Finding the Next Wave to Ride // The 2024 What's Going On In Banking Report

In this episode, Ron Shevlin and Steve Williams discuss some of the hottest findings of the 2024 What's Going On in Banking report. Come for the data. Leave with ideas on successful deposit strategies, faster payment prospects, and other ways to combat growing competitive threats. Also, hear some comments penned from your peers on the thorniest challenges and biggest opportunities they see in the months to come.

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Transcript

Ron Shevlin
Hey, and welcome back to another episode of the What's Going On in Banking podcast, the first one for 2024. And I thought what better way to start off the New Year's podcast with a discussion of the What's Going On in Banking report for 2024. I'm Ron Shevlin, Chief Research Officer, Cornerstone Advisors, author of the FinTech Snark Tank blog on forms, and author of the What's Going On in Banking report at Cornerstone and with me today is really the only person I'd really want to have on the show to talk about the report with me and that's Steve Williams, president, partner, co-founder of Cornerstone. Steve, welcome.

Steve Williams
Hey Ron, how you doing? I was waiting for someone more special when you said the only person I'd have, but thanks for having me on. I'm ready to riff on some good discussion.

Ron Shevlin

You are number one on the list, Steve. Absolutely. I value your input better than more than anybody's. So 2024, what's going on in Banking Report? The theme for this year, Steve, is riding the next wave, or finding the next wave to ride, I should say. And I pulled that theme a little bit from last year's, the 2023 report, where the theme was facing the headwinds, riding the tailwinds, with a picture of an executive out in the sea.

Steve Williams

Yeah, right.

Ron Shevlin

on a little boat, waiting to see what the economy and the world was going to deliver as an analogy. And kind of thought that this year, well, there are certainly some headwinds, but I kind of envisioned that banks and credit unions are kind of sitting in the windless cove of the economy these days and in the industry as well, and kind of waiting to see what kind of bubbles up and what's going to take them. We'll get into this a lot more after we discuss some of the detail, because I want to wrap up with a... a more detailed discussion of the theme itself. But let's get right into the outlook. This is the ninth year that we've done the report. Every year we ask senior executives. This year we had a pretty good turnout. We had over 350 respondents, almost half and half from banks and credit unions. 90% of them are vice president and higher. And in fact, I don't forget the exact percentage, but a pretty high percentage of CEOs themselves.

So we're getting a pretty good perspective. And we always ask, how optimistic or pessimistic are you about the prospects for the industry in the coming year? I know everybody's always optimistic about their own organization. So we want to kind of capture optimism and pessimism for the industry. And this year, 60% said they were either somewhat or very optimistic versus 38% who were very or somewhat pessimistic.

And the high percentages of those are in the somewhats, the somewhat pessimistic or somewhat optimistic. That 60% who are somewhat or very optimistic is up five percentage points from last year. So there's clearly some more rosier views of the industry going into 2024 than we're going into 2023. And yet Steve was roughly half, just over half, 52% of the respondents who said that they are anticipating a recession or downturn in the economy. So clearly that's not impinging on their optimism for the year. What do you make of all of this?

Steve Williams

We'll go back to 22, late 22, December 22, when we surveyed last year, and everybody was kind of, I like to say, trying to schedule this recession and get it over. We had almost accepted there would be a recession. And I used to joke back then, it's like, they wanna get this done like four o'clock Pilates and then get ready for dinner. Let's get it done, let's make it short, and let's move on. It didn't happen. And so it made people a bit more optimistic. Like we got through some very interesting 23.

starting with bank failures and then a liquidity crisis and a lot out of uncertainty. So it's still like, but is it lurking out there? Is some weakness lurking out there? What's really interesting that we've never seen before is this kind of anxiety with this kind of employment. It's this low unemployment rate, the consumer in pretty good shape. And so that's kind of the positive. The negative is we've been sitting there now with much higher interest rates and in there is borrowing costs.

borrowing costs for the federal government, borrowing costs for business, borrowing costs for investors in commercial real estate, and of course, borrowing costs for consumers. The question is, does that start to drag into the economy and we do get a recession? What I don't see is the doom and gloom, deep recession, great risk, other than people who like to peddle gold investments, I haven't seen any folks really predicting that for 24.

Ron Shevlin

Yeah, we had some interesting comments. And as I looked at the comments, and we try to capture quotes qualitatively as well as just the numbers in the report, the comments tended to group in a number of different areas. Clearly, there was the economy. Liquidity was a big issue, Steve. The industry dynamics and a couple other things. I want to share with you one of my favorite quotes that somebody and they did not name themselves, so I can't say who it was.

But they were somewhat pessimistic going into this year and said, personal saving rates are dropping as spending continues. Housing affordability is at historic lows. Credit card debt is at record highs. Delinquencies and bankruptcies are on the rise. And significant increases in 401k hardship withdrawals and the use of buy now, pay later lending are troublesome. Other than that, everything looks good. Actually, they didn't say that. I threw that last piece in. But they did mention the low employment.

Then we got a quote from Jill Castilla, CEO of Citizens Bank of Edmond, who commented on the liquidity side. Jill said, extension of the Fed's bank term funding program is imperative to ensure continued liquidity with high unrealized losses with recent inflation, GDP and unemployment looking favorable. A recession is less likely, but that might mean also rate cuts are unlikely.

Then somebody commented on the industry dynamics and said the maneuvers banks needed to take to shore up deposit outflows by locking in very high term deposit interest rates will likely outrun the period of high interest rates on loans that will be repricing or refinancing lower for the better part of 2024 squeezing margins even further. So, there's a whole bunch of, you know, factors both positive and negative and that's probably the way it is every year you come to think

Steve Williams

Yeah, one of my favorite quotes I want to jump in, Steve Stafford, United Credit, you know, conditions for inflation are not being moderated and government spending will drive higher inflation. He's one of those ones that say, don't dial in these rate cuts already and make that your kind of black and white plan. And I agree with him. We could have rate cuts. We could have thorny inflation that goes all year long. So I'm a big fan of scenario planning right now. The stock market has already priced in.

The rate cuts, the return to a tame Fed, I think that's, you know, the stock market prices are running ahead of what may happen. And I don't like that in running a financial institution.

Ron Shevlin 

Hey Steve!

Steve Williams

Yeah.

Ron Shevlin

Guess what?

Steve Williams

What?

Ron Shevlin 

I got 10 bank accounts plus a main account with insane amounts. And every bank and credit union wants to get their hands on it. By the way, that's the only line from that Lil Wayne song that I can actually say publicly, or even privately for that matter. But deposit gathering, boy, this is at the top of the list. And you and I had a conversation with a bunch of execs about a month ago or so.

What are you thinking are going to be the successful strategies for deposit gathering in 2024?

Steve Williams

Yeah, it's a good one. And congratulations, Ron, you've really created a youthful version of yourself quoting Lil Wayne. You know, I think what happened is everybody got shocked by the consumer and small business waking up to pricing in April, right after the SVB and First Republic signature failures. The good news is they priced up, they tanked their margin a bit, but they've stabilized. And I think one thing just to stop for a second is to say.

The country still wants banks because if you look at the fact that their cost of funds is still a good 250, 300 basis points below Fed funds that I could get today in treasuries and the fact that a big portion of deposits are still uninsured in America, especially for businesses, and they continue to bank with the banks in America. So they want this system to work and they've stabilized it a bit. In terms of though, I like to say this was not a short-term challenge with liquidity.

I think it's going to be systemic because of the rise of embedded finance, challenger banks, banking as a service, everywhere that people can put money today. So I think it's important we think of this as a long-term systemic part of our business model. So I think to me, Ron, where I don't see us operating at full tilt yet is I like to say take your marketing leader, your head of digital delivery, your head of data analysis, smash those folks together and start doing really intelligent strategies around deposits, looking for what's unique about my high-balance baby boomers, where can I start to drive more core deposits through my younger generations where you've done a lot of research. There's been very little innovation in micro business banking, you know, for the business with say revenue under two million, start to really package up better micro business digital first kind of services. So I think it's segmentation and getting your delivery system connected to the data that you have.

Ron Shevlin

Steve, one of the things we asked in the report specifically, we asked what strategies they'd be using. Two of the most popular strategies, just what you're mentioning, number one, targeted pricing strategies to retain specific clients. And number two, more popular with credit unions than with banks, was new deposit products tied to pricing. And your point about bringing retail, digital delivery, analytics together really kind of points to the fact organizational agility, not just technical technology agility and technology capabilities is what's going to address this. My fear here is that it could take some banks and credit even six to nine months to develop new products or maybe even longer get them out the door. So the speed with which they kind of do this and if they're building on weak analytic capabilities, listen, we've been yelling at banks and credit unions for what, 10 years now to get better in analytics. Now it's coming home to roost. So I think your points are spot on and they're reflected a lot in the data. 

Steve Williams

Yeah, and Ron, one thing I learned from an exec this year that it just stuck with me and it will never unstick now is instead of using the term product, I use the term product experiences because it's not just the price and the terms of the product, it's how do I access it? How do I move money within it? What other features does it have? How do I open an account? And I think we've kind of have that traditional bank product view when we need to broaden more into the world of agile and how you say how app developers, for us to deliver product, they deliver it as a continuous flow of new features and experience. And I think I would give the banking industry kind of a C, it's just a straight C on how mature are we in kind of delivering those product experience, mostly in a digital first

Ron Shevlin 

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I often rant about how it's not just about customer experience. It is about the product, the product design. So I think I need to adopt that terminology around product experience itself. But I did a study a couple of years ago, jointly studied with someone else, and looking at new product design and development capabilities in financial institutions. And they're not really there because they're pretty much relying on their vendors. And I think that's a big shift.

Steve Williams

Well, Ron, you did a lot of research though this year and I think it's important because you did a lot of research with thousands of consumers across America. And I had a bias that some of the features that people try to add to payments accounts, whether that's subscription management or cell phone protection or other things, I had a bias that those were kind of the traditional bells and whistles that may overcomplicate a product or don't really add value.

You've proven me wrong because if you could share a little bit, I think that idea of creating more of features and things that people find value in was one of the things that you really confirmed with consumer research in 23.

Ron Shevlin

Sure, let's take 30 seconds on that or so. I think this kind of all started about a year and a half ago, two years maybe even at this point, when I got a call from someone we both know, I'm not going to mention who it was, who said, hey, we just did some consumer research I think you'll be really interested in. We found that the typical consumer has six to eight financial relationships. And I said, dude, do not go public with that, because you're off by an order of magnitude of five to 6x. When you look at especially consumers under the age of let's say 45, they are using so many different digital tools to manage their financial lives and in many cases spending money on that. And climbing again we've run the survey five six years in a row now and continue to find that consumers would rather get this from one place, their bank, bundled with a checking account so they can pay for it. So it's really a win-win strategy for both the financial institution and the consumer.

Steve Williams

Yeah, interesting.

Ron Shevlin

Speaking of some of these fintech competitors, I wanted to point out for the past couple of years, we've asked about competitive threats in the industry. We've asked to what extent is big tech, mega banks, big fintechs, and challenger banks. And Steve, one of the things that really surprised me is we year over year, we have seen minor increases, one percentage or two percentage points. But this year, the percentage of respondents

Big tech companies would be a significant threat, jumped from 39 to 57%. It said mega banks, 38 to 56%, big fintechs like PayPal and Square, up from 47 to 60%, and even challenger banks who had declined year over year between 2022 and 2023, four out of 10 jumped up to there. So what do you make of this increase in the perspectives of these these competitors being significant threats.

Steve Williams

I thought the jumps were fascinating, Ron. I think they almost happened though, for these convergence of different reasons. For instance, big tech, I think it's the march of embedded finance. Apple savings and Amazon, small business lending, et cetera. They see that out there. And I think embedded finance is something we have to take extremely seriously. Finance is gonna move to ecosystems, not to particular institutions. Secondly, megabanks, that was more that flight to safety.

You know, are these little banks like SVB going to fail? So let's put our funds in big banks that the government won't let fail. Big FinTech, I think what we saw is the shakeout in, in FinTech, but we're seeing big companies like a PayPal, their stocks down 70%, but they're chugging along, making money, doing acquisitions. And then challenger banks, I think it's because rates went up and they now can press their cost advantage. So if you think about a traditional institution now, those four are surrounding them for different reasons and they feel somewhat like, wow, this thread is very real. And it goes to something you talk about, which is how do we adopt some of the value adds of those players to do what you call embedded fintech.

Ron Shevlin

Yeah, one thing I think also to support that is the jump in the Challenger banks, I think is actually a recognition among a lot of financial institutions that niche strategy isn't dead. I don't care what happened with Silicon Valley bank and you know, it's supposed to over concentration and technology companies. I think a lot of mid-sized financial institutions, um, we're beginning to recognize that a targeted niche strategy, um, is, is a way to go. 

Steve Williams

Right.

And also, Ron, the acceptance of fast money movement. Everybody believes it now, they have confidence in it. Didn't used to be the case about moving money. It would certainly scare a baby boomer in the old days. Now it's second nature. And so a lot of this isn't, I have to go with a bank and close an account. It's just, I'm gonna download another app, open it real quick, move some money. And I think that creates a much different competitive environment where the challenger banks need to be taken seriously. What's the effort required to open a Challenger Bank account and move half your money today. It literally is 20 minutes.

Ron Shevlin

So Steve, I threw in a new prompt in this year's survey in the competitive threat question. And I asked, to what extent is the US government a significant threat? Overall, 25% of bank respondents said that the US government was a significant threat, one out of five credit union. But four out of 10 bank CEOs said that the US government was a significant threat. Now, there's a lot of interpretation here. They might have thought, well, you know, the government, thanks to faster payments going to displace banks, I was really thinking of it more from a regulatory perspective that a very anti-bank regulatory environment posed a threat. So I don't know how all the respondents interpreted that question, but I was really struck that nearly four out of 10 bank CEOs said that the US government is a significant threat to the banking industry.

Steve Williams

Yeah, I think the bigger a bank gets, the more brutal it becomes. I think many banks now see getting to a hundred billion is really going to be tough and they may want to stay under that. There's of course the $10 billion threshold, which invites the CFPB and all kinds of regulatory requirements. And also, you know, we know it's so fun. Interesting. Janet Yellen said we need to consolidate the banking industry to make it stronger. We'd all agree we probably don't need 4,700 banks.

We don't want 10 banks, but we know consolidation has to occur. But the government is, with merger approvals, has been slowing things down, creating all kinds of requirements to get mergers approved. And so it's like you want us to consolidate, make ourselves stronger, but you won't approve what really are common sense mergers. And then I think in the community space, what's happened with things like Reg II and Dick Durbin wanting a regulation bill on pricing around credit cards. And now...

Chopra at the CFPB coming out with inspiring Biden to do an executive order on ODP fees, overdraft fees. I think they're looking and saying, where are we going to actually provide all this infrastructure and safety and soundness to consumers, but somehow make money? So yeah, I think that's, it's the regulatory side that is saying you want us to be strong and vibrant, but every time we turn around, you're trying to weaken us.

Ron Shevlin

So Steve, one of the big things that happened in 2023 that's impacting 2024 was the launch of FedDown from the Federal Reserve and real-time payments. We had already been seeing the interest and trend towards that even before 2023, even before this year. And not surprisingly, we see a pretty good bump in those financial institutions that are planning to launch real-time payments this year. that I do think banks and credit unions are kind of missing out on and is reflected somewhat in the data, is the opportunity to use faster time payments as a revenue generator. Among, let's see, banks, only about one out of five said that they see, they think it's very likely that commercial B2B payments will be a, or real-time payments for commercial payments, will be a profit center within three years. on the retail side that goes down to about one out of 10. And only 7% of credit unions saw either commercial payments or retail payments from a fast real-time perspective becoming a profit center. I think they're missing out on the boat. You disagree?

Steve Williams

I think it's nuanced. So I'd love to hear maybe why, I'm gonna say my thoughts and then tell me why you think they're missing out. I think what they think, first of all, commercial banks make a lot of money sending wires. And so this is a huge killer of wire revenue. On the consumer side, I think they anticipate that FinTechs and people like Chime and Challenger Banks are gonna use this to gain market share. So they won't be able to charge for the convenience because there'll be too many innovators wanting to use this as a customer benefit to gain market share. I do think there's revenue to be had in using this capability in niches. So how do I really get good at the restaurant industry or the homeowners industry or the medical claims processing? I think that's where banks need to go deeper and they can make the whole relationship a huge source of revenue growth. What do you think?

Ron Shevlin

I am with you 100% on the B2B side. I don't think the retail side is necessarily a huge revenue generator or opportunity. But I do think on the commercial B2B side is where the opportunity and action is. And what I'm fearful of is that a lot of banks in particular who are really more focused on the B2B side than a lot of the credit unions are, but who want to get into that space are looking at FedNow and real-time payments as a product or a solution itself. And I don't think it is. I think it should be looked at as more of a, as a capability. It's not a rail, but it's, you know, it's a capability around which you build a solution. And I think that goes, kind of goes back to our product design development discussion before. If you're not approaching it as a solution, building a solution for niche specific industries and just going to sit back and go, yeah, well, if somebody wants this, we'll give it to them and we'll charge them 15 cents a transaction. I think they're missing out and that's where I was kind of going with the profit center.

Steve Williams

Yeah. And Ron, I think that I kind of give kudos to the government. They've created a commons, an infrastructure for folks to use. I think what we're going to be blown away by is the FinTech engineers and entrepreneurs who are going to look at this, quote, capability and build things on top of it, build intelligence and workflows and niche offerings and use data in ways that I think they're going to move faster than banks. And I think it underscores why we need to keep partnering, investing in, stay very close to my Fintechs because they're going to move faster using FedNow as a commons to innovate on top of.

Ron Shevlin

Right. All right, next topic, Steve, and one that we'd probably take a lot of grief for if we didn't bring up in this conversation is artificial intelligence and AI.

Steve Williams

It doesn't ring a bell. Is something going on there? I haven't heard anything.

Ron Shevlin

Yeah, it's after 60 years becoming a reality in the banking industry. Finally, things don't move real fast. And it's not just banking. It's every industry.

But there's a couple of really good charts, I think, in the graph that show year over year the adoption levels. And really starting to get up there for robotic process automation, even machine learning, and then chat bots, which are now in more than a third of credit unions and about one out of five banks. So they're a little bit lagging on that. But clearly, the big interest since the end of 2022 and all of 2023 was generative AI.

And looking into 2024, 14% of banks plan to invest in or implement generative AI. For credit unions, that percentage jumps up to almost a quarter, 24%. What's your take on what the year is going to look like from a generative AI perspective in banks and credit unions?

Steve Williams

Yeah, I think, you know, some of our smart people at our firm, Ron, talk about things like machine learning being around for a long time, the older cousin, I call it, but really having applications in cybersecurity fraud, alternative credit like Zest AI and Cienaptic. So I think that whole world of using that for risk and underwriting is going to continue to move very, very quickly. You know, actually on generative AI and large language models, I think it's something you, you have to use this as an enhancer to smart knowledge workers to really get the benefit. I think everybody producing kind of just empty content through chat models right now is gonna end up sounding a bit, remember in like 1986 when suddenly every song got these horrible keyboards in it and now you can't hardly listen to it because of those bad late 80s keyboards? I think chat GPT content that isn't enhanced by creative knowledge workers is going to start feeling like that. So I think it's going to be really important that as we use large language models around marketing policies and procedures training, that we also are doing that knowledge worker job enrichment, or it's going to be late eighties keyboards. I can already see it in some of the content.

Ron Shevlin 

Yeah, I agree. I like to think that my BS radar is pretty good. And I think what I'm beginning to develop is the chat GPT radar. Reading articles where I can go, that was not originally written. That was a pull from chat GPT. There's a feeling and a flow for that. But I will say this. I think we have a terminology problem in the industry, Steve. You know?

Up until about 2022, everybody used the term AI indiscriminately to reference a lot of different technologies. Then with the launch of Chad GPT, generative AI has become now the umbrella term. And it isn't everything. It relates to a very specific set of technologies. So I actually wrote in the report this year that I think we're going to see both the overestimation and underestimation of the use of generative AI. Overestimation because they think everything they're doing is gen AI, but underestimation because I think a lot of senior executives don't have insight into like what their people in marketing and legal and some of the other support departments are actually doing with these tools. Because they don't see it. It's not, they're not enterprise, you know, applications. It's not like.

ERP type systems, they're individual productivity tools, which is why I have liked to say over the past year, I'm gonna have to find a new line that chat GPT was to 2023, what Lotus123 was to 1983. And I think there was a lot of analogies there. Okay, we...

Steve Williams

Yeah, I agree. I think good, good knowledge workers are going to kick holy tail with tools like copilot and, and the tools that can be provided, uh, from, you know, hundreds of new applications that are out there.

Ron Shevlin

Okay, so we are running out of time, but I'm going to want to squeeze in two more topics, Steve. I'm going to throw one more in here and then I'm going to wrap up with a discussion about the themes and the strategies and going forward. For the past couple years in the report, we've asked respondents about their satisfaction with their core providers and their digital platform providers. And I think we can all agree that one of the bankers' favorite sports is to bitch about their core providers. That said...

The respondents satisfaction with their core providers over a number of different attributes that we asked about actually increased between 2023 and 2024 among bank respondents. Interestingly among the credit union respondents the percentages went down a little bit. Any thoughts on what was going on there?

Steve Williams

Yeah, I don't think it was because, you know, they got a net promoter, Ritz-Carlton service training. I think what happened is other priorities in tech started to consume them. So where do I go with AI? Is my digital transformation, especially as it comes to acquiring and cross-selling to my customer base at full tilt? Have I really used platform automation in processes like lending and fraud and relationship management? So I think the...

The priority kind of has shifted in many ways. I think the core is still a frustration, but it will be there for a hundred years well after our retirement parties. I think the bigger story that I'm tracking, Ron, is a lot of these tech companies wanna be just providers of cloud tech. Access our cloud system and go with God. Community banks, credit unions, regional banks, they want service providers.

They want people to help them integrate things, deploy new things, understand new technologies. That's not being provided in the marketplace. In fact, there's a real brain drain of operation and product knowledge across these big conglomerates that own the tech platforms now. And I think it's a risk to our industry. So I think you're gonna see more of where are we gonna get service from, integration service, development service. And I think there's gonna be new players around the cores in the future.

that solve this. We see this today in middleware, in integration, in custom dev. So I look for the next five to 10 years, a new kind of fintech ecosystem serving the banks.

Ron Shevlin

Two things quickly. Number one, there was a quote in the report from one of our survey respondents who really just nails that point about the resource issues that the providers have. And I totally agree with you, Steve, but I got to tell you, when I'm talking with financial institutions in their board and strategy meetings, I'm basically telling them, you got to have those integration capabilities. That has to be a core competency.

You may not have to build it, but you're going to have to integrate it. And the product, I think that has to be the next iteration of the competency of IT. OK.

Steve Williams

Absolutely. I always say, do you have a SWAT team with enterprise architecture, integration, data, customer experience development? Because you have to have that team maybe working with partners, but you got to take control of your destiny.

Ron Shevlin 

So Steve, let's wrap up here when we spend a couple of minutes, at least, on this last topic and go back to the theme of riding the next wave. One of the reasons why I selected that as a theme was because for me, there was an analogy around strategy. Yeah, it was the analogy of the banks and credit unions sitting out in the sea waiting to grab things. But for me, there was a kind of a strategy analogy that I often see and think that...

a lot of financial institutions fall at either end of two spectrums, or actually it's one spectrum, there are different ends. One being where there's a set it and forget it kind of strategy. We compete on our service and then every year it's just project planning. And then those at the other end of the spectrum that tend to redo their strategy every year as part of their strategic planning efforts. And I think the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle where you really need to...

have a defined strategy, that's at least a two, if not three to five year strategy. For me, that's kind of the wave. And it's like, what takes you on that wave? And it could be a product strategy like, yeah, we're going to really optimize revenue with real time payments. Or it could be building new capabilities through AI or moving towards a banking as a service strategy. That takes you three to five years and then

the wave dies out and you got to find the next wave because there's been tech change, industry change, societal change. That was what was kind of driving me for picking this as a theme. We talked, you had some different mental images. Want to share those?

Steve Williams

No, I couldn't agree more. It's kind of, I think this is a time when you have uncertainty about what's the next thing that kind of gets me momentum. You have to build optionality. So to build optionality, I need to be doing stuff. I need me to be trying stuff. I think banks oftentimes confuse the need to be very risk averse when it comes to their balance sheet and their finances, capital, liquidity, credit risk. They confuse that risk aversion to a risk aversion about experimenting with things, partner with a FinTech, try a new marketing strategy, build a small niche line of business and see if it can go, try to expand it nationally. And so that's the creative element. You and I both read Rick Rubin's book in 2023 about creativity. It is time for folks to essentially think about what is their comeback album? What is their Achtung Baby? What is their Foo Fighters after Nirvana?

And the only way you do that is you get out there and you try things and you talk to people and you see what the story is. And so, you know, I think that's the what needs to be done is yes, stick to conservatism on safety and soundness, but go take some risk, some creative risk on where can this business go? Where should we market? How do we use data? I'm not seeing enough of that. And we've got to not confuse those two risk appetites.

Ron Shevlin

Steve, I've been working with you for eight and a half years, and I'm going to do something right now that I've never done in those eight and a half years. Ready? I'm going to give you the last word. There you go. Steve Williams, president partner at Cornerstone Advisors. Thanks a lot for joining me. And everybody listening in, thanks a lot for joining the inaugural 2024 edition of the What's Going On in Banking podcast.

If you subscribe, thank you very much. If not, please do. And we look forward to seeing you and from you on another episode of What's Going On in Banking. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Steve.

Steve Williams

Thanks, Ron. It's really great stuff. Hope everybody reads the report because great stuff from hundreds of executives.