By John San Filippo
Finopotamus was onsite for the American Banker Digital Banking Conference, held June 12-15 in Austin, Tex. Among the many informative sessions was a conference staple: the speed demo session. During this session, a wide range of experts from a wide range of vendors were provided eight minutes each to present the how and the why to their respective solutions. Below is a recap of a few of the participants.
Bankjoy – Mike Duncan, Chief Executive Officer
Specialty: Digital Banking
The phenomenon of community financial institutions launching discreet digital brands is growing. Duncan took his allotted time on stage to announce that Bankjoy now offers a set of tools that allows community FIs to launch such brands using the Bankjoy digital banking platform as the frontend.
According to Duncan, these digital-only extensions fall into three categories. The first is affinity banking, where the digital FI appeals to a narrow vertical segment. “There's a bank here in Texas that has launched a digital-only bank that serves frequent flyers,” said Duncan as an example. He said the second category is FIs that are trying to reach as wide a base as possible. He offered Chime as one example.
“The third category is one that's really near and dear to my heart,” Duncan told the audience. “It’s community banks and credit unions that want to launch digital-only brands to go into their communities and uplift them, really going back into their roots and finding ways to serve their communities better.” He added that this includes meeting the needs of the unbanked and underbanked, as well as helping people repair their credit or develop better personal financial wellness.
“We have a solution for that now,” he continued. “You don't need to go out and find a dozen different vendors. You shouldn't do that because you’d probably end up with a solution that doesn't feel seamless – that doesn't have an experience that makes your users want to say, well, check this out. I have to share this with my friends and my family. Bankjoy has built out a full end-to-end digital banking ecosystem to help you launch your digital-only brand.”
QuickFi – Nate Gibbons, Chief Operating Officer
Specialty: Equipment Financing
According to Gibbons, approximately $1 trillion worth of business equipment is financed in the United States annually. However, he added, most community financial institutions are not active in this area because setting up an equipment financing operation is expensive and the transactions are complex. QuickFi seeks to address both of these issues.
“QuickFi is a 100% digital self-service financing platform,” Gibbons told the audience. “It allows banks to complete lease and loan transactions in minutes, instead of days or weeks. And QuickFi costs less than one third of what you'd spend to process a transaction using a traditional financing model.”
Gibbons claimed that by eliminating the high barriers to entry, QuickFi “changes the competitive landscape.” It allows banks to give their business customers “a nearly instant self-service digital finance experience they can't get anywhere else.” He said that FIs can deploy the QuickFi solution with minimal setup time and no upfront costs.
Payveris – Marcell King, Chief Innovation Officer
Specialty: Payments
“Bank bill pay is dying,” declared King. “When you look at the data over the last 10 years in its totality, bill pay has been growing about 75%. However, when you look at it from a distribution standpoint between banks and billers, bill pay through billers is growing at 123%, whereas bank and credit union bill pay is down to flat.”
He further claimed that over the past five years, financial institution bill pay has actually lost ground. One reason, according to King, is that bill pay through a biller typically allows multiple payment method options. “You can use a debit card, a credit card, you can use your digital wallet,” King told attendees. “You get real-time payments and you get real time confirmation of those payments.”
According to King, paying bills through a financial institution can be costly to consumers. Since FI bill pay systems require payment from the accountholder’s checking account, they miss out, for example, on the rewards points they would’ve received had they put the bill payment on their American Express card.
The solution, said King, is Payveris’ Bill Center. “[Bill Center] is a new, personal finance tool that converts bill pay into something that helps consumers simplify their financial lives,” he explained. “It allows consumers to aggregate and consolidate all of their bills, subscriptions, and other financial obligations.”
LemonadeLXP – John Findlay, Chief Executive Officer
Specialty: Digital Training and Education
“Technology implementations most often fail because all the focus is on the tech and very little is on the people who are meant to use it,” Findlay told the audience. “You're meant to drive adoption and maximize usage of the technology you're rolling out, but you don't have the right tools to do it. You don't have modern learning platforms that are designed specifically to train people to use digital tools. You also don't have the right support tools to help staff and customers learn to use your tech.” The LemonadeLXP platform, Findlay assured the audience, addresses all these issues and more.
According to Findlay, the LemonadeLXP platform tackles two major objectives. “First of all, you want to optimize your digital customer experience so you can maximize the ROI on your tech investments,” he said. “Second, as you're going through a conversion or new tech rollout, you need to train both staff and customers on that tech, again, to protect that investment.
Findlay further explained that the platform is designed to engage and educate staff, turning them into digital experts. LemonadeLXP achieves this through gamification. “You start with a tiny little bank and you're trying to grow it into a gleaming downtown tower. You do that by taking training and doing well in it. The better you do in training, the more it helps you grow your bank. … It's designed to drive participation and keep people coming back to take regular bite-size learning bits.”