared, you have to be asking your partner, your core banking partner to say, I'm gonna open, an an a way for your other best to be providers to integrate. That should be essential to the evaluation of any core provider, is that they're open to these ideas and then you need to figure out from a vendor like Finzly or others, what does it take?

[00:07:30] Brian Anderson: For us to integrate with you. How long does it take? Have you done it before? how, how intense is my level of support at the financial institution for this? Or is it something that the vendor takes care of? And generally it's the latter. So all of those things open up the possibilities and really kind of change the mindset of the organizations to becoming, either core complimentary in, in attitude or just open, open in attitude to understand the possibilities.

[00:08:04] Elyssa Morgan: Well that's, that's great to hear. because you know, I didn't wanna put a negative spin towards

[00:08:10] Brian Anderson: I am just trying to be nice. I'm trying to be nice there. There are ones that don't there.

[00:08:15] Elyssa Morgan: Yeah, no, I love it. It really is a, a complimentary thing and the fact that you're having conversation. And they're getting more, ready to kind of open up and allow these other technologies in.

[00:08:24] Elyssa Morgan: I mean, the future, and I've said it time and time over the last five, episodes. It's collaborative. So to see everybody kind of coming together is great. but I'd love to kind of shift the conversation slightly to talk a little bit about, we'll say our next myth to bust is kind of, payments are just a cost center.

[00:08:40] Elyssa Morgan: Like that's the mindset, right? They're not necessarily a growth strategy. So they're often seen as this, this piece to the puzzle that just needs. To function, you know, it's critical, it's important, but it's not necessarily seen as something that can kind of fuel growth. And that's something we're trying to shift here, right?

[00:08:57] Elyssa Morgan: payments should be this strategic lever, where, you know, customer experience data and revenue potential really can all intersect here. So if we're not building around payments, I think we're missing a really big opportunity. So how do you think institutions can kind of start thinking differently about their payment?

[00:09:14] Elyssa Morgan: Strategy to unlock new revenue opportunities and diversify beyond traditional deposits and lending income.

[00:09:22] Brian Anderson: That's a great point. It's something that most of our early adopter financial institutions, I. I almost already understood that a non-interest income strategy through payments and the fees related to them is a really great smoothing opportunity for revenue. Most banks and credit unions are subject to the whims of the interest rate.

[00:09:46] Brian Anderson: Environment, in good interest rate environments, they, they make good lending margins on their loans versus their deposits in more difficult lending environments. They, they make less loans, they have less spread, and it causes a revenue drain payment, income and money movement. Income happens all the time regardless of what happens.

[00:10:04] Brian Anderson: So, one of our institutions here at Finzly, one of our early adopters, had already kind of gone down the road of a strategy to promote. Diversifying revenue streams and actually generated 40% of the bank's income with payments, just payments, which is a, a target that is pretty difficult to achieve these days, but it's possible.

[00:10:27] Brian Anderson: It shows the art of the possible and what the art of the possible is with payments is usually, usually it starts as a commercial. Customer or member opportunity. You know, any credit unions these days, you'll hear them talk about positioning for small business and medium sized business growth because unfortunately, consumers tend to expect everything to be done for them for free. that, that even that's changing. So the world of instant payments with RTP and Fed, now can look at someone that uses, say a mobile wallet like a Venmo or PayPal. They will, Venmo or PayPal will charge that consumer for the instant ability to move that money to their bank account and they'll charge 'em multiple dollars for it.

[00:11:12] Brian Anderson: And it's something that consumers, in credit union and banks. Could also something that the banks and Con and Credit Union can also do for, for their consumer members. More likely. There's a unique use case in your commercial customer base where you can process, you know, payroll or group payments or bulk payments or some sort of unique experience.

[00:11:36] Brian Anderson: Like I'll give you an example of a homeowners association, right? Homeowners Association has. Hundreds and hundreds of people or members of the Homeowners association, those people have to make regular payments to the HOA for different reasons, whether it's dues or utility bills or snow removal services.

[00:11:54] Brian Anderson: If you can provide two HOAs or similarly municipalities, this ability to. Easily process and reconcile those sorts of payments and make it as straight through as you can without, you know, without weird manual intervention. That's a very valuable service. So you're not just providing the payment, but you're providing an operational a. Ease of use to those particular HOA companies, municipalities. that's just one example of, of many that we've seen out there that will unlock new revenue

capabilities. 'cause we're finding a valuable service. You're taking the operational burden off your business customers and taking it into the bank, bank or credit union, and that's, that's of value.

[00:12:38] Brian Anderson: That's something you can actually generate value from.

[00:12:42] Elyssa Morgan: Right. And it kind of makes that relationship a little stickier. I,

[00:12:46] Brian Anderson: much stickier. When you control workflow. When you control workflow, whether it's banking based or file based or really great API based, then that's a, a great way to do things. There's a, another bank in, just in our region here in New England, a bank I'm thinking of here in Connecticut, started working in the payments as a service space.

[00:13:07] Brian Anderson: And what I mean by that is they worked with. An online bank, a bank that is not really a bank, it's a FinTech, right?

[00:13:15] Elyssa Morgan: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:15] Brian Anderson: of the accounts for this FinTech sit with that bank. All of the payments that are made for this FinTech go through that bank and to the tune of one or 2 million a CH payments a year. They make good money on that, and that's a totally separate business line than the rest of the financial institution.

[00:13:34] Elyssa Morgan: Yeah. And you had touched on municipalities. I, I think especially with the shift at the government level going. Electronic, as far as all payments, you know, the states are soon to follow in the towns, and I think there's

[00:13:44] Brian Anderson: No more checks.

[00:13:46] Elyssa Morgan: there.

[00:13:46] Brian Anderson: Yep. No more checks. And when you, and, and, and a lot of banks have made money on the back of lockbox and check

processing for years, there's no reason that that can't be, become more digital, more electronic of similar or better value, and the bank should continue to monetize that, but hopefully reduce the operational overhead of it.

[00:14:06] Elyssa Morgan: right, right. So you had mentioned. Know your cash apps, your Venmo. So I do wanna talk a little bit about the, the idea or the myth. We'll say that, you know, our current technology or positioning really puts us in a place where we can't compete with big banks or, you know, fintechs, right? And it's easy to fall into that trap of comparing yourself to these mega banks or these flashy fintechs, with huge budgets.

[00:14:30] Elyssa Morgan: but that's not the goal, especially here with NEACH and a lot of the work we're doing around our surveying. You know, we really wanna provide these benchmarks that. Show you what your peers are doing and what's possible, for you right before the market saturates with all of these big banks and fintechs kind of coming in and, and taking over.

[00:14:47] Elyssa Morgan: just remembering kind of, you know, these, these mid-market financial institutions. You're not trying to be these huge fintechs, these, these big banks, right? You're trying to serve your community, in a modern way. And I think there's, right size solutions built for institutions just like the listeners listening right now, right?

[00:15:06] Elyssa Morgan: The trick is just kind of figuring out what fits with your strategy and not there. So, you know, you're talking about, you know, deposits and, and the deposits actually sitting with the banks, right? So with the cash apps and the Venmos, you know, that money's not sitting in, you know, a fine, right? So, and there's no relationship there either, right?

[00:15:27] Elyssa Morgan: But there's still this ongoing battle for deposit. So how are you seeing kind of smaller mid-market institutions successfully use? And I think you gave. You know, a, a a, an example of this, but really use payments innovation to not only attract new customers, but strengthen loyalty and retention. I think that's kind of what you just kind of answered earlier, but I, if we can dig into

[00:15:47] Brian Anderson: no. I think there's more, I think there's more to it too, is, you know, one of the things that we've stated, even in our marketing at Finzly, it's, it's obvious. We said we are here to democratize access to modern technology and, and, and the FinTech like feel and experience. and a lot of fintechs like us are out there doing that.

[00:16:04] Brian Anderson: You know, there's. Platforms out there, like Venmo and Cash App and PayPal, but there's also many others, you know, digital banks like SoFi and, and other institutions. But when you look behind the covers, a name of a bank behind there. Like there's always, there's always a bank account. It's not just a mobile wallet.

[00:16:22] Brian Anderson: Mobile wallet is a transient thing, right? If the money, eventually you want it to be in a bank, especially. If a bank is offering you a way to generate some interest off of your money, whether, whether it's consumer or a business. So once you have that bundle of services, you can compete with the big boys.

[00:16:41] Brian Anderson: 'cause like, said, Elyssa, there's I. Millions and millions of dollars in budget there. But we service many, many financial institutions and through, through us and through other fintechs like us, a lot of the banks and credit unions can introduce a very similar, if not better experience than some of the big institutions.

[00:16:59] Brian Anderson: And and by doing so, you kind of democratize access to that ability to attract customers, attract deposits. You know, for example, if you take an app like Robinhood. Robinhood is an investor app for mostly smaller individual investors. they're constantly promoting high yield interest accounts, interest deposits.

[00:17:18] Brian Anderson: How did they do that? They partner with many small, some community banks to do that. And so the bank account that you might hold at Robinhood is not with Robinhood. It could be with a community bank, and that's, and why not? Why not have that? As long as you have some good compliance in place to know your customer's customer.

[00:17:39] Brian Anderson: This can, this turn keeps coming up over, over and over, over

[00:17:42] Elyssa Morgan: Yeah.

[00:17:43] Brian Anderson: days of. KYCC know your customer's customer. As long as you have a good compliance, understanding of who that is, and you can reconcile the, you know, transactions that are going to and from that deposit account and any payments going to and from that deposit account, then you're in great shape and you'll have the ability to compete with just about anybody.

[00:18:03] Brian Anderson: one of, one of the other cool things that I think people can use to attract. New customers and strengthen the existing customer base is be perceived as, as innovative. You may not be as innovative and maybe scary as a FinTech, but when you have this entire generation of people under the age of say, 30 coming in, they rarely, if ever go to a bank branch or a credit union location.

[00:18:27] Brian Anderson: They want to, they want to understand that. I can adopt solutions and be able to receive an inbound realtime payment. I wanna be able to see that in my account. I wanna be able to move money, however I wanna move money and just enable that for me. And if you can do that with some modern solutions, then you'll never lose that customer.

[00:18:48] Brian Anderson: You won't, you know, certainly you won't lose them from the, from your institution, but you won't have that. Somewhat ghosting process of moving their activity to another bank account at a FinTech bank. 'cause there's a lot of digital banks out there that are trying to be no brick and mortar, no community bank relationship, no community member focus like the credit unions provide.

[00:19:10] Brian Anderson: And you gotta continue to differentiate against that and say, Hey, we're not only your innovative partner, we are your local partner. And when you need someone to talk to, we'll be here.

[00:19:22] Elyssa Morgan: And that's that relationship piece that's missing, I think

[00:19:25] Brian Anderson: Yes, you need to have that. I I, I, I had a, I had a terrible experience recently with one of the banks that I used for a high yield savings account and that high yield savings account, moving money in and out of it. I had a problem. I tried to contact them. Good luck with that. There's no contacting a person.

[00:19:48] Elyssa Morgan: That's why I love calling and having someone pick up, and I know automation and your chat bots and everything's fun, but there's just times you just need to speak to somebody,

[00:19:56] Brian Anderson: Right,

[00:19:56] Elyssa Morgan: hear people. Have you ever been, you know, in a place where you just hear someone on the phone, you know they're doing it and they're like representative?

[00:20:02] Elyssa Morgan: They can't get through.

[00:20:04] Brian Anderson: I've screamed a lot worse than representative into my calls, I'll tell you that. I hope they don't record them.

[00:20:11] Elyssa Morgan: oh my gosh. I bet you they do. I bet you they do. for training and, you know, experience purposes. Right. so I guess like little recap of these last few myths before we get into the next one. Leg Legacy systems, they're real, they can feel really heavy, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're stuck. a lot of progress can be made with small strategic, moves.

[00:20:30] Elyssa Morgan: Right. Whether it's, you know, rethinking how you manage your vendors, ensuring you know your customer's, customers and what implementing a program like that looks like, tapping into middleware options or just really tackling one problem area or opportunity at a time. Right. You don't

[00:20:44] Brian Anderson: I'm glad, I'm glad you said middleware because I, I forgot to say middleware. I'm glad you said middleware because

[00:20:50] Elyssa Morgan: Go for it. You got something to say about mineral wear? Take it away.

[00:20:54] Brian Anderson: free talking about freeing you up. So there's a lot of banks that will rely on their partners for their API solutions and, and maybe not have a middleware.

[00:21:02] Brian Anderson: They'll have a direct connection between a Finzly and their core banking system or whoever and their core banking system. That is good. Also still limiting because now the plug and play is between your two providers, not with the bank or credit union in the middle. A lot of solution providers out there now are providing easy to adapt middleware solutions that says.

[00:21:27] Brian Anderson: Bring your provider, bring whoever. We're gonna run it through our banks or our credit union's middleware. We're gonna control that. We're gonna look at, you said earlier, at least data. We're gonna look at the data, what's moving where, and how We can capture that in a, in a data warehouse solution. A lot of people use things like Snowflake today, dict combine all that data into one place.

[00:21:50] Brian Anderson: Once you have that middleware understanding, or even from us directly, we can give you an understanding of the data that's, That's fueling the movement of money here from here to there. Once you have access and con and control over that, now want to entertain a new core provider, you can. You wanna entertain a new payment provider like Finzly or one of our competitors.

[00:22:11] Brian Anderson: You can. You have that. Disconnect. You have that ability to disconnect from your existing provider set and move to a different provider set. And that is something I see a lot of these days. A lot of even community

[00:22:24] Elyssa Morgan: a lot of flexibility. Yeah. Hand. Hands on control and flexibility. Yeah. That's nice.

[00:22:32] Brian Anderson: And not that expensive, you know? Not that expensive either.

[00:22:38] Elyssa Morgan: well, that's a plus, right? So moving into our, our final myth here, I think there's sometimes just a disconnect internally, with internal, you know, even external stakeholders. and we actually did an episode on kind of breaking this siloed mindset internally and. Externally. but I did wanna touch on this because some of the responses to our survey, kind of lack of, or, or what the hesitation, I guess I should say, is jumping into these relationships.

[00:23:08] Elyssa Morgan: Why don't we wanna explore this further? And a lot of it is just buy-in from the top, right? And, and this backing at the, at the board and executive level. so there's this kind of idea that technology decisions are just, IT projects, right? Not necessarily a business strategy. a lot of financial institutions still.

[00:23:25] Elyssa Morgan: E tech decisions like their it's responsibility. but these are really the businesses' strategy decision, right? And so they impact how you grow, how you compete, how you serve. And they really belong in the boardroom, not just in a tech committee, right? Meeting. fintechs isn't just kind of a cool techie word, right?

[00:23:46] Elyssa Morgan: And a buzzword. It's really a tool to get you to where you wanna go. So how would you say,executives and boards should be? Reframing these conversations to ensure that technology investments are directly tied to long-term business strategy and competitive advantage. How do, and how do the folks really advocating to move forward in this space?

[00:24:05] Elyssa Morgan: Get those, you know, the ears of the executives and, the board.

[00:24:09] Brian Anderson: That I would say would be the, the biggest myth and most difficult challenge that I see out there of all of these is changing board level mindset. Changing C-suite level mindset to get out of these are not IT projects at all. The only reason you spend money in it is to generate either val value with the customers or members or to.

[00:24:34] Brian Anderson: Smooth operational efficiency strategically and make the ba, make the banker credit union more scalable. it's very

frustrating from our perspective to come up with discussing something innovative with the business owner, within the banker credit union. And then come upon the idea, oh, this is just another project in the annual budgeting cycle, and we have all this other non-discretionary IT spend that we have to do every year with our providers, and they're not planning for.

[00:25:06] Brian Anderson: A budget for unexpected spend or innovation spend, or new business spend. All of those things have to change that whole mindset of here's what we spend every year, and maybe we'll spend 5% more and we're gonna allocate it to these three projects for the year, and they can't respond at all. To anything new that comes along to attract new customers, to build more loyalty to market and gain new deposits more efficiently through a unique idea.

[00:25:36] Brian Anderson: So one thing that we are trying to advocate for in the financial institutions we talk with is you need to get away from annual budgeting. You can have a plan, but you need to have a plan to change a plan, change that plan on an ongoing basis, have budget available. To address those things. You may spend it, you may not, but you have that ability to respond more quickly if it isn't just something that you do in September and October every year.

[00:26:05] Brian Anderson: Then from, from that perspective to reframe the conversations, it does have to be driven by a business strategy because otherwise it's just another thing on the wall. It, it's, in, if you don't have a long-term mindset and say. I need a strategy that this is what we're going to do with this spend. This is our project.

[00:26:27] Brian Anderson: This is what the vision is three years from now, five years from now, of where we're going to attract business. This is how we're gonna gain some sort of ROI and it may not be in year one, like most boards, they, it has to be in year one. That's short term mindset. So the other piece of being able to reframe the conversations in a, in a.

[00:26:49] Brian Anderson: For the long term and for competitive advantages. A lot of community banks and, credit unions not have a role of what I would call a product lead, a product manager, a product, a strategic product owner. big institutions do, right? You'll have a strategic head of

payments. In fact, one large regional bank recently put a new role in the C-suite called Chief Payments Officer. Just overpayments, that's the only job is payments. And so that has, you know, says to me that the trend in the market is that you have to have someone who owns the product. And in a traditional community bank, for example, we meet lots friends at NEACH who are. Head of deposit operations or they're an,payments professional with expertise in a CH or wires or whatever it may be.

[00:27:43] Brian Anderson: But their remit is to not look at strategy. You know, they may have great ideas about what a new payment strategy might look like, but who's gonna own that and own that business strategy? Who's gonna take it to fruition over the next 2, 3, 5 years? That has to come from the C-suite and the board level at a community institution, and someone's gotta own it.

[00:28:03] Brian Anderson: whether it's someone you hire from the outside, a, a consultant to help you drive it, or whether you, you take it on board and give someone that responsibility, it has to be driven. Otherwise it'll die on the buy.

[00:28:16] Elyssa Morgan: Right. No, that makes a lot of sense. you have, again, it just goes back to kind of being siloed right there, vis. If they're looking at these deposit operations people, as you know, one, you know, skillset and one area of subject matter expertise, right? So how do you get that big picture, solution in front of the board?

[00:28:34] Elyssa Morgan: and it, it makes sense to have it kind of live with, with one individual,

[00:28:38] Brian Anderson: Whether you include this or not, Elyssa is is up to you, but one of your board members came to me at the exhibition. Great. Relatively large community banker, right? Knows payment strategy came from two really large banks prior, wants to implement, you know, new ideas. It's a struggle. Like we had, we had an idea together about what to do in one payment area.

[00:29:03] Brian Anderson: It got put on the shelf because other priorities took place that were mostly non-discretionary priorities. so it was, it's a very interesting world and, can I tell her, tell you her name?

[00:29:16] Elyssa Morgan: Yeah, you can, and if, honestly, we can use the example, we'll use the example, even if we take the board. Out if they don't wanna leave them in, but probably because they'll know it

[00:29:25] Brian Anderson: well, they'll know who it is. Exactly.

[00:29:27] Elyssa Morgan: it's a good example. Yeah.

[00:30:06] Elyssa Morgan: right? I think a lot of it comes down to this conservative risk tolerance for that business line, at the board level and, and trying to take a, a look at, Risk, appetite, enhancement, like, you know, just growth, considering you gotta do something.

[00:30:28] Brian Anderson: Well, I mean, they are doing something. They're doing something today.

[00:30:31] Elyssa Morgan: you know, risk can be a good thing.

[00:30:33] Elyssa Morgan: Right. So, just looking at the opportunity to offset, you know?

[00:30:37] Brian Anderson: it's the understanding of risk, right? In this case, there's actually very limited risk, but when someone says international or foreign currency, I. Most board members at the banks are not from that world.

[00:30:50] Brian Anderson: They're lenders or community bankers, and rarely touch that space. And they worry is there risk related to this? And until someone with experience explains, not really, no. You know, we're not taking foreign currency risk, we're not taking foreign country risk. We're actually transferring that up towards larger banks who then deal with that for us, while also making money.

[00:31:13] Brian Anderson: At our institution, it's something that, you know, I, I've just spent a long time in it and understand it, but a lot of people don't. And when the, I've heard it so many times at community banks, well, doesn't that expose us to country risk? No, it does not. So, and it's just a misunderstanding. And until you get through that willingness to understand, then you get the, the opportunity comes to you.

[00:31:38] Elyssa Morgan: No, that was great, great conversation. Any, any closing thoughts? for the, for the audience, the listeners I should say. So any closing thoughts for the listener?

[00:31:48] Brian Anderson: So a a, I know it's certainly a challenge doing the day to day at a community bank or a, a local credit union and those heads of deposit operations and trying to strategize, you know, what's the next investment beyond, your core or even with your core, in relation to, to payments, services, and just, you know.

[00:32:08] Brian Anderson: Be optimistic and be open. Things have changed a lot over the past 10 years and you know, most traditional ways of doing things, there are new ways of doing them that, you know, some of your customers, even in us, even in a local regional community bank where you think the customers only do it in a certain way, that.

[00:32:27] Brian Anderson: That's changing and you'll be pleasantly surprised that, you know, hopefully your area is somewhere that the bank and credit union can invest in and you guys will have an easier time of it. I was joking with some of the NEACH members at the recent conference that wouldn't it be nice to go home at five o'clock 'cause the system was doing the work for you.

[00:32:46] Brian Anderson: And so that's my goal and that's what Vince's goal is to make. The lives of the banks more profitable, but also make the operational professionals lives easier. And, and that's, that's the possibility that that exists out there, that hopefully we'll all get to.

[00:33:06] Elyssa Morgan: That's a great goal. We love that goal. so that'll do it for today. Today's episode Big thank you to my guest, Brian Anderson from Finzly. For joining the conversation today. Thank you for sharing your

insights and experience. And as you know the listeners out there, as you think about the challenges you're facing, take a moment to consider what's truly holding you back.

[00:33:28] Elyssa Morgan: is there a real limitation or is there an opportunity that's waiting to be explored? So whether we've confirmed a myth for you today or uncovered a hidden gem, I really hope today's discussion gave you something useful to take away and carry forward.

[00:33:42] Elyssa Morgan: we appreciate you spending your time with us and we hope you'll tune in for the rest of the episodes in this series. There's a lot more to come.

[00:33:49] Elyssa Morgan: Take care everybody.