Return to Normalcy & Money’s Got Soul – Podcast Transcript

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.

The Fed just cut rates. The 50 basis point cut was welcome news for many financial institutions, but the pressure the industry faces are not going away. In fact, rate cuts may mask the underlying changes that are going on.

In our first segment, I connect with Lake Michigan Credit Union’s EVP, Chief Lending and Experience Officer, Eric Burgoon, and James White, General Manager of the Banking Business at TotalExpert, to talk about the future of banking. Customers are always in search of higher yield and the best terms, and it’s easier than ever to move money. Customers have options.

Institutions need to be reliable, relatable, and credible. To do that, the institutions need an overarching organizational strategy for differentiation and data to drive personalized products. In the second segment, where can you find everyone in the collective world of money? Vegas, of course, October 27th to 30th.

To provide insight into Money2020’s 2024 North American Edition, it is Chief Strategy Officer Scarlett Sieber and Zach Anderson-Pattett, VP and Global FinTech Strategy, connected with Brett to talk about the conference and the dynamics that they see shaping financial services. Keynotes from industry experts and rising stars lead the agenda with sessions on open banking, AI, borderless payments, embedded finance fraud, policy and regulation, of course. And they’ve built in lots of fun.

No spoiler alerts here. If you’re headed to Vegas, join us for the FinTech Luminaire’s reception. You can apply for an invitation with the link in the show notes.

See you in Vegas, baby. Well, I think everyone looked with great anticipation to what the Fed was going to do around rates. And probably no surprise that we did see a rate cut.

I think people are forecasting maybe one more. But something that struck me, and I can’t think of a better group to have this conversation with than James, you and Eric around, is it a return to normalcy? There was all of this clamor amongst the banks and the credit unions that it’s like, as rates went up, it was unexpected. And how would they survive? And money started moving, because it turns out people want yield.

And there was pressure on loans and repricing and assets. And so, yeah, we’re seeing some dips, but are we going to go like, is it just a reset back? Like, have we finished a cycle? Eric, why don’t we start with you? Yeah, I don’t see it as a cycle that we’re going to go back to. I mean, it’s continuing.

We’ve seen pressure on deposits for a couple of years now. And it’s still there. A lot of factors there, one being liquidity for many of us.

We still got to, we might have recovered a bit from the deposit runoff sort of scenario, but it’s still an issue. And we want some cushion there. We want to make sure that we’re able to continue to do the lending that we want to do.

So I think it’s going to be, it’s not going away. We’re still under pressure. Let’s pull on that for a second.

Where are you feeling the most pressure? And then, James, I want to turn it to you. What are you hearing? The pressure, right? Because it accelerated this year. Pressure was a, like, if there was a word cloud, I think pressure would be one of the biggest words.

But Eric, specifically, where is LMCU feeling pressure? Yeah, well, our members and our future members are coming to us with competitive rates. It’s almost a bit like, as rates were coming down on the mortgage side years ago, the cocktail conversation was, what rate did you refinance to? Now it’s kind of, what CD rate did you get? What’s your money market rate? So it becomes kind of a general conversation for everybody. So that creates pressure on us to make sure that we’re matching and keeping up with the market even more closely.

Deposits historically have been, some portions of deposits have been pretty sticky. They kind of, people put their money in and they kind of leave it there. Now we’re seeing a lot of money move out of a traditional savings account to a money market, high yielding money market, or a CD.

And so that’s been going on for a couple of years now. One of my favorite conversations with a bank president not that long ago, he was telling me, small community, his mother came in to the headquarters of the community bank and asked to speak to him. And she proceeded to dress him down in front of the entire lobby because his 86 year old mother had discovered the internet and said, you know, I can get over 4% other places and you’re paying me 0.2%, right? So it’s not just the young people are cognizant of what they can get.

You know, like once rates went up, people really did recognize, you know, that rate sensitivity. James, what are you hearing from Total Expert clients? Yeah, it’s been really interesting. So there’s a chart out there from the FDIC that talks about cost of funds for community banks and, you know, the big five.

And historically, the big five, just from scalability, have always had really low cost of funds. But that has shifted where the bigger institutions were raising rates to stay competitive and not lending out as much money, whereas the smaller institutions were really behind the times as far as following, you know, the consumers, what they’re requiring. And so their cost of funds have been higher, you know, over the past two years, which is really very interesting, because I think that, you know, to Eric’s point and his story about the cocktail conversation, a lot of bankers don’t factor in consumer behavior and consumer expectations oftentimes and how they have shifted over time.

And the expectations have always been really high around service and transactions. But, you know, now you can go online and access data and, you know, look at MarketWatch or Bankrate and see the highest products and originate those in moments, you know. And then you’ve got all of the fintechs like PayPal and Robinhood and all these that are constantly.

So I don’t foresee that cost of funds is going to drop dramatically because consumers are still right now trying to, as they’re coming up with this, the refi of these short term CDs that they’ve gotten, they’re looking for the highest rate they can get for the longest term because they expect rates to drop, you know, over time. And you know, there’s a threshold where you can go with a nice, safe investment like a CD or money market or a bond, you know, versus being in the market. And once the rates get below that threshold, then you’ll start to see consumers really start to invest in other channels again.

Yeah, I agree. And it’s a big difference between 0.25 and 4 point something, right? You know, it can be it can be looked at as an investment, not just a place to keep your cash. Yeah, absolutely.

So, James, what are you seeing from clients? Like, how do you combat this? Because let’s face it, institutions of all sizes, unless you have massive scale, this idea of competing on rate, right? Price competition really only helps in the long run if you have economies of scale and unfair advantage there. So how is everyone else going to compete there? Well, I’ll tell you how I believe that they have to do it, and then I will tell you about institutions that are focused on it because it is a hard shift. So relationship banking is a buzzword that we’ve used in the industry forever.

But over time, we really became transaction focused just due to volumes and free money. And now, I mean, transaction surveys, I mean, just the whole industry really evolved. And now it’s got to get back and shift back to relationship banking because otherwise you just got hot money sitting there burning, waiting to jump to the next rate.

And you’ve got to continue to show value, whether you’re manufacturing that value through rewards, programs and things like that, or you’re generating that value through technology and human interaction and all that. But it’s got to get back to trying to build that relationship. Yeah, well, and I think an important thing that often gets lost in relationship is it isn’t just about interpersonal relationship or personalization, but relationship is around unique understanding of you, who you are, who you are as a person or as a business, the pains that you feel and how I can deliver something of value for you.

You like in that, guys, it may in that value may not be actually, you know, right. Like there’s other sources of value that you can deliver. Eric, why don’t we start with you? How are you thinking through that for your lending clients? Yeah, I think James hit it right in the head.

I mean, it’s a combination of actual personal relationships and the use of technology to to make us appear smarter or more in tune with all of our customers. So frankly, that’s what we use Total Expert for a bit to make sure that, you know, when you have any large institution, any relationship manager, be it a mortgage loan officer, commercial loan officer or anybody else, you know, has hundreds, even thousands of customers that they’re trying to be, you know, the the point person for and anything that we can do to bring that that need or potential need or just a way to stay in touch with, you know, our customers and our members in our case, that’s huge. So to be able to point out and quickly get a notice that somebody’s, you know, savings rate is point two five percent.

Yet we have these other options, a great opportunity to make a phone call. And that really stands out because that’s where the personal understanding, like you said, Jason, that’s that really gets people’s attention. Like, oh, you knew that my rate was low and you actually offered me this.

I didn’t have to go out on the Internet and shop and go to seven different institutions to try to get what the market is. That’s huge. And people people remember that.

And again, technology helps us. We should be doing that anyway, but but technology helps us do that much more effectively. When you think about, you know, let’s face it, this year was maybe one of the craziest in terms of speed of evolution of technology when we went from data and analytics are important to a world where, you know, you see AI cropping up everywhere, you see automation cropping up everywhere.

James, how are you a total expert thinking through how you support clients there that are just dramatically different places, some leading all the way in and super sophisticated, others, you know, leading all the way back and want to, you know, not risk being in too early? No, I could not agree more. So I’m sure you guys have noticed, but the industry always has buzzwords that are themes for years or sometimes it can be a couple of years, whether it be personalization or engagement or CX journey, you know, and AI quickly became a buzzword. And so what we’re really trying to do is make sure that we’re not just checking a box for AI so that we can say that we have AI on a marketing slick.

But, you know, as Eric mentioned, it’s about scale and helping your customers scale. If you’ve got a thousand customers that you have to interact with, you’ve got to be able to scale those interactions, whether that be understanding them at scale, being able to communicate with them at scale, being able to, as you mentioned, with relationships, I always say that relationships to build a real relationship, you have to fit into three categories, reliable, relatable and credible. Reliable is, you know, being trustworthy.

Relatable is understanding them or making them feel understandable, understood. Incredible is exactly what Eric mentioned about feeling like that you’re keeping their best interest at heart and being able to do that at scale these days requires real AI and not just the buzzword of AI when you’re looking at all of your relationships that you’re responsible for trying to understand intent, you know, so that you can be there when it matters, because we’ve seen just through consumer behavior, even the youngest demographic still want to interact with somebody during a complex transaction. They still want to feel like they have a trusted advisor.

Well, they may or may not reach out to you. So if you know or can predict that they’re in a time of life or they’re going through something that may be that, then you can reach out and really continue to build that credibility. You obviously want to do it in a soft way.

That’s more of a value based interaction versus a selling interaction. You’re not going to reach out to them and say, hey, you know, did you just get a divorce? You know, you just want to reach out. Probably doesn’t play well.

Yeah, probably doesn’t. Yeah. Unless you’re single, I guess, you know, but being able to reach out to them and say, hey, I just was thinking about you, you know, is there time to do an account review? You know, maybe, you know, we can get you some better into some better products or some better rates.

Yeah, those relationships are genuine. It just it’s just it’s the matter, like you said, at scale. How do you know who you’re going to talk to today? You know, it’s not like it’s a fake thing at all.

It’s just it puts it to the forefront and gives you the opportunity to reconnect. Well, build on that for a second, Eric, in terms of how do you think about scaling relationships and understanding, you know, kind of intense stage of life? Because I’ve been having this discussion a lot lately with executives that, you know, the data they have really are age based, right? Like they clump people in demographics as if every 28 year old is the same. But let’s face it, you could have a 28 year old who’s having a child, you could have a 28 year old who’s getting married and you could have a 28 year old that’s getting divorced.

They’re all 28. But yeah. Or just so their company is retired.

Yeah, you’re right for sure. I mean, it’s it’s not to me it has not gone very far. It’s all the data is all there.

But but getting to that, I mean, many of our our systems in the banking industry are fairly antiquated. They don’t necessarily talk to each other. You’ve got loan systems, you’ve got a, you know, a core system.

You build integrations and do what you can. But really, the important thing is what the, you know, kind of the CRM or whatever the buzzword is now. But, you know, being able to bring that data together and it doesn’t have to be, in my opinion, it doesn’t have to be perfect.

It just has to be, you know, an opportunity to where there’s either like a life event or something that triggers. I mean, you can get a lot of data from credit card transactions, history and such. But ultimately, you still have to have somebody, whether it could be a it could be a branch manager or a customer service rep in a branch.

It could be a mortgage loan officer, commercial officer. Somebody still has to have to really make it work. In my opinion, you have to have both.

You have to have good information about what’s happening with that person now, or at least a hint or a tip of what it might be. But then the person contacting them has to have that that relationship. And, you know, most of our, you know, whether it be investments or a branch manager, they do have good relationships.

You know, we’re a credit union. We pride ourselves on our members being our owners. And so everybody is is pretty connected to the individuals.

But but they’re busy. And if you can’t help them know what who might be, you know, in the need for something, then it just sort of goes by. And then, you know, they come back into the branch or they call their loan officer up.

Great. But it’s not what it could be. And that’s not, again, to Jay’s point, it’s not we’re not able to scale it.

So you need both. So I want to ask you both is we near time. What do you think the market’s getting wrong, you know, broadly around the correction or this idea that we’re a return to normalcy? And what are they getting wrong technologically? I’ll start talking heads like me and you, Jason.

One of the things that we love about the economic changes is one, it gives us something to talk about. But also it allows it’s a good motivator for some institutions to actually make changes and really start to do some of the things that we’ve talked about. And I’m starting to see a lot of institutions really start to engage in enterprise wide data strategies, you know, as Eric was talking about, which is something that is important if you really want to connect those systems together, because when you look at data, it really you have marketing data, you have IT data, you have accounting and finance data.

And so you really have to have an overarching data strategy and then making sure that you’re you aren’t just chasing the shiny penny every time that you’ve got a good organizational strategy, that you’re executing at a boss one time, tell me, always be concerned about a company who’s changing their strategy all of the time, because it really takes at least three years to implement a strategy in a real way to see how it’s evolving. So some of it’s just, you know, from a technology perspective, getting that foundation right, so that when you build your tech stack, you’re able to really do these things with longevity, which is going to give you a good, healthy, you know, balance sheet. One thing I would think we’re maybe getting a little bit wrong is, is making sure that we, we communicate with our members, our customers in the way that they want to be communicated with, you know, it’s not a one size fits all with a, you know, be it mail or just, you know, general advertising, you know, you know, email, whatever.

But, you know, mobile is, is, you know, there’s a, and it’s not like, to your point earlier, Jason, it’s not necessarily an age thing. But people communicate more by their phones, but not everybody, not every young person, you know, wants to do it that way. We still have somebody coming in to buy their first home, they want to sit down and meet with somebody, or maybe that’s their parents telling them they have to do it that way.

And you have, you know, retirees that are great mobile users. So it depends on the person. And so it’s the right information with the relationship, you know, presented at the, you know, in the right way for for each individual.

So as we bring that home, James, if we think about to do, you’ve mentioned this idea of you have to be able to do it at scale. But you also need to be able to deliver in the channel. And the method and the means which may change over time, depending on the customer.

How do you think organizations, you know, that are just beginning to become tech savvy, you know, how do those banks and credit unions leverage platforms like a total expert or others to to get into the game, right? Because it’s not just about selecting the tool, it’s what do they need to be ready to do after they have it? No, I agree with you completely. So what you have to do one is not be overwhelmed by, by it. So don’t try to be Amazon tomorrow.

There are small data elements that you can continue to add and segment your customers or members, just to to start the personalization and the communication, you know, the multi channel, you know, omni channel is still something that is difficult, you know, around all the technological areas, but our channels, but, you know, just start crawl, walk, run, you know, make an impact and then continue to build on it. Because as you’re making those small impacts, you can use that ROI to fund, you know, future projects and be able to continue to build it out. It can be overwhelming, really, when you really think about trying to compete with a chase, you know, or someone like that.

And just age, income, presence of children, homeownership, which has been around since at least the 90s, can help. And then you start to add, you know, things, income, transaction behavior, you know, and you just continue to build on it. But, you know, start somewhere.

Eric, another question on that, because this can be hard for FIs to get their head around where they measure size of impact. In these small wins that are essential, but you can actually get your arms around and say, okay, we can see how this is going to benefit you’re like, okay, but it doesn’t move the needle for the overarching organization. But as a result, you don’t actually get started on anything because it’s not big enough.

But then you can really end up sideswiped by markets that have evolved past you. How have you begun to internalize within your C-suite that need to change behaviors? A couple things I’d say that come to mind, you know, you just gotta, you can’t do everything. I mean, you can’t in sort of a disciplined, we’ve traditionally not been that way.

But we’re moving toward a more of a disciplined process as to which kinds of technologies we’re going to implement. You know, it sounds bureaucratic, but it’s really not a steering committee kind of approach. And, and really, we kind of all we all kind of all in on it, whether it’s, you know, the lending side, or, you know, the deposit side, or everybody in between.

We’re all in agreement that, you know, these are the two or three things that we’re going to focus on, you know, this year, and you kind of stick to that, and you got to stick to that plan. So there’s always a shiny new object. And, you know, certainly, I’m, I’m one that always goes for those two.

But you can only pick a couple of those. And you gotta, you gotta choose wisely. Because I agree with James said, it’s just, you need to just start moving, you know, you know, one step forward.

If you’re making progress every day, you know, every day, every week, every month, you know, you’re going to get somewhere. And if you don’t, it’s just analysis, paralysis, and, you know, nothing happens. And then you kind of become what the stereotypical, you know, bureaucratic institution, you know, bank or government or whatever it is.

So you got to fight it. You got to fight it for a reason. So Jason, one thing I’d like to add, though, you know, Eric is a pretty humble guy.

So Lake Michigan, one of the things that they do that they have started with, I believe that makes them set apart from others is their culture. And their culture is top notch, you know, and we’ve seen them execute, you know, projects and implement and hold people accountable and making sure that, you know, they’re getting the value out of the tech and empowering their employees. And, you know, they have a really strong culture that really sets the base for all the things that they do.

And I think that doesn’t, it’s not easy to attribute it to performance, but it definitely is attributed to their performance. So strong culture, dude, I think of strong equals consistency. Eric, what are the elements if you had to define your culture that you say sets you apart? I’d say, you know, listen to those closest to the customer.

That’s been one of our guiding principles. Our loan officers, our tellers, our customer facing, you know, employees know far better than many of us in the C-suite or around what’s really going on and what’s really needed. We’ve been a real successful mortgage business, at least in the credit union space.

So about 65% of our loans are in residential mortgages. So in that space, it’s been focused on the purchase business, you know, don’t get dissuaded or caught into the refinance booms that come and go. And so staying focused on that sort of that piece.

And then I would say just the employee. I sort of feel like as a credit union, you know, we have, you know, typical companies and I’ve worked at other banks and other institutions, but you have a customer, an employee and a shareholder. And I think the thing that sets a credit unit apart a little bit for us has been our investor and our customer is the same person.

It’s the membership that owns the credit union. So that allows us to, of course, it’ll focus on that member. But it also gives us a little more ability to focus on our consumers.

We only have two, 50% of our effort toward, you know, toward employees, 50% toward our members instead of a third, you know, and so that kind of helps us, you know, and happy employees, you know, they keep, they keep their customers, their members. And, you know, those are a couple of the basic things. Fantastic.

Well, thank you both for joining me today. And really enjoyed the conversation and look forward to future episodes together. 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.

Welcome back to Breaking Banks. I am your host, Brit King. And unless you’ve been sleeping under a fintech log, you know that coming up in Vegas in just a few short days, in October 27 to 30th is Money 2020 Vegas.

And one of the biggest events on the fintech and financial services calendar for the year. We’re welcoming to the show Scarlett Sieber and Zach Pettit from Money 2020. And they’re here to tell us all about what’s going to happen in Vegas.

Scarlett, Zach, welcome. Thanks, Brett. Happy to be here.

And when you mentioned sleeping under a log, the word that stuck with that for me was sleeping. And wow, I can’t wait to do that in November. Yeah, exactly.

November, you’ll get some sleep, right? Actually, you know, it’s really interesting, because, you know, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on longevity recently, and sleep is keeps coming up as a really critical thing. So this old VC, you know, finance bro thing of I’ll sleep when I’m dead, it could have implications of pushing you towards that prematurely. So get some sleep, Scarlett.

That’s all I can say. You’re like the next Brian Johnson, Brett, you’re gonna you’re gonna go that direct. Yeah, I’m really interested in that stuff.

You know, I mean, obviously, you know, I think that it’s just it’s, it’s not a question of technology right now. It’s really a question of whether or not we put the resources into this, but it’s technically feasible now. So it gets really interesting.

What will life be like, when we can live to 130? You know, how many times will that mean I visit money 2020? You know, a lot now you got us doing math. I mean, we are even we’re I mean, Scarlett, we can kind of jump in. I don’t know if we want to go too far down this rabbit hole.

But we are even leaning further into health at money 2020. Right? Like the Vegas specifically, maybe a kind of tough place to be healthy. And we’re, you know, trying to do things with food with actual sunlight with, you know, trying to develop health lounges, things along those lines.

So people can actually, you know, have some sense of hydration by the end of the show, and you know, have some energy left at the end to I’m seeing events to yoga classes in the morning and stuff. You know, it’s like, yeah, I think that’s all part of it. Scarlett.

No, we’ve definitely we’ve definitely done that. And I know we were talking a bit offline about the lovely Bangkok. And one of our shows is based there as well.

So across all of our shows, we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about that, because the way that people connect and make, and make, you know, business happen is sometimes in a very formal boardroom, sometimes that in the connections under wherever else, but sometimes it’s things that are happening outside of the floor itself at the parties in the evening, the industry events or whatnot, which is great. But also to your point, there has been more of a focus on health and the human and showing up as your best self. So we’ve really taken that into account where, let’s be clear, there’s still going to be a lot of the fun evening events and industry nights where we’re going to be having a lot of great things, but making sure that we incorporate moments that are about taking care of yourself throughout the day.

And we’re really looking at that in 2025. We’re going to get a taste of it in 24. But 25, there will be some very dedicated specific things around health.

In Europe, you may see some saunas. We’ll see. We’ll see what happens.

Oh, saunas. Hot stuff. We don’t need those in Bangkok.

You just walk outside. Well, it’s actually pretty cool at the moment. But that’s another story.

And now I see, you know, in terms of talent that you’ve got coming to the event, I did note, we’ve got some alum from Breaking Banks there, including Gary Cohn and Frank Bizzano. I can never pronounce his. I had the same trouble when I interviewed him on the show, actually.

And you’ve got Daniella from Anthropic and so forth. There’s clearly a real focus on tech and particularly AI in the show this year. But, you know, like, how would you say AI is reshaping the conference in particular? I would say at the end of the day, so it’s really interesting the way the AI thing has come together.

We as a content team work very hard to mirror the industry without just blindly trend chasing, right? Like there’s a very slippery slope every year. A couple years ago, it was a blockchain. You know, right now it’s AI.

But how do we actually focus on a trend and have the audience and delegates actually get a very clear answer to a problem and come out of the four days with a strategy? So what we kind of realized is, you know, most every bank, most every, you know, established incumbent chartered financial institution either has an AI question or an AI remit, right? Where they’re either trying to figure out what to do, or they’re being told they have to do something. So that’s why you’re thinking of, you know, we have Sarah Fryer from OpenAI coming, the CFO that used to be part of Nextdoor, just absolute legend. Daniella that you mentioned, but also doing a summit with Nvidia, right? And there’s a whole set of kind of different pieces of AI conversation across the show, but you have every single LLM that you want to have a conversation with.

You have like every company in the world of AI that really matters right now. So the way that we’re thinking about it is basically whatever your problem is that around AI, if it’s you’re trying to solve for fraud, you’re trying to solve for like, you know, settlement in some sort of advanced way at the end of the day, whatever that might be, you should come out of these three and a half, four days with a very clear answer on is it actually even something that you should be doing, right? Is it actually something you should divest from and focus somewhere else for the rest of the year? Or, you know, this is the specific thing that we’re going to lean all the way into and just happen to have every single partner that you would need to build some of those things in Vegas in one place all at once. You know, I mean, I think that’s a reasonable question.

I think the answer is if you want to stay in business, sure. If not, then yeah, no problem. AI is optional, you know? Yeah.

And that’s that’s part of the conversation, right? I mean, I think there’s a I think that is what you’re saying is true. But I think you also have to lead the horse to water in a certain, you know, with especially with certain organizations inside of, you know, the domestic US when it comes to thinking about AI and things like that, because it is scary to a lot of people, you know, for you with a futurist sign behind you. It’s a little scary.

Yeah, true. Yeah, I mean, I do look at these things a little differently, you know, but, you know, we saw the massive strike on the docks. And one of the key elements of the strike was the potential impact of automation on to the dock workers employment.

And this is going to keep coming up again and again and again. So we need to be having grown up conversations about this, I think. But tell us about how many expect to be at the event, and how this has changed over the years, in terms of attendance.

And let’s talk a little bit about also that the ecosystem of all the the other events that attend tend to happen or networking and so forth that tends to happen around money 2020 as well. Yeah, so we are a public company, but the high level number that we can definitely talk about is 10,000 plus. So as you know, Brett, we have three shows.

So you were with us in Asia this year, we had 3000 people in Asia 8500 for Europe, and then 10,000 plus for Vegas. I think the thing that’s been interesting, and I spent a lot of time looking at the composition of our customers, there’s a handful of consistencies wherever you are in the world, and then there’s some geographical nuance. So naturally, and you know, this from the early days, we started focused on payments, but really, at our core, it’s still banks and payments, the networks, but payments more broadly.

However, as we’ve continued to grow, it really is the fintech show, which encompasses the collective ecosystem. So some of the things that Zach was talking to you about, when you were going into AI, he talked about the LMS that were there and whatever else, of course, we all the big tech companies coming, but then we also have the regulators. That’s another thing as well.

So we announced that Gensler is going to be speaking, we had some really interesting things in the past with Rohit Chopra coming and introducing his attentions around 1033 from the CFPB. So when you look at the composition of the audience, it really varies across the collective ecosystem of money, but banks and payments are at the core all across the board. And roughly a quarter of all attendees globally are startups.

And again, startups, broad and vague words, so it depends. But and we have some some ways that we quantify that in terms of how you interact and what you do in the evenings. So there’s a few things we make sure because we want to make sure that you’re having fun at our show too.

And as I said earlier, there is this concept of a lot of business getting done during the day. And there’s a lot of the US show is roughly 80% US people. Americans are quite serious at times and they want to get business done, which is amazing.

And we make sure that that happens. And we because the the global world of money is coming there 80% US but 20% rest the world business is getting done at a pace that is really unmatched. However, people also like to have fun.

And we might go to connect on something that we didn’t know that we were both interested in. So as an example, on Tuesday night, we have the legends of hip hop. And this time we’re doing it all around money’s got soul, where we have En Vogue, and we have a really great DJ coming.

So that is a moment where I’ve also heard about deals getting signed post that because people, you know, we’re all sudden lip syncing to the same song. So we have those moments we take over nightclubs, we’re taking over towel on Monday. And then one thing and Zach is actually the brainchild behind this.

We’ve really reimagined Sunday night in Vegas, calling it we call it Sunday Night Live, where it is a combination of content, but it’s also kind of like a show. So you get to be there and be a bit entertained. Sometimes just listening to the speakers in our industry talk is entertaining enough, but we really make it a show we have a live band, we have a DJ or whatever else.

And we really have a little bit there’s a story connected to it for that evening. And you know, we have libations and food and all that other stuff connected to it. So it’s gonna be I’ve got an idea for you for next year.

Let’s do it. What’s up? Open mic night, fintech comedy night. We’ve done it.

You’ve done it. Yeah, but it hasn’t been quite to that. Zach, you want to talk about what you did with Dave Burch and I’ve been trying to set something up for a while.

So yeah, God, you have to actually tackle Dave offstage. If you allowed him to even have a microphone and an open mic for a minute, that would be two hours later. Yeah.

So what Scarlett’s referring to two years, this is super random, big comedy fan. This was kind of based off of a show called kill Tony. And the idea is that basically, there you go.

Okay, I was wondering, I was wondering, it’s very, we should definitely do that. Yeah, the idea was basically kill Tony for fintech. So we had it was myself, Sheil Monat, and Emmeline Shaw, all as the kind of judges.

And then we had a little bucket startups put their name in a bucket, they came up, they pitched, we gave them feedback, we have a version of it that we really want to kind of lean into and do more over time where we actually have VCs up there, really writing checks. But love it. And more conversation to happen.

We did it last year, though, to Zach with with Niamh and at the Oh, yeah, those little wasn’t open mic night. But we did have comedy. And we had a professional comedian come in like roast the audience.

It was so awesome. Yeah, I broke a light. It was a good time.

And, I mean, um, you know, these days, when sort of you think about the caliber of organizations coming to an event like this, it’s it’s fairly clear that the conversation is very different from 10 years ago. But right now in the US, of course, we’ve got a lot of debate going on about banking as a service and fintech charters and stuff like that. How much of what’s happening outside of the US, because the big fintech moves are increasingly happening outside of the US, how much of that is bleeding into to the show from a geographical perspective? I think a pretty good amount of it.

I mean, I think we think of Scarlett kind of said this earlier, but we think of the US is a very global show, right. And what I was alluding to in terms of trying to be a mirror to the industry, I’d say that we we think about, you know, what is happening with open banking in Europe, right? Obviously, I think we can all agree, open banking in Europe is pretty far ahead of the US. But we want to think about how you know, what the CFPB is doing kind of compares contrast.

And that’s why we’re doing like a deep dive on open banking on Sunday, that’s actually a summit, right, it’s going to be three hours of deep, deep dive content there. But it’s broken into three different pieces. So it’s broken into 101, 201, and 301, where you can dip in dip out kind of, if you’re just, you know, the rules just coming, and maybe just coming right as the show happens.

So if you are truly a novice to this, you can dip in at 101. Right. And that’s if you’re most Americans, probably 101, 201.

But if you’re coming from overseas, 101, 201, for you is going to be things that have happened in past years. So you’d be focused on 301, yada, yada, yada, the point is, we’re definitely thinking globally. And now that we have shows, you know, we have a Asia content team, we have a Europe content team.

So we’re a holistic team that is bringing these things together. And I would say we pay a lot of attention to it. But we really want to serve the American market and make sure that the customer, the 80% of folks that are, you know, US based, are really getting what they need out of it.

Just just to give two other specific examples on things we’ve already talked about. So one is around AI. So Klarna, European, European darling there, you know, had their journey, but obviously been in the news a lot for their how they’ve been implementing AI and how that’s been reducing costs.

So the CTO, and the architect of OpenAI, who is responsible for that are actually coming on the main stage, and having that conversation. And then for us, too, we also spent a lot of time talking to our customers. And LATAM, in particular, from a geographic perspective, is quite interesting to a lot of American businesses.

So we’re making sure that we’re highlighting that. So we’re having key people, again, another UK darling in Revolut. So we have the CEO of Revolut Brazil and CEO of Revolut Mexico coming and talking.

And like the really interesting thing about that, Revolut’s the first one to get a banking license in Mexico, meaning the first fintech, you know, neobank to do that. That’s a huge deal. People aren’t really talking about that, but we’re making sure that we’re telling those stories as well.

Yeah, I’m catching up with David Velas in a couple of weeks in Brazil. So that’s gonna be great. Yeah, there you go.

We got the Brazil Central Bank and a handful of other big regulators from across the globe coming and having conversations as well. Good. I mean, I think the one of the things we’re seeing is borders consistently mattering less and less year over year, right? The idea of Canada and US and Mexico and, you know, these are entities, these are countries, but money is flowing across these borders in different ways, faster ways than they ever have before.

And as those, you know, boundaries kind of get grayer and grayer, like we want to mirror that in the content, mirror that in the show. And we’re, you know, even outside of content, we’re seeing fascinating conversations between, you know, this American organization and this Brazilian organization just exploring if they could do something, right? So there’s some really, some really interesting stuff happening as far as the world shrinking and globalizing very quickly. On the content side, let’s talk about that a little bit more.

I mean, obviously, you know, I’d like to talk about how you put an agenda like this together, Zach, first of all, and then Scarlett. I’d also like to talk about, you know, you’ve got the Money Pot podcast and other content that gets generated from the show. And I’d like to sort of talk a bit more about that, how the show builds community over time.

So Zach, first of all, how do you put together an agenda for an event like this? It’s a great question, Brett. I’d say it’s part science, part art, part pure serendipity. At the end of the day, the science is, the science and the art together, I would say, is it all starts with a story, right? It starts with the US content team on this specific conversation, myself, Rachel, Kelsey, coming together, going in a little room for a period of time and figuring out from our perspective, based on a lot of research, a lot of conversations, a lot of podcasts, a lot of nerding, what is the story of FinTech for this year, right? And being very future looking, but not being too out there, right? Really focusing on the next 12 months, what are going to be the key things that happen? Some people would call those show themes.

We refer to it as a story as of right now, content pillars, call them what you want, but they’re key things that we want to lean all the way into. You asked a question a second ago about, you know, how has the world changed in the last 10 years? One of the pieces in that is we refer to it as the FinTech economic cycle. And the idea is basically we’ve done one full economic cycle in FinTech now, right? So a lot of what we’re seeing this year is actually similar to what you were saying 10 years ago in terms of partnership conversations.

It’s just, they’re different now, right? It’s rhyming, but it’s not exactly the same. So after we build that story, that goes into the call for content where, you know, we get over 2000 submissions from across the industry that kind of represents about 6000 ish speakers. Um, that are actually, you know, trying to get on these stages.

And then we, as a team, we go through that. We end up probably getting about 40 to 50% of our content from the call for content. We really want the industry to be represented in terms of their perspective and their kind of the way that we think about it is like fan fiction, right? If we write a story, kind of what they’re coming back with, with their session or their idea, their panel, their, their demo, whatever it is, is kind of taking that and owning the story in their own unique way.

Right. And then from there, we are basically taking call for content and then going and nerding and building things that we see as incredibly important. Right.

One example would be, you know, Rohit Chopra coming a couple of years ago and giving some guidance around what the CFPB was going to do on 1033. That was not exactly coming through call for content that was, you know, really hard work from Rachel Morrissey, spending time in Washington, um, really building relationships there and leaning, you know, into kind of making sure that the regulatory aspect is, is represented there. So I’d say that’s the bulk, but the serendipity and the power of the brand is really the interesting part where, you know, we as a team can work incredibly hard for eight months to put together the absolute best agenda that we can.

And then two, three months from the show, we’re going to get a, you know, a note from the CFPB, or we’re going to get a note from the SEC, or we’re going to get a note from, you know, bank of X and it’s going to be their CEO that like, Oh, actually, yeah, that is really important. That’s three months away now. And then that’s when things get really fun.

Right. That’s when it’s a, Oh God, we, we don’t have much room left, but we can’t say no to this. Let’s figure out how to do it.

And that’s, that’s when it really gets interesting. Yeah. Fair enough.

I already forget your second question, Brett, because I was so focused asking about what, how you build community with content that’s generated at the show that keeps this sort of community going really. Totally. So there, there’s a few things that we do around that.

So as you mentioned, the money pot, you obviously were one of the pioneers in podcasting before it was a cool thing. Now everyone loves it, but we’ve been doing podcasting for over five years as well. And so that is, that is one of the places where we have consistent conversations with the ecosystem year round.

And then we obviously make sure that those are also geographically represented. So we have, as Zach mentioned to you earlier, we have FinTech experts in each respective geography whose job is to make sure we’re representing that geography. So that happens often.

And then that’s a big part of it. We also, we also make sure that we try to foster different pieces of that community in person at the shows and at moments throughout the year across other key geographies that we have presence in, whether it be New York. Zach mentioned that really good example in San Francisco where they did the version of the open mic night that was in San Francisco.

So we make sure we try to give back to the community and go to key markets throughout the world, throughout the year. And our team is always out having conversations. But we also, one of the things that we do is we have these cohorts as well, dedicated to women, to minorities, where that continues to blossom and grow.

We give, they have to apply to be part of it. It’s a really rigorous process. We get, you know, we’re really tight on who we select and they have a curated experience with us on site and then go and talk about us.

And then also on site at the show, we’ll bring together people, credit unions as a really big opportunity for us. So we’re having a dedicated session, which is a combination of like content and networking for credit unions, marketing. So we do, whether it be like sector or job function.

So we have things dedicated for marketing. We have things around women and FinTech, you name it. We make sure that the best part about what we are is that everyone comes from the collective world of money, but we want to make sure that people can find their their group and feel included as much as as much as they want to.

All right, so if you’re talking to startups or attendees this year, what are your instructions to them to get the most benefit out of the show? I would say so the biggest thing prep money 2020, if you’re going to do it correctly, starts at least a week, two weeks, three weeks in advance, right? This is actually the time to start thinking about do you have the app downloaded? Are you booking your meetings? Are you aware of like actually how you’re going to spend your time when you get to the show? I’d say right now is the time to start getting those meetings planned. Start looking at where and when you’re going to go to content. Sunday is an incredibly important day at money 2020.

I would say if you miss Sunday, you’re missing a lot of the value that you’re actually paying for to come to the show. We have four deep dive summits. We are going to be doing a very significant kind of intentional meeting gathering in the afternoon.

We have something called Startup Connect that’s going to be really focused on VCs and startups in a closed room, getting close together. We’re opening that with a little conversation with Tom Brown from NICA. A lot of exciting stuff happening Sunday.

Scarlett referenced Sunday Night Live earlier. I would not miss Sunday Night Live this year. We’re going to have Lynn Martin, the president of NYSC, Sarah Fryer, the CFO of OpenAI, a very exciting announcement that Scarlett and I literally found out about an hour ago.

And one more panel that is yet to be announced, but will be focused on doing embedded finance correctly. So wouldn’t miss Sunday. And then thinking about Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Monday and Tuesday, you know, that’s the time to, you know, make sure that you’re showing up for a couple of the key content things.

There’s going to be some really big announcements this year, but leaning really heavily into, you know, where are you booking your meetings? Are you actually getting the value out of the dollars you’re spending? I have been to money 2020 as a, you know, as a biz dev person at a startup, as a biz dev person at a bank, as a partnerships person. And the years that I started planning when I was on the plane on the way there, I would say I got the value, but I got the value of the serendipity that money 2020 just provides in that network. Right.

But I didn’t get the intentional value that I did in future years when I actually took the time to plan and schedule and figure out who I needed to talk to and what the value would be. So that would be the first thing. Second thing, dive into that agenda, find the most interesting things and whatever your problem is that you’re trying to solve.

Right. I think most people come to the show with something that they’re trying to like really learn or understand or get out of it. Lean into that.

If it’s AI, whatever it is, like there is, there is content. There are companies, there are individuals at the show that can get you from A to B on whatever it is you’re trying to do. I would just say, start thinking about it sooner than later, or you’re going to end up maybe a little overwhelmed.

And, and also don’t eat for like three days before you go to the event, right? Because you’re going to be doing every meeting you’re going to have is going to have food involved. At least three breakfasts, or you’re not doing a job. Exactly.

Yeah, you’re not doing it right. Exactly. Well, Scarlet Seba and Zach, thanks for joining us on the show today.

Where should people go to find out more about the event? Our website, Google My 2020, you’ll find all the things that you need. Obviously, you can follow us on any social platforms, but always, always a pleasure speaking with you, Brett, and lots of ways to engage with us and looking forward to seeing hopefully most of you in Vegas in a short time here. Have a great event, and we’ll, we’ll get some breaking news, obviously, as it happens.

Good luck. Thank you. Thank you, Brett.

That’s it for another week of the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks. This episode was produced by our US-based production team, including producer Lisbeth Severance, audio engineer Kevin Hersham, with social media support from Carlo Nabarro and Sylvie Johnson. If you liked this episode, don’t forget to tweet it out or post it on your favorite social media, or leave us a five-star review on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Facebook, or wherever it is that you listen to our show.

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