Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one global fintech radio show and podcast. I’m Brett King. And I’m Jason Henricks.

Every week since 2013, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services. From incumbents to unicorns, and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative, inclusive, and healthy financial future. I’m J.P. Nichols, and this is Breaking Banks.

Welcome back to Breaking Banks. I am your host, Brett King. You guys will have to put up with me a little bit today, as the guests will, because I’ve got a bit of the rona.

Round four of the COVID for me, and it’s been a bit of a rough one, but I am slowly recovering and trying to keep the ball rolling. But we have a returning guest, well, in terms of a fintech, that’s been working with Breaking Banks for a long time now. Actually, on a second, very second episode back in May of 2013, a gentleman by the name of Ben Milne, who was the founder of Doala at the time, came on the show and introduced Doala to the world.

And here we are 11 odd years later, and we have Dave Glazier, the CEO of Doala, and Skylar Nesham, who’s the CTO there, joining us today to give us an update. Ben’s been on the show a few times, but we haven’t heard from Doala in a little while. So, Dave and Skylar, welcome to Breaking Banks.

Thanks, Brett. Great to be here. Thanks so much, Brett.

Thank you. Awesome. So, Dave, just give us a bit of an update.

What’s Doala focusing on right now? What’s the state of the company? What are you excited about? Just give us a bit of an update. Will do. So, Doala is focused on providing the most innovative interfaces to the U.S. banking system for innovators of all sizes.

We know that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of startup fintechs trying to embed payments in their applications that are appropriate for and being built for all sorts of industries. But we also realize and see a very common occurrence that larger organizations are also innovating and even digitally transforming their legacy systems to take advantage of the U.S. banking system for things like pay-by-bank and open banking to keep up with these smaller and more disruptive innovators. And Doala is providing the payments infrastructure and the open banking infrastructure for all of that innovation that’s happening in the U.S. today.

Awesome. And, I mean, what’s changed in the last few years in terms of Doala’s mission, or has it just got a sort of a tighter focus? I think we’ve gotten a tighter focus over the years, and it has evolved. Certainly, Ben Milner, our founder, is still a board member and very involved with the company and a good advisor to Skylar and myself.

He’s moved on to other fintech startups as well. So, he’s a brilliant guy. And his vision initially was to really bring costs down for individuals and small businesses to exchange funds in easy ways using the banking system and trying to get the costs of that for free to small businesses especially.

In doing so, he and the team built out this terrific set of APIs and infrastructure that overlays the legacy banking system. And over the years, there’s been a lot of evolution, as you pointed out, right? So, sort of PayPal, Venmo, sorry, Square Cash Square themselves have sort of innovated in that small business space and done very well. Doala continued to innovate to really bring the technology and the value-added services that we provide to more and more types of platforms as opposed to just small business retailers.

And so, that was kind of our second very evolution, I’d say. Now, we’re almost into our tertiary evolution, our third version of Doala, where we’re providing the similar solutions and building them for scale to provide for large businesses and enterprises as well. So, this capability to pay by bank or to streamline payments, particularly for real-time, is something we’re seeing happening around the world.

So, as we were prepping for the call, the three of us were discussing the success of PIX in Brazil. About 80% of population has adopted that now. The fastest growing payments network in the world.

You’ve got the UPI rails in India. I think it’s something like 300 million monthly active users on UPI right now in India. And 80% of retail payments or retail commerce will go through the UPI rails in India by 2027, just a few years from now.

Of course, we’ve had pay by bank, real-time payments capabilities in much of Asia for a while now. I’m living part-time in Bangkok, where, again, we have very high penetration of QR-based payments here with a system called PromptPay, which is pay by bank. And you can also use your phone number or a QR code or your bank account number for real-time payments in that way.

So, it seems like everywhere we’re seeing this massive injection because of mobile tech as an interface, enabling sort of this bank payments capabilities. But the US is still sort of dragging our feet. A lot of people are still… Yeah, we do have some same-day ACH, and we do have FedNow.

But still, majority of the payments are probably facing that sort of still three to five-day payment cycle stuff. And you’ve got the question of what’s going to happen with the interchange basis for merchants if we’re successful with pay by bank. So, there’s all of this sort of debate as well as the federal versus state regulations and mandates, of which there are little.

But why is it that the US sort of continues to struggle with this a bit in terms of this commitment to real-time payments, do you think? I think at the highest level, it’s the fact that we’ve built a payment system over the past 50 years that’s worked pretty well. 80 trillion with the T dollars was processed on the ACH system last year. 55 trillion of that 80 was B2B payments.

And then a smaller subset of that was retail payments. And frankly, we don’t… So, it’s sort of just momentum, right? It’s just that momentum in the system? I think it is. I think it is momentum in the system.

And so, pay by bank, as we think about paying for retail goods, either in-store, out of shop, or even online with merchants that we work with, it’s not easy today for us to enter our account numbers and routing numbers. We don’t know those by heart. We don’t have them in our pocket.

So, we haven’t built up those tools to make pay by bank ubiquitous in the US, like cards have become ubiquitous for retail payments. However, in these other countries that you talk about, regulators saw the opportunity to do that, the government regulators, and they issued these mandates to do it. Now, we’re in a more free market society and the innovators are what tends to drive innovation.

And we’re seeing that start to drive now, but we’re not nearly as far as… Hang on, hang on. I want to take exception with that because it hasn’t driven innovation. We’re at least 10 years behind China right now in the US.

So, the free market hasn’t driven the innovation, right? Yes, you’ve got some pockets of it, but sometimes you just need to mandate standards, I think. And I think because the rate of technology is happening so quickly, if you don’t do that, if you don’t mandate those changes and you leave it up to the free market, you get this lag. At least that’s my… There’s another element too.

It’s than other economies, because your labor cost is going to be lower and so forth. But I don’t know, what do you think, Dave? I think you can definitely make the argument that a lack of standards has introduced a lot of competing standards and a lot of competing solutions. And so, that’s led to a ton of complexity.

And that complexity really challenges business adoption and consumer adoption of these new tools and techniques, because it’s hard to even understand, how do I piece all things together? And I’ve got to get it from three or four or five different providers. And each of them has a different solution or a different standard that I’ve got to adhere to in order to adopt an open banking connection or a pay-by-bank connection. It’s incredibly complex for businesses.

I get that. So, your mission to abstract that complexity from businesses is admirable. It’s needed, obviously, because of that.

Maybe, Skylar, if I can follow up with that. Most of what we’re talking about here is in order to be able to use these new tools, use these technologies available to us to build these efficiencies for businesses and merchants and so forth, at the end of the day, it does come down to technology implementation. And to Dave’s point, we’re dealing with systems that have been put in place and have been successful for many years.

But at the same time, that means you are dealing with older legacy technology infrastructure. So, how much of that is the problem? Is that you’re trying to take diesel-powered next-generation horse and carts and put jet engines on them as an analogy? How much of it is just that the technology challenges are significant because of the massive investment in technology in the past? And that’s a place where a number of enterprises, it’s called mid-to-enterprise size businesses, I think, struggle. They have existing infrastructure and systems that they’ve built and invested in and put in place in order to interact and send payments today.

And you might be the CIO or the CTO inside of another organization, and you’re thinking about the technology that you use to wrap your bank in the US to pay ACH or something like that. And you see emerging open banking technology, or you see instant payment rails, and you think, gosh, that could be a great value add for my business partners. But in order to do that, we’ve got to crack open a system that we haven’t touched in 10 or 15 years.

And it’s just hard to imagine being able to upgrade that system to interface with a real-time or instant payment. And it might cost you $2 million, right? Exactly. And so what we’ve focused on at Douala is trying to build a very developer-centric, easy-to-integrate platform.

Another way to think of it might be an account-to-account payment gateway that allows a mid-enterprise business to essentially replace the tech stack that they have today and the connection that they have to their financial institutions or their payment methods with modern interfaces that are interoperable with their existing ecosystems, and that are powered by all the emerging technology in open banking and instant payments. Hmm. Yeah.

Dave, when we think about Douala’s journey through this, I mean, you guys, we just talked about the fact you were on the show back in 2013. And so, I mean, Douala’s been around for more than a decade now. And in that time, obviously, the technology has advanced.

So let me ask you, and Skylar, you can feel free to contribute as well, but clearly, you’ve had to be continuously adapting and continuously innovating in this space. So would you say it’s easier for a fintech like Douala than a traditional bank to do that and why? The short answer is yes. And the why is, I think, mostly because banks are great at taking care of their customers’ deposits and helping them manage their financials versus working with businesses and individuals on these really complex flows for payments.

And that’s what we’ve seen. We’ve seen banks trying to innovate in the realm of payments and money movement and open banking, but they almost always get in their own way, their bureaucracy, their size, their other priorities of handling deposits. Sort of just gets in the way of them being able to innovate fast, especially as fast as the innovators like Douala or our customers who are innovating even faster.

And so that’s where, you know, that’s where Douala fits in best is working with banks, providing these great interfaces to the banks, and then enabling all these really interesting use cases involving different funds flows and pay-by-bank payment methods so that innovators, whether they’re fintech innovators or large businesses that are disrupting, you know, they can do what they need to do. We’ve got so many really interesting examples of customers on our platforms that are innovating both for sort of B2B flows, but also for the retail flows that we talked about that are still new in the U.S. We’re seeing a lot of innovation there, and, you know, we want to be their partner to make it as easy as possible to work with the banks that they want to work with. Yeah, I mean, we just saw, you know, recently Apple’s announcement of their foray into the AI space.

And, you know, when we start talking about adaptability of AI in banking, one of the obvious areas is going to be some sort of super wallet payments capability that your personal AI will have. So, for example, I could say, you know, let’s say I nickname my personal AI Albert or Alfred, right, you know, like from Batman, and Alfred sits in my phone, he sits in my, you know, he’s my replacement AI, sits over the top of Alexa or Siri or whatever, and I can personify that. That seems like the way we’re going with this sort of capability.

And so, or even if we have, you know, Siri, in providing this and you have your AI assistant, one of the first things we’re going to see integration with is Siri being able to send your money on your behalf, like send a $50 Siri, right? And, you know, you don’t have to worry about authentication and any of that, because it’s using your voice, it’s on your, you know, your device, which has got the secure element and so forth. This seems like a no brainer that these types of abilities are going to come with the impact of AI. But again, the complexity of that from a technology capability perspective, for an average community bank or credit union would seem, you know, pretty far away, wouldn’t it Skylar? I mean, you know, so, you know, how does Diwala come in then and abstract that, you know, complexity with the sort of emerging systems? So I like the example that you provided, right? Like you could think about everyone sort of having their own personal LLM that’s trained on like all the things that are going on in their life, maybe has access to emails and messages.

And, and it’s sort of is like seeing bills that are coming in that need to be paid and recommending how to do it and when to do it and all those types of things. I think that the innovators are probably going to be the ones who are helping to design those, those personal LLMs and make them available to individuals. But when it comes to the payments piece, I think it’s more about how do you make, how do you open up your system in a way that makes it available to the AI? Right, that gateway.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. How do you, how do you make that gateway available? Because you’re sitting on a powerhouse of technology and services and, and the real challenge is… But it’s not accessible.

Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I get it.

I get it. So, I mean, when, when you’re sitting down with a bank partner, Dave, to come in to Douala’s family, you know, you know, I mean, how does that, how do you go through that process, particularly where there’s that cultural difference or where that there’s, where they haven’t touched those systems in a long time. And they’re saying, we’d love to do this, but, you know, we just don’t have the expertise.

It’s not our culture. You know, we use this rented core and they’re not being much help. And, you know, the, the pricing that they’ve put to us to modify this is, you know, something we can’t even consider at the moment.

You know, where do you start with that sort of, with those type of situations? Well, you’re describing the situations really well. And I think the situations are starting to fall into three categories, at least the way that, that we see them starting to pan out. One is that certain banks will just say like, hey, we don’t want to mess with any of this.

Like can you just be our partner? And we’ll white label your API and we’ll let you kind of deal with customers. And if you bring us customers, you know, we’ll incent you and we’ll make sure that your customers have a great experience. So that’s, that’s one way around it, where the banks just say like, we don’t want to do it, but we do like getting deposits and help us work with our customers and your customers.

The next, the next way is where some banks are embracing, trying to upgrade their cores to take advantage of some of the new technology. And there’s a few interesting companies that are helping them. Companies not known for core technology, but more for like interfacing with the core, but still behind the bank software.

These are companies like Finsley and Braille and Alacrity are some interesting innovators in that space. So we’re working with them to figure out how, how can we create great payments gateway interfaces to their software so that they can bring that to the banks they’re working with. And then I’d say thirdly is probably the big banks, like the really well-known, like the top 10 or 15 banks.

Most of them are trying to build everything themselves. So they’re trying to build everything themselves, but still have partnerships with FinTechs like Douala. So we find that an interesting space where they’re, I think what’s happening there is what we see is like customers get to decide, right? So these big customers working with the biggest banks, they’re going to decide, do they want to work with the bank and have an all-in-one stack with a single bank, or do they want to work with an integration provider, an innovation provider like Douala that allows them to get that stack and interface to their one bank, but maybe they need to interface to other banks as well.

So we give them that opportunity to work with multiple banks in those cases. So, you know, there’s three or four models that we see and the way we’ve positioned our tools and our open banking platform is that, you know, we can provide that one-stop shop to work with any bank you want to work with in the US. Very cool.

Well, here’s the thing is it also is a bit of a team sport these days in terms of these transformations. There’s obviously many different players in the space right now, apart from Fed Now, you’ve got players like Plaid and Stripe and others that are involved in elements of this, as well as sort of, you know, competing attempts from banks with, you know, the likes of Zelle and others. But Skylar, you know, how do you build out a capability that enables you to plug and play different players and what could others in, you know, particularly bank partners learn from that in terms of the way they have to think about their tech stack moving forward? We rewind the clock, let’s call it 15 years ago.

The technology that was available to us to build software was, you know, technology’s emerging, but you still have to kind of configure and build it yourself. There’s a lot of maintenance that’s occurring. You know, people are planning big infrastructure migrations to the cloud and things like that.

Let’s fast forward now to where we are today. Much of our technology is completely serverless. It’s very easy to get services stood up and build API gateways and build connections to new infrastructure.

And so if you’re able to pivot your engineering and technology teams to take advantage of the latest advances in cloud computing, whether that’s a private cloud or a public cloud, what you can do is build a way that it’s very quick to have a simple API gateway. And behind that, it’s connections to all kinds of financial institutions, open banking platforms, and other kinds of payment providers. And your developers can be writing simple wrappers around those things and embedding it inside of your technology stack.

And on top of this, AI that we just talked about just a little bit ago is just going to keep speeding this up, right? So you can imagine AI helping write code that lives inside of simple containers and connects to these new integrations into your software platform or API layer. And that’s a part of the strategy of what we’re building with Dualla. So, you know, I think it’s keeping your eyes on those emerging trends in technology and thinking about how you can leverage them to move faster and ease the integration and maintenance for your team and really modernizing whatever tech stack or cloud that you’re working on.

But the continued advances in AI and cloud computing just make it simpler and simpler to deliver software for us. And as a practical example, right, we’re building connections to banks. We’re able to connect a new financial institution to our platform called Dualla Connect in a couple weeks’ time, where when we first started building software at Dualla and connecting to banks, we would talk about integrations taking quarters or maybe even years.

Now, based on, you know, API-enabled banks and that simple technology layer that we’ve built, we can connect to new banks in just a matter of a few sprints for our engineering teams. So here’s my question, Dave, sorry, you follow up. Yeah, just to abstract that a little bit further from a business sense, I think this idea of specialization is going to become more and more important, right? Companies are going to specialize in one thing, and then they’re going to rely on other companies to gain access to the other things that bring value to their one thing.

So if you think about, like, the insurance industry, as we’ve gotten deeper, working with more and more insurance companies and insurance technology providers, you know, we see software companies building new claims management systems or new broker management systems or new premium management systems. So they’re building this really interesting software for insurance companies or insurance brokers, but they’re not payments experts. Well, they don’t need to be, right? They can plug in to this integration, the way Skylar talked about.

The same is going to be true for manufacturers that want to do supply chain automation and transport companies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s exactly what’s happening. Yes, exactly.

But here’s the question. I mean, you’ve laid out the problem set, you know, we have on this discussion, and it’s clear trajectory-wise where this is going. There’s going to be more automation, more requirement for integration, more technology involved in the play.

But I have a question here and get your opinion on this. You know, if you take it out five or 10 years from where we are today, will it be possible as a bank for you to be involved in this ecosystem without at least being integrated into the cloud? I mean, I think everything will be integrated into the cloud in five to 10 years. Most things are already in some way, shape or form today.

I mean, even the way we’re talking today is via the cloud, right? Everything that we’re doing is becoming cloud enabled. So there’s no doubt in my mind that that will be the case. You know, Skylar and I were brainstorming with some innovator friends of ours over the last week.

And, you know, we were saying, like, how far can we take this AI journey? And we can imagine that, you know, a smart designer will be able to tell its AI what kind of new services or systems they want to build. And the AI will just go, you know, turn that into ones and zeros. It’ll be done.

It’ll all be done in the cloud, right? Yeah. But see, I mean, that in itself means that there’s going to be sort of this generational shift to these new techs. And this is one of the arguments I have as to why fintechs, you know, if you look like at challenger banks, like NewBank and Revolut, Chime in the US, you know, WeBank in Shenzhen, or you look at the wallet plays, you know, the wallet ecosystems and so forth.

The conclusion has to be that these organizations have a strong technical advantage because they’re cloud native. They don’t have to do any migration. And if AI comes along or quantum comes along, and you want to plug it in, that’s just, you know, tapping into a new service on AWS or Azure or Google Cloud.

The banks, even if you have a fairly advanced core provider, you know, with a pretty good stack of their own, not Amazon or Microsoft in terms of those sorts of central data center and cloud capabilities. So I do see a bit of a divergence there. But ultimately, you know, would you agree with the statement that, you know, the players who survive this are those just that just continuously innovate from this point forward? Absolutely.

It’s the innovators dilemma. Everybody has to innovate. And if you if you don’t, you will get swallowed up.

And the banking ecosystem in the US is in is in a, you know, a sweet spot for consolidation opportunities. There’s 10,000 financial institutions in the US. It’s gonna be like any other country.

So it’s great when it comes to getting personalized service in your community. But in terms of being able to push technology advances forward in the banking system that those 10,000 banks are going to provide friction if there’s not more consolidation and more innovation towards consolidation, I think. All right, well, listen, we’re going to wrap this and go to break.

But before we do, Dave, how can people find out more about what’s happening with Doala right now? Well, check out Doala.com. We’ve got some cool new AI enabled features on the site. So you can do some do some extensive research and check out our LinkedIn posts. We keep everybody up to speed there in terms of where we’re headed and which conferences we’ll be at and where we’ll be in the world.

So that those are good spots. And how about for both of you, if people wanted to reach out to either of you individually, LinkedIn is the best channel for that. I think that’s the best way.

Please do. Okay, great. Well, Dave Glazier, Skylar Nesham, thanks for joining us and giving us an update on Doala.

It’s great to have you guys back on the show and sounds like you guys have your work cut out for you. Thanks, Brett. We do.

We’ll get back to it. Thanks so much. Looking forward to talking soon.

So go and check out Doala.com. That’s D-W-O-L-A dot com. And to find out more information or follow them on LinkedIn. Let’s take a quick break.

You’re listening to Breaking Banks. I’m your host, Brett King. We will be back in a moment.

This show is brought to you by Alloy Labs. As much as we love talking on the show, we believe that action is more valuable than talk. Alloy Labs is the industry leader in helping fearless bankers drive exponential growth through collaboration, exclusive partnerships, and powerful network effects that give them an unfair advantage.

Learn more at AlloyLabs.com. Alloy Labs, banking unbound. So you’ve been in the event business now for close to 20 years. Part of that early team with Money2020.

Part of the early team with Fintech Meetup. You’re playing this game, but I’ve got to know, right? What happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas on Breaking Banks. What is some of the craziest that you’ve seen? Because you’ve got to have witnessed a ton of craziness at these events.

Yeah, I’ve definitely seen a lot. There’s probably many more stories that I can’t say that are inappropriate for a general audience, but I want to be family friendly. There have definitely been times when I’ve had the CEO of a public company come off stage with the lab mic, and then he goes off and runs off into the bathroom.

That is one of my greatest fears as a speaker, by the way. I take that thing off. I always worry it goes on and you hear waterfalls.

Yeah. I literally ran from that desk. I was like, hey, let me get that back for me.

We don’t need to hear all this. Oh, man. I’m curious.

Has anyone ever fallen off stage or out of a chair? We had our team picture, and someone fell off the stage on the team picture because the photographer told us to go back, back, back, and then someone fell off. It was not good. Oh, man.

Well, speaking of inappropriate, this might seem like an inappropriate question past someone in the event business, but it seems we were just trying to plan our annual member meeting for next year. There is at least one fintech-oriented event every single week, year-round. With the exception of the winter holiday and 4th of July, mercifully, there are no fintech events then.

Are there too many events? Yeah, that’s a great question. The way I think about it is what’s the purpose of an event? It’s to learn something. It is to meet like-minded folks potentially tackling the same issues.

It’s to meet new companies and network. You’re right. Sometimes I look at the calendar.

I’m like, do we need all of these? I think about it almost like a forest because there’s no barrier to growing a tree or going to a plant. There’s a lot of plants. Then what happened, for example, with the pandemic was the pandemic came and wiped out that all the trees were cut down.

The forest fire has come through. It has cleared the land. It has.

It has. Then right after the event, some of the trees were able to have still shoots. By that, shoots, I mean they had some kind of digital thing or something like that that was able to keep a community going through the pandemic.

Then post-pandemic, the first couple of years, there were some big tall trees. Then everybody went to those big trees. Now we’re back at a point where there’s a lot more plants coming up.

It went from no trees to a couple of big trees and now back to a broad forest. The question, it’s a valid question. I find myself being much more skeptical when I’m asked to join an event.

With that in mind, events are made to make money. That’s why Money2020 was purchased. Yeah.

Nicely for you. Fintech Meetup was recently purchased. You can’t not monetize it.

How do you think about differentiating in a world where it isn’t just about how much speakers that are doing pay-to-play rarely deliver? You can end up with too many stages and too many logos all crammed in. How do you actually find a way to differentiate and deliver that value? A couple of things. Going back to 2011-12 when Money2020 was built, there were other existing events too at that time.

The thing was that their definition of innovation was different than, for example, at the time Google Wallet was coming out. Then you had so many different new platforms on mobile. You had new things happening with data and they weren’t being adequately covered.

There was a market need for something that brought the appropriate people together. We capitalized on that with Money2020. Obviously, that business has been doing great and growing.

Now, I think we’re at a point where there’s so many events, I do feel like there’s a huge desire and need to maximize, to improve our return on time when we’re at an event and to make it worthwhile. Whereas in the past, you could have hoped on serendipity and bit of luck. Our view is, can we use technology to maybe shift the odds in your favor of actually meeting the right person, of meeting the right company, of achieving your goals that you set out when you signed up for the event? It feels like this is, I love the analogy of the forest fire, kind of needing to clear out some of the trees of, call it not just the conferences, but the habits that we do by rote, because that’s how business was done, which was so much in person.

But it’s replaced with now, I feel like we’re all inundated because we can’t hop on a Zoom in your day. Your work happens after the workday because the day is taken up by Zooms and Teams meetings. Yeah.

Which makes the conference even more costly, because I love the phrase, the return on time. Yeah. When an organization thinks about return on time, how should they think about who to send? Because I don’t know that a whole lot of thought necessarily goes into that.

So you as a professional conference goer and attender, how do you think about what you’re putting together? Who’s the right audience for that? Yeah. That’s a great question. And I don’t think companies think enough about that.

They’re just like, okay, who wants to go, go. But that’s not necessarily the right person or people. I think, first of all, figuring out what are the business objectives? Are you looking to create new partnerships? Are you looking to hire people? Are you looking to socialize a new product? Depending on who or what those goals might be, requires different levels of seniority, requires different levels of function as well, too.

Whereas if you’re going to an event with a lot of, let’s say, technical solutions, and if you don’t bring someone who understands the technology- Like DevCon, right? Yeah. CEO, not most appropriate to maximize from what moves built, disclosure, we’re investors, but it’s like, they’ve built something that it’s technical content, actually. Absolutely.

That is a perfect example. And so I, myself, I was an engineer, so I can understand that. But if you have someone who can appreciate that, then I think it’s a big miss.

From a seniority perspective, I also think that having someone who has the right level of detail for the conversations that you’re thinking about, if you are looking at, let’s say, socializing a banking as a service solution or socializing an identity solution, it probably might make more sense to have the product person there who can speak to broadly how it could fit into different use cases. Whereas if you’re too high up, it’s going to be lost in the weeds. And if you’re too much in the weeds, then you’re not going to be able to navigate and adapt to how the conversations might go.

Corey LeBlanc, one of the founders and CTO at Locality Bank, would tell me his least favorite time of the year is when his bank CEO would come back from an event and just hand him a bunch, his previous, just to be clear, previous CEO would come back from an event, hand him a bunch of cards, with very little context and not understanding where they fit the ecosystem. He’s like, and then I’d have to spend two to three weeks with my team trying to figure out who are they, what do they do, and do we care? Yeah. I used to be at Citibank many years ago.

And similarly, it was like, if you don’t have that appropriate context, like, for example, is it a SMB solution? Is it a consumer solution? You’re going to waste a lot of time. And no, that’s a great example. One of my other favorites like that, Matt McCullough at Enterprise Bank, I was surprised at FTMU this year, how many people they brought.

You know, part of the banking as a service team, plus, you know, the CEO of a good sized bank, and some others, he goes, well, we each have different purposes, right? Like the VAS team is here doing, you know, biz dev, right? Part of the ops team is here to actually go do due diligence and look for new vendors. But some of these other people are on our delivery side. And I want them to see what fast looks like by being exposed to a bunch of startups.

One of the things I loved about that is, he was very clear about what he wanted each, like, it’s not we’re all just going to Vegas. Yeah, it is, you know, hanging out at the Venetian is fun and all, but they each had a different purpose. And it was a clearly stated purpose.

That I love that. And another thing that I’ve seen companies do is that your post event, like all of these individuals will need to have like, almost like a debrief or like a page write up or some kind of a write up of what they’ve seen. And I think that that also, I think that sort of makes you take it more seriously that like, you’re sort of helping that group intelligence.

And like, what you’re like, let’s say, like, you’re just looking at the speed elements of it, like, key in on that, and like, feed that to the rest of the team. And I think that I do wish that like, I shouldn’t say I do wish, but there are definitely a lot of companies that think through it in a appropriate and strategic manner. But like, if you don’t, then like I said, you’re going to be you could miss some things that could be vital for your business.

Any other unexpected best practices that you’ve seen? Yeah, I sort of going back to even a little bit of like, you know, the post pandemic element of like, how we’re all living on zoom, and everything’s so much more decentralized. Like, I do find that like, when companies have, like, let’s say some kind of networking event, they’ll get like a restaurant. And then, like the at the end of it, they’ll have everyone on their team say, Okay, this is our, this is our time together.

And it’s actually like a great way I found it. It’s a great way that like, you know, a lot of these ideas are top of mind, you can meet someone in person versus a zoom. And so like, I think that thinking about an event not only externally, but internally as well, I think as a focus point, I think that I’ve seen that work well, switching gears to the other side of the stage for a second.

You also and I know we share this same passion, which is so much content at conferences is horrible. You know, a lot of it is it is because they’re sponsors, right? Like, make no bones about it. Like we’re not everyone is a paid and professional speaker.

And they have an agenda, which is to sell things, right, not make the most engaging content. What have you seen that really kind of nails it for the speakers that they both get the business value they’re paying for? Yeah, but also, you know, contributes to the greater knowledge? Yeah, I, I think a couple of things come to mind like, and, you know, both you and I, we’ve spoken at so many conferences and done so many prep calls, and like, you want to have your speakers feel comfortable. But I think that there’s there’s definitely a huge value in feeling uncomfortable as well.

And you don’t want everyone to sort of feel like, oh, I can go on to my speaking autopilot. And like, sort of just say what the what the, you know, what I’m supposed to say, I think that whenever you can actually get someone to say what they’re really thinking, as opposed to what they’re, they’re told to think, it’s like, the audience knows that. And I think, like, I found that that’s also the time where, you know, you could do follow up questions.

And like, really, I think really create something special versus something that, quite honestly, you could just like read on a web page or something like that. So bringing this home, FTMU, you know, pioneered this idea of the speed dating. And we reside, you know, now in a world, you know, oversaturated with content.

What do you think the future of content really becomes with like, what’s up your sleeve in terms of the next level of innovation? Yeah, I mean, I think a couple of things that that is important to us is that, you know, that like, say, for example, a panel, and you have a panel, and you can assume a lot of people think that a panel is easy. But if you have the right moderator, who can ask things or frame things in a different manner, or to get people off of their, you know, their, their, their regular zone, I think that that tends to get people to reveal things that are going to be interesting. It’s also that, you know, this is like, really, really super hard.

It’s like, creating the right culture, where people feel open. And, and, and I’m actually really happy about that, like the first couple of fintech meetups that we’ve had, you know, we’ve had that environment where it’s people feel, you know, comfortable and say, you know, like they’re in a safe zone where they can express things, versus having to feel like that you need to be in front of the bright lights. And like, it’s obviously bright lights, but we don’t need to be so bright.

So it should be feel like you’re in a living room, not underneath like a, an inquisitor or something like that. Yeah. Well, all fantastic advice is people are ramping up for the fall season and budgeting for the spring season conferences, how to maximize the value.

It is great to have you on the show after too long of a hiatus, Anjeeb. Thank you very much, Jason. Really appreciate it.

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