Revolutionizing Financial Services: Rab Govil, CEO of Naehas on Trust, Compliance, and the Future of Banking

In this episode Rab Govil, CEO of Naehas, discusses the transformative role of financial institutions in improving lives, especially for the unbanked. He highlights Naehas' customer experience platform, enabling personalized products, regulatory compliance, and operational efficiency. Govil explores future banking trends, emphasizing trust, regulations, and adapting to evolving customer interaction channels like Amazon or TikTok.

Key Words:
- Financial institutions
- Customer experience
- Regulatory compliance
- Personalized products
- Operational efficiency
- Banking innovation
- Future banking trends
- Trust in finance
- Unbanked populations
- Technology stacks
- Financial services platforms

Transcript

Welcome to Banking on Information, where we dive deep into the dynamic world of financial services and technology. Discover the innovative solutions driving the industry forward, explore the latest trends, and uncover the strategies that are reshaping the future of finance. Join us as we unravel the why, what, and how of solution providers in the financial services industry. Stay tuned for insights that will revolutionize the way you think about money and technology.

Hello, and welcome to Banking on Information. Today, I'm speaking with Rab Govil, the founder and CEO at Naehas. Rab, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Looking forward to the conversation. Yeah, and as you know, we're always starting off with a question based on the book from Simon Sinek. Start with why. We're asking you, why do you do what you do and why did you found, as a founder, why did you found Nehas? So what a great question, Rutger, right? And I think if I go back to the core, right, I fundamentally believe that financial institutions really, really matter in increasing the quality of life of the people around them. They really, really do matter.

I mean, there's lots and lots of you look at countries which don't have well- developed financial institutions, the quality of life in these companies are not great. Many of folks who are not, what we call the unbanked, their quality of life is not great, right? So fundamentally, financial institutions matter we want to make financial institutions better. to make financial institutions better, need to kind of deliver a customer experience is on par with all the other tech companies out there. The reality for most financial institutions is have to deliver to that level of customer experience within a regulatory environment that is very, very strict, right? I tell the story, right? Suppose somebody sends an offer out that is not correct. not gonna get sued, most likely.

will not have regulatory fines put on them, most likely, and they won't have a lot of governments going after them, right, in major ways, right? So they have a big rock to take upheld most financial institutions. So they matter a lot within a regulatory environment and we think we can help them do that. So how does that customer experience, how can we help them deliver a great customer experience? Well, a bank can deliver or a financial institutions, because we work not only with banks, we also work with asset managers. A financial institution can deliver a great experience when they innovate with products that really, really work for customers, not at a mass level, but at an individualized, hyper- personalized level. So we enable that, right?

When you deliver the product, you want to give them an offer that gets them and sends them to buy. We help them create that When the offer or product shows up, the disclosures should be simple to read. They should be easy to get. They should be consistent, right? If I get it into a direct mail piece and I go to the website, it should not be very different because if they're different and they're not correct, takes away from the customer experience and takes away from the feeling you can trust this institution, right? Then after they and then we help you deliver those messages, whether it's through email, direct mail, through digitally into the hands of the customers. And then once a customer takes advantage of that product and offer, they need to have a great experience.

And what I mean by great experience is, suppose you offered them 500 for opening a checking account, then they should be informed along the way that how close they're achieving this instead of them having to worry about, did I do this or did I not do this, or I did not qualify for this, and then I need to call the customer, right? So there's so many parts of the process we can help optimize. And currently, the conclusion we have come to after working with a lot of tier one and tier two institutions is we're still pretty far behind. And the reason we are far behind is they have so many different applications, each with their own data model. And they have to connect to each other and they never quite connect the right way.

So they have humans in the middle doing it and you go talk to the employees and they're very frustrated because they're spending all the time trying to chase all these corner cases down and these Excel spreadsheets, even with the level of investment these banks are making. So we have done this and the way we have done this is we have actually created a customer experience platform for financial services we can take all these different use cases and put them on one platform in a connected data model. So you can actually execute on these processes faster, you can get them to the customers faster, you can make sure you don't make any regulatory faux- and in the end deliver a great customer experience, not only for the customer, but also for the Yeah, so that's a great sort of bridge.

So you wanna make financial services better because it matters and I We don't think of financial services every day, but when we do, they do matter, right? They do make the difference between owning a home or not owning a home or being able to pay for things or owning a car. There are a lot of financial decisions that matter for customers. So I love that why, and I also love your what, how you help facilitate that, right? And make sure that highly regulated organizations are able to deliver those offers in a way that feels, that has a customer experience like non- regulated companies like Netflix or Amazon, right? Because that is the bar, that's the standard. the standard consumers are used to.

Right, now how do the customers that you work with, can you just tell me a story of maybe just one of them? You don't have to name them specifically, but how much value do they get out of that one platform by actually organizing and normalizing things? Like, so I first kind of tell the story, right? Like when we go to a customer, we ask a simple question. I said, okay, you're gonna make a change to one attribute of a product, right? For example, you're gonna say is, I'm gonna change the prime rate. I'll give you an example as a use case, right? The primary changes, right? You go talk to most customers, a primary change creates a series of anxiety among the whole financial institution, right?

Because that means is I gotta get a team together. I gotta make sure wherever there's a prime rate in every part of the system, every type of organizational structure, right? Every website, I need to go make all those changes. And literally it can take weeks, if not months at most financial institutions, right? We have customers now that do that in an afternoon. Wow. Literally in an afternoon, the channels they have. They go to one place, make the primary change, right? And part of this is our platform and the connected data model that allows you to do that. So even if you go to a financial institution and ask them a simple question, right? Do you know if you make this product or offer change, what are the different things you need to change in the org?

Most people will look at this and say, well, I need to call Susie up over here. I need to call Jim up over here. I need to call all these people here. I need to get them in a meeting together. We'll create an Excel spreadsheet. that's why it takes them months to get an offer out. Yeah, no, that makes total sense. So you do everything much faster. I'm assuming that that also reduces any mistakes being made, right? If you have it much organized. And I assume that you can then get new offers out faster, which hopefully soon will be in a downgrade environment, right? Who knows maybe whether the Fed is gonna lower rates or not. It's gonna be important to go to the customer with a new offer quickly.

So there's certainly value there as well. Like, I mean, there's real, I mean, it's a great customer experience, right? And it's very, very efficient. We have another customer for new products and offers, which had an internal saying, when in doubt, pay. So this customer would send out an offer and the whole idea behind the offer is to get somebody to engage with your product, right? Actually do a direct deposit, actually transact to be able to do this. But their internal systems to track were so bad that the legal and compliance people said that any customer could just call them. And once they call them, they'll just pay the Wow. So my question to them was like, why do you even do an yeah. That's kind of, that can get expensive soon, right?

Like- It did get very expensive because it's killing their budgets be able to do it, right? So I think forget, I mean, there's real dollar and cents associated with delivering a great customer experience and making it self- service to deliver on that. Yeah, no. And then obviously the compliance being fully compliant, banker understands that that is even more important, right? Because if you're not compliant, you're out of business in banking. Yeah. It's as simple as that. It's, I'm always, I'm just always impressed, right? Yeah. That these companies do such an amazing job with compliance, with the manual processes they have. And I've come to theconclusion the reason they're able to do this job is they have a very dedicated set of employees and teams and lots of them. Right, yeah.

Right, who are checking everything, not once, not twice, but three, four, five, or six times before something goes out, right? Which is built into the cost of them doing business. But, I mean, we have folks who will read like 50 page documents end to end. Right. Multiple times to make sure they're absolutely correct. When there's technology available to do comparisons, there's technology available to extract the content and make sure it meets all the compliance requirements. So since we havedeployed some of these automated compliance technologies for some of these employees, it's been life- changing, literally life- changing. We have had customers come to us and I said, you know what? My life is significantly better. Right, because you gave them the easy button. You made it easy for them.

Let's talk a little bit about the future. I like to do this thing called future stinking where we think 10 years out in the future. And you and I both don't know what the future holds, but we can think about possibly what a future could look like. So if you think about 2034, how do you see that the market, the banking market and what do you see in Well, with the amount of volatility that's in the world, right? future is definitely going to be very different what is today. So I can tell you what will stay the same and what will change, right? Sometime it's easy to do the change, right? What's not going to are financial institutions that people can trust to keep their Right?

That is not going to move some sort of decentralized methodology where they cannot somebody accountable, right? What's not going to change is the need for regulations to keep people's greed in check. And what I mean by that is that human beings will want to push boundaries because that's how we are set up. So to have regulations to ensure that those boundaries are adhered in the name of the consumer, I think I don't see those two things changing. The need for financial institutions that can be and the need for Now, everything else I feel is going to go through a pretty radical change, right? Just to give you a data point, Bank of America just told us that it used to be that folks go to their branch maybe two or three times a year.

they check their mobile app 300 times a year. Yeah. Right? So reality is based on tech, the interaction. the bank has actually gone up higher. Yeah. The number of phone calls they have making to the institution have gone up more. Yeah. Right? So I think folks will be engaged with their financial institutions much more. Now, the definition of a financial institution will also change. And what I mean by the definition is will want to do business where they spend most of their time. Right? If they're spending time on Amazon, will want to do business, all their business in Amazon. If they're spending all their time in TikTok. Yeah. They will want to do their business in TikTok, right? So the UI. the channels. Yeah. Are just going to continue to increase.

And the sad part about this is the number of channels continue to go up. Yeah. But the old channels don't go away. Right. Yeah. And the number of interactions go up as well. So it's incremental. It's also the complexity. Yeah. Right? So either an institution has to say is, okay, you know what? Yeah. I'm getting rid of all my bank branches. So that means that there are certain segment of customers I'm going to give up on. Right? Or I'm not going to service this channel. And if I don't service this channel, there are certain segment of customers we have to give up on. Yeah. And institutions have a hard time doing that because they really reduce their market. So if I look at the future, right? Yeah.

The future is, you still need trust in financial institutions. You still will regulated environments, the fundamental way we interact with our and the way we access it, the way we use it, the way we deploy it. Yeah. Those things are going to continue to and they will get more and more and Yeah. So if we take that future where some things are the same, so trust and regulations will still be there. There might be other players that have that trust, but they will still be regulated. Yeah. And there will be more engagement through more channels. How can people get ready? How are you getting ready for that future or help your customers to get ready for that future? Well, the reality is, right? They have to really rethink almost all the processes from the ground up.

Yeah. Right? And the tech stacks that go with it. Yeah. Right? That's why some of the de novo banks, right? That start up. Yeah. Have an advantage, right? Yeah. Then they don't sometimes scale because they don't have the cheap deposits or they don't have the money to go with it, right? So that's why the large financial institutions kind of still are very, very active. So they're gonna need to be a big part of it, right? And I know, I think people talk about like some of the big tech getting into it, right? Obviously Apple Pay is very, very popular, right? So the payments mechanism change, right? But I'm still convinced that these large tech companies don't want to get regulated. Right. They have enough. Yeah. Worry about regulations just in the core business.

Yeah. The last thing they take on is more regulation. So I worry less about the large tech companies getting into the business. Yeah. I do worry about new players coming into this marketplace. And if these institutions don't rethink their processes from the ground up, reduce some of the tech debt, do all the work necessary, that at some point they will be obviated. So now is the time to get ready. That is, I think, a great way to wrap this up. Thank you, Rab, for joining us on the podcast today. If you have any questions for Rab or myself, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn and obviously like and subscribe. Rab, thank you very much for being on the podcast. Allright Thank you so much, Rutger. And until next time, choose to be curious.