2019 Conference

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The Brain of the Bank

Presented By:

Greg Demas - SVP, PrecisionLender

Andy Max - Managing Director, Treasury, First National Bank of Omaha

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Description

In today's hyper-competitive Commercial Banking landscape, customer experience and speed to funding are two of the most important differentiators for your brand. A holistic, integrated technology stack spanning your front and back offices is no longer a nice to have; it is foundational to your success.

PrecisionLender refers to this as the Brain of the Bank; a fully integrated application ecosystem comprising of CRM, Pricing & Profitability Management and LOS.

Join us, along with some of our CRM and LOS partners, in exploring why Pricing and Profitability Management is such a critical component of this ecosystem and see live demos of the value this is adding to both banks and their customers.

Transcription

Greg Demas:    My name is Greg Demas. I run the community and regional banking business for Precision Lender. In The latter part of this session I'm going to invite up Andy Max to join me. Andy's one of our longest standing and really most forward thinking customers, and he's going to share a bit on his journey on this topic. The topic, of course, is the brain of the bank, which you can see on the screen here. That's essentially the term that we've arrived at, at Precision Lender for referring to the integrated set of platforms and applications inside a bank that really comprise the commercial sales cycle.

Greg Demas:    Being a lifelong banker myself, the choices that financial institutions make around technology has really always been fascinating for me. I devoted a huge part of my career to it when I was a banker, and then decided to devote 100% of my time to it and came over to Precision Lender last October after being a banker forever. So really happy to be here today.

Greg Demas:    Before we get started, let's set a foundation. I'm going to go back in time three years to this exact conference, different room, but this hotel, three years ago, and this is actually from a time when I was a banker and a client of Precision Lender, so we can play that video real quick.

Greg Demas:    We can look at this kind of in the concept of like an ecosystem, right? So I'm looking at the little screen here. The definition of an ecosystem is a system or a group of interconnected elements formed by the interaction of a community of organisms within their environment. That's exactly, essentially what needs to happen to originate a loan. I mean, think about it. What happens with a loan from its inception, in either the pricing tool or in your CRM tool, to when you actually click the big red launch button in your core system to get the thing funded, right? Think about all of these different parties of people that need to interact together to get something done, right?

Greg Demas:    So nobody's here from our bank, and it's good. I made sure that we can say that the fish is operations, and the eagle is risk management, I made sure there's no snake on here or no whatever other bad animals you wouldn't want to put on here. I don't want to make anybody angry. But you know, the key here obviously is not doing pricing in a vacuum, and having all of these parties work together because ultimately, I know this has been said a bunch up here, it's not about squeezing an extra basis point in Nim out of a deal, right? Yeah. Nim is important, of course it is. I'm sure we all stare at it every single day. It's not about increasing a line of credit so that your exposure is greater, your fundings are greater. Right? It's literally about getting everybody to work together so that you can deliver on those value points that we talked about.

Greg Demas:    All right. My hair is a lot less cool now than it was back then, unfortunately. So essentially what I was getting at back then in 2016 was the concept of the brain of the bank, which is why we're here today, I just don't think we were really calling it that yet. I use that slide with all the animals on it to essentially present this concept visually. I had to do that because it really didn't exist. It was still conceptual. Parts of it existed, but there were still a lot of gaps in the technology that was available, a lot of integrations that were available at the time. The awesome thing, and the reason we're all here today and I'm up here again today, is that it now does exist and I don't need to put up a conceptual slide with a bunch of animals on it to show it to you, I can actually just show it to you. So I'm going to do that today. I'm going to do part of it today, actually, because my request for a three hour demo up here got denied. So I'll show you a part of it.

Greg Demas:    Before we get to that, let's continue kind of setting this foundation that we're building. So it's been three years since then, a lot's changed, but actually a lot hasn't changed. Let's first take a quick look at what's remained constant besides the obvious fact that we're all sitting here again in Austin today talking about this. We touched on the concept three years ago that in the world of commercial banking, customer experience is the most important factor and differentiator for a bank brand. For some reason, customer experience seems to get a lot more attention in retail or in the world of consumer than it does in the world of commercial banking. But all the commercial banks we talk to, and more importantly, all of their customers are telling us that customer experience is the most important thing that they look for.

Greg Demas:    I think customer experience, unfortunately, has become a little bit of a cliche, overused term, kind of a buzzword that a lot of people use. So what does it really mean? What is the customer experience? Right? And everybody we talk to really boils it down to three big things in the world of commercial banking: flexibility, transparency, and speed.

Greg Demas:    So specifically, flexibility in the world of commercial banking, the ability to craft deals and structure relationships around the unique situation of your customer, and not have a really one size fits all type of approach. Transparency. We had our client advisory board meeting yesterday, it was a phenomenal all day affair that we talked about a lot of stuff. This was huge, transparency. What does that mean? The ability for a customer to get information from a relationship manager that's actually knowledgeable and empowered to answer their questions in the moment, not have to say, "I don't know. Let me come back to you a little bit later with an answer." And lastly, speed. This is the obvious one in the world of commercial banking, speed is king. Right? The ability for a bank to go through their entire sales cycle, prospecting all the way through origination to facilitate timely transactions in what is obviously a very competitive environment.

Greg Demas:    So a couple things have changed, though, as well. Let's talk about what's changed since then. I think that this concept of this whole brain of the bank and really having a best in class customer experience being your real brand differentiator, it's no longer like a nice to have. I think back then it was, "This is important, we need to do this, but we have other priorities as well." I don't think it's that anymore. I think it's the most important thing out there now. I think it's table stakes. I don't think it's something that you can eventually get to. If you're not focusing on innovating around the senior bank, you're probably falling behind as you're sitting here today.

Greg Demas:    So you know, particularly in the world of larger commercial banking, this has a lot less to do with building some sort of nice digital interface for your customers to be able to log on and do something. This really is much more about what's happening inside the four walls of your institution, specifically connecting all those different parts of that ecosystem that we had up on that slide so that basically data can flow freely and bi-directionally across that entire ecosystem to connect everybody. That's really the true enabler for being able to deliver on those three pillars. Flexibility, transparency and speed.

Greg Demas:    One other big development, I think, that's happened over the last three years is I think there's been a general realization across the commercial banking industry that this stuff's hard. This is complicated. I think just three years ago there was always hope for some sort of technology panacea that, "My core provider can give me all of this, and I can have one vendor that's going to be able to give me this whole thing." And I think that's impossible. And I think basically banks, FinTech providers, the core providers themselves, has essentially come to that realization that if you really look at it from end to end, it is impossible for one company to be able to deliver all this, and to its fullest potential.

Greg Demas:    So what that means is that there has to be partnerships, right? There has to be collaboration among the best FinTech providers out there to be able to deliver this in a way that's seamless. Okay? So the good news is since 2016 there's been a lot of partnerships that have taken place, and the concept that we shared in that in that video is actually now a reality, thanks to that. It's readily available off the shelf, if you the right pieces of technology, of course. And we're really happy to be a part of that.

Greg Demas:    You know, each component, if you think about this, Tim in his opening remarks today that we were all at shared this slide as well around the brain of the bank, and each component here, if you think about it from the top, customer relationship management, really when you're in your CRM platform, Precision Lender for relationship pricing and relationship management and profitability, and lastly LOS providers for the onboarding and origination piece has so many nuances to it. There's so much specialization that essentially each of these require the scope and dedication of an entire company to be able to really do it right. If you kind of are half-baked and trying to do it all at once, you're just really not going to able to get deep enough to do this really, really well. So really, only through partnership with these specialized companies can this all really come together into one integrated ecosystem. Okay?

Greg Demas:    I'm going to show you a piece of it today because unfortunately with timing I can't show it all, as much as I'd like to. The good news is that we have these demo stations outside and we can show you anything that I don't get to up here. That's the beauty of Bank on Purpose, is that it's not this massive, gigantic, expansive conference. We're all here together. We have demo stations, not just us, but our partners. A lot of these companies, Salesforce, Microsoft, Q2 are here with us. Right? So we can show this to you guys together. I've selected today to demo for you guys the Salesforce and Precision Lender integration, specifically. What I mean by that is the powerful things that you can unlock by leveraging the core strengths of each of those platforms together. Okay?

Greg Demas:    One last thing before I jump in. A core value of Precision Lender is for us to meet you wherever you are in your journey of transformation in technology. Okay? So we'll never dictate to you what your workflow should be, what your architecture should be, what your tech stack should be. That's up to you. We want to fit in where you need us. So we've built the platform to have really robust APIs, very advanced integration capabilities, and we're confident in our ability to fit in wherever you need us. So I'm going to show you today the Salesforce Precision Lender integration, but just know that we also have a great integration built with Dynamics. And then if you go downstream into LOS, we have a great integration built with our partners at Encino, and we're actively building one right now with Cloud Lending, which is another force.com based LOS that just came into the Q2 family of products, and something that we're actively developing right now. Okay? So can we toggle over? Thank you.

Greg Demas:    Looks like my screen locked up on me here. Okay. Nothing better than doing a live technology demo in front of like 200 people. This should be fun. All right, so I am on an account page in Salesforce. For those of you that have Salesforce or for those you maybe that don't, they should look pretty familiar. Right out of the gates, you can see I have this amazing information on this account page, not just an org hierarchy or marketing history. I have a full blown balance sheet and a full blown P&L income statement for this customer. So anytime I come in, I'm not just seeing who are the contacts at this place, I'm actually seeing is this a good customer? Is this a profitable customer to my bank. Very important core information that you can have.

Greg Demas:    But what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to show you how simple it is to create something new. I'm going to create a new opportunity right now in front of you guys. I'm going to name it, we're going to call this BOP CRE Deal. I'm going to put a close date on there. I'm going to put a stage in I've quoted. I'm going to save it. I'm going to go over to it. You go in, this great price in Precision Lender button from Salesforce. It authenticates me directly into precision lender. I can pick a product and off we go. CRE investment. I've set all my defaults to the concept that Rory was talking about this morning. I thought that was very interesting about perceptions. There is definitely an art to default setting and how you set these defaults in terms of behavior driving and whatnot, so that's a fascinating conversation if anybody wants to get a beer tonight and talk about that.

Greg Demas:    In this case, I'm going to say, "Hey, yeah, 1,500,000, five year deal, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let's slap it right on there, 4.75, great." That doesn't quite get me there, but I'm going to go ahead and add a few deposits to that deal as well, let's add some DDA, okay, great. 90,000 bucks in DDA and voila, I got there. Great. In 30 seconds, I just structured a deal with some cross-sale in there that got me to hurdle. Awesome. I'm going to save that. I'm going to go back to Salesforce and refresh it.

Greg Demas:    That was easy. Okay, so I just went and structured a deal, integrated it with Salesforce and that was that. You could imagine, I did that really quickly, but it really is that simple. The beauty now, Precision Lender did its job, what are all the things that you can do inside of Salesforce now that you have all of this rich data that we just pulled in from Precision Lender, right? Again, to the concept of an ecosystem, Salesforce has incredible capabilities as does Dynamics. Right? What can you do now that you have this incredibly rich profitability data in here? So really the possibilities are ultimately endless. You could do pretty much everything, but I'm going to show you some stuff that we've done.

Greg Demas:    So if I go to this home page, I built a bunch of dashboards, and I'll show you two different dashboards that we've built here. I now have customer profitability in there. By show of hands, don't be shy, how many of you know, we'll be positive here, how many of you know who your most profitable and your least profitable customers are today? Okay, I think that was maybe 25% or so. That's good. How many of you, by show of hands, think that's important to know? All right, cool. Agreed, agreed. So that's a really important thing, right? Well now with this data in Salesforce, because Precision Lender's calculating relationship profitability, and you have these amazing reporting and dashboarding capabilities inside Salesforce, we've gone ahead and very simply built a portfolio dashboard.

Greg Demas:    So in this case, in this fake bank that I've created, my commercial loan portfolio is spitting off $7 million a year in net income. Well, I can now go and see, in this case, I'm looking at everybody, so say I'm the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Lending Officer. I can break that down by customer, and I can see at any given time, my 7 million, how does the pie look? Over here, I can see top 10 and bottom 10. Yikes, look at this. Some House Homebuilders, I'm losing money on this customer. That's a problem. What are we doing about it? Right? As as it pertains to action, what am I doing about that?

Greg Demas:    You can do the same exact view, and I'll ask the same question again. Who knows who their most profitable and least profitable customers are losing your bank money? By show of hands, who knows which bankers at your bank are making your bank money and losing your bank money? Right, even less. Right? So I think there were a few hands that went up there. It's the same concept. It's the same cut of that $7 million, but instead of cutting it by customer, you cut it by banker portfolio. So which of your bankers are lending your money out responsibly? Which of your bankers are lending your money out irresponsibly? Really, really important to know.

Greg Demas:    The next question that would come to mind for me is, this is a portfolio view, my next question would be, "Well, what are we doing about it?" So let's have that same exact view for our pipeline, right? So in this case, I can see my pipeline has $35 million of net income in it. That's great. Well, which deals in my pipeline are contributing and taking my bank to where I want it to be? So the same concept, right? But now instead of looking at your existing balance sheet, you're looking at your pipeline. So I can see here, and again, top 10, bottom 10. Which deals in my pipeline … In this case, it's nice positive data. Do I have deals in my pipeline that are going to be putting me in reverse? That are going to be detracting from the profitability in my bank? And why are we doing that? And again, the same exact thing by banker. Which banker has built a good pipeline, and which one hasn't?

Greg Demas:    Then you could imagine the beauty of Salesforce with the way that you set up your users, having a whole filter here, I've been looking at the top of the house. Let's say I'm just the head of the middle market group. I can just go to that, and great, I hit refresh with just middle market data, and I can see that. So the concept of tying these two together is fantastic.

Greg Demas:    What I would say is this is a management dashboard. What if I don't have a team? What if I don't manage anybody? What if it's just me, and I'm just in RM? I'm hoping that there's some RMs in the room. That's the question I would be asking. So same concept for an individual contributor, because you could imagine, if you have a customer that's losing you money, or a banker portfolio that's losing you money, I would imagine that banker is going to probably get a call pretty quickly from somebody around that saying, "What are you doing?" Right? So it'd be really unfair to your bankers to only build these dashboards for the management team, and not give the bankers the same realtime access to this information so that they actually know what's going on, they can be prepared and actually be doing something about it. Right?

Greg Demas:    So we built the same thing for individual contributors. So now let's just say I'm an RM, right? And I'm going to go in, at any time I can see my portfolio. How much money is it making the bank, pure net income? From a risk adjusted return standpoint, how much is my portfolio spitting off? And again, same thing, I'm going to break that out by customer. So in my portfolio, am I carrying customers that are losing my bank money? If I am, I should probably be doing something about it because now that we've gotten everybody on the same page, everybody's looking at this information, I'm probably going to be getting a call from somebody in management very quickly about why I'm carrying a customer, or multiple customers, or God forbid, an entire portfolio that's losing my bank money.

Greg Demas:    So that would then jump to the next side. What am I doing about it? What does my pipeline look like? Right? So if I have a bunch of customers that are losing the bank money, do I have pipeline opportunities with those customers to improve the profitability of those? Then again, being able to look at it not only in pure dollar profitability, but our critical metrics of risk adjusted ROE and risk adjusted ROA. Okay? If you want to look at per dollar profitability.

Greg Demas:    So really, really, really important. And this is just the concept of now that we've been able to develop such a deeper partnership with Salesforce, that whole concept of an ecosystem is starting to come to reality. Okay? And again, the sky is really the limit around this. If we could toggle back to the presentation, I just want to share a couple of other thoughts.

Greg Demas:    What are some other things that you could do now that you have all this information at your fingertips in this beautiful reporting tool that you can do this stuff with? So a couple of other thought starters that we have around this. Yesterday we had, with our client advisory board, a very long discussion around incentive compensation, and the fact that money has essentially been more or less free for the last several years with a zero rate environment. Having an incentive comp plan that was tied to volume probably made a lot of sense, right? But now I think there's fears that the credit cycle is going to turn, money is becoming very expensive, deposits are harder to get, compensating your people on profitability probably makes a lot more sense now.

Greg Demas:    Somebody, I actually think it was you, Dallas, had the idea yesterday about if you think back to those individual contributor dashboards that we just showed, where if I was a banker, you're essentially running your own business. Should we be compensating people that way? Right? And could you use this information? You talk about actually driving behavior and actually having this information lead to action. Could you imagine tying your incentive plan into something like this so that people are actually managing a profitable book a business rather than just trying to book a bunch of loans to hit some target that they have? Very, very important.

Greg Demas:    We see some of our best clients doing a ton in terms of cashflow and balance sheet forecasting, and now you can do that inside of Salesforce. Right? So if you think about it, you really have all the information that you need there. You have the existing portfolio, you have the amount of capital allocated to it, you have the pipeline coming in, you have the amount of capital allocated to your pipeline. You have your projected close dates and close percentages. You could build an incredible set of reporting for your treasury group.

Greg Demas:    The last thing I'll touch on, just as a thought starter, as a banker, this was something I was always really vocal about. It never ceased to amaze me, in terms of loan approval workflows, right? Every bank has some sort of loan approval workflow, where in order for a loan to get booked it has to get blessed by some group of people. Salesforce is an amazing workflow platform, as I'm sure many of you know. But it never ceased to amaze me how loan approval workflows were always almost exclusively focused on risk. They were basically … Which makes a lot of sense, obviously that's very important. It makes the fed and the OCC happy, very important things.

Greg Demas:    But shouldn't loan approval workflows probably tie in the quality of the loan, like if it's going to make you money or not? That always, for some reason, seemed to be an afterthought in these, and they were mostly two dimensional workflows that I usually see in terms of like the size of the loan and the product. If it was really risky, or like a really big construction loan required the CEO to sign off on it, and a tiny little a CRU loan didn't. So you could imagine using Salesforce workflow capabilities, and tying in all of this profitability data into that, and having it in a fully auditable digital thing where you're not scanning anything and the breadcrumb trail is all there for your internal audit people.

Greg Demas:    So a lot of really, really incredible stuff. Again, this, these dashboards and these ideas are really tip of the iceberg. I don't have a ton of time to show you the whole thing today, but again we have a lot more of this type of stuff built and we have demo stations set up. So I would love, over the next day, to show you more of this and to show you some of the other stuff that we've built with some of those other partners, and do that.

Greg Demas:    So Carl, our CEO, who you're going to hear from later today, uses the term the last mile a lot. And I love that term. Essentially with the last mile refers to is a concept that really anybody can get their hands, any bank can get their hands on some data, and they can do some analysis, and they can probably generate some cool findings. The last mile is what do you actually do about it? Like when you generate cool findings, do they sit and collect dust somewhere? Or do you actually have a bias for action, put those into action, and change your bank?

Greg Demas:    So that's essentially what we built Andy for. Andy essentially is the tool that takes you over the last mile. She's the one inside Precision Lender that's looking at all of this and nudging your bankers to do things differently. Andy, a quick story, was named after one of our clients, one of our best clients. Basically, it shouldn't be a surprise given that we already went through the title page, that it's named after Andy Max over here who is about to come up on stage. But just the story behind Andy, for those of you who haven't heard it, essentially is Andy is an unbelievable user of the platform, he's one of our most forward thinking customers, and he's done stuff and given us ideas that we never would have come up with on our own.

Greg Demas:    And I think one day Carl was sitting around and saying, "Man, wouldn't it be great if every bank had an Andy?" And I think the light bulb just kind of went off, and basically, that was how we came up with the name of that product. So I want to invite Andy up please to share some of some of his journey down this path. Thanks, bud.

Andy Max:    All right. It's not everyday you get to walk up on a stage in front of a large group., So I always like to get my intro tunes in because that's the one opportunity of the year that I get that. So thank you very much for that. I'm here today just to talk a little bit about kind of what we've learned since last year.

Andy Max:    So last year when we were at BOP, when I was here, Andy was formally introduced. So we're cousins. We work well with each other. But what Andy has done has helped you, coached you, helped you find a solution, whether that's a structure in your loan, or maybe a recommendation, another product would be important here to discuss, and what the value of all that is. And then last year, we started to hear a little bit more of, and if you didn't hear it at this conference, you heard it at a conference out there about these buzzwords. And I went back, and I was like, "Wow, this is just amazing. We're going to be able to send our information over there. It's going to crunch it for us. We won't even have to do anything. They're just going to give us the answers. It's going to be awesome."

Andy Max:    I started to learn a little bit more of, that's not really the way it works, but not being in the tech space myself, I went back and the two things I knew were we had to have more data that we could send over to them. So no matter what we wanted to do, we had that there and we could start to use it. And I wanted to make sure that the quality of our data was really good as well.

Andy Max:    And so I went home, and the first place I thought to think was our CTS group. And I go in and I just say, "Hey Russ," who's the head of our CTS group, and I said, "I just came back from this conference and I'm just going to change your world." He's like, "Great! Thanks. That's wonderful." And I was like, "All right, this is what we're going to do. I needed to get these things done. I'm going to come back to you, and I want to start to implement this stuff and start talking about it."

Andy Max:    Well, as we all know, as Greg said, that this journey is hard. Where do you start? How do you start? I mean, there's just so much. And so I started to put this information together and what we learned as we were organizing the information and having it be more granular, just providing new views of what that information is, that before we even get to this point, there's a lot of value in that by itself.

Andy Max:    But it comes back to the last mile, right? So I got asked, "Can you give me a list?" I've given lists to hundreds of areas of the bank throughout my career there, and I've never once asked, "What are you going to use this for?" Because usually it's easier for me to do it in the five minutes it takes me to then to ask, "Can I do it better for you?" And so this time, I have just been working on this, I'm really excited about it. I just asked, "What are you using this for?" And they're just like, "Well, I want a list of clients in this industry." And I was like, "Okay, well why? Why do you want that?"

Andy Max:    And they were just like, "Well, I know that if I take this list, and I go and I look everyone up, and then I see that they have these volumes, and don't have this, and don't have that, they're a really good internal lead for us." I was like, "Well, why do you want to spend all your time doing that?" And they were just like, "Well, because that's just the way we have to." I'm like, "No, no, no, we have that now. So what if I just tell you that? And so if that's something that you're interested in, I'll just give you that information." I'm like, "But what are you going to do with it?"

Andy Max:    And so that's when it comes down to what do we do with the information when we get it? If I give everyone a list in this room, everyone will attack that list in their own way. Some people may start from the top, some people may start with the most profitable, most opportunity, whatever it may be. Some may just say, "I'm going on vacation next week, and I'll throw it away. I'll get the new list next month." Whatever it may be.

Andy Max:    But to actually turn that information, and monetize it, we started to talk, and I was like, "You're onto something here, because if this is all the work that you're going to just to get these internal leads that's going to take you three weeks, I can provide this information to you in 20 minutes." And so we started to go through, and we started to talk to the product experts. We started to realize there's a ton of curiosity and knowledge with it within the bank that just weighed down, and it should be no surprise, by administrative tasks. And so when I went in and started to talk to everyone, I just said, "Hey, what are you doing today? We've worked really hard on this data set over here. Just want to make everyone aware that we have more levers to pull. So let's just talk."

Andy Max:    And we started to just sit down and we have product experts in the room, we have our global banking group, we have our purchasing card group, we have our CTS group, and we have the product experts in there. And I just listened to them, and they just said, "These are all the things that if I was out on the front lines, this is the best way to sell our product, and this is the best for our customers." So it's not about the dollars and cents, it's about how we can better serve and give our customers the correct product set that they should be in. So we started to think about that, and we were just like, "Well how do we take you, and get all of this information that you've given me into a meaningful, sustainable way and approach?" Because still, it's information, we've organized it, we've made it easier for people to get, but what do we do with it?

Andy Max:    And so we started to track everything, and so we started to see what worked and what did not work, and we started to have conversations at the bank that we really haven't had in a long time, and we started to talk about what the process is. So when we got done, it wasn't, "Hey, we're done now. We figured this out. We're good." We kept looking at things, and we kept talking about things, and having conversations about what was important. What we were able to do is say, "That's not very hard to do. Let's just get that information. We'll bring it over here, and we'll just display it in your page, and then you don't have to worry about it. So let's do that."

Andy Max:    So we started to get these things, and then we started to build these triggers. And those triggers were things that said, "Hey, because you have this, this, and this, you should ask them about this, and this is why." That just shows up now whenever those things trip. So it's really a framework for what we want to start to do in Andy as our next steps. So we got through all that and we were just like, "Oh, well we just want to make sure that people know this, and people know that." And we took all that, and we baked it in, and then we started to talk about, "Well, just because they have the sheet doesn't mean they're going to read it and just be like, 'Aha, I know how to sell that.'" Because there's a big a disconnect sometime when you've never been asked to sell this way or that way or consider this or that. You need to be informed of the best way to go about that.

Andy Max:    So we sat down with our department heads and we said, "What is a cadence that we can get in where we can support our front lines and make sure that they have the most information, the most up to date information that they could have on how to sell it." So we said, "Hey, all right, let's pull this whole group of leads." And we looked at it, and we had 1,000 leads to show everyone. And we just go, "All right, so where do we start? We have 1,000 leads." We're like, "Well, we have loan renewals. That's a good time to talk to our customers. We have annual reviews. 1,000 is way too much, let's boil that down. All right, so how many leads or internal leads do we have next month that are going to mature or renew?"

Andy Max:    And we looked at it and we're like, "Oh, we have 140. And throughout our footprint, that's manageable." And so we boiled that down, and we looked at that, and we said, "All right, well how do we know when we hand this information to our treasury RMs, they'll make the most of it? And we were like, "Well, I'm not sure." I was like, "Well I think what we probably need to start with is we need to get a coach on the phone with them right now, and tell them what they see, and tell them what their opportunity is, what the product experts see, and what we built in. Let's have a conversation about that."

Andy Max:    Then the front lines can go out and work with the lending RMs, and they can say, "Hey, this is what I see. This is what I understand. And this is what I want to help you understand about your clients as well." So what we've been able to do is to build that sustainability in our process as well. And so ultimately, the approach that we took, and we continue to take is not foreign, and we've all seen a graph that looks similar to this, but we simply just sit down, we listen, we find the information, we find a way to present that information back to our RMs in a meaningful way. But the very last step is making sure that their coached to be able to take action on that information.

Andy Max:    And it's pretty fun for me now. I used to be in finance, not so much anymore, so I don't care as much about the dollars and cents. I get to work with our front lines, and I'm more pleased when I get a smile out of them than I do if this translates into bottom line. So does this make their life easier at the end of the day? Does it align with what our processes are? Does it fit in with what we want to do? And does it supplement where we're at today? So again, not trying to change how we work, but how do we work and how do we make that work easier for our front lines? And at the end of the day that our leadership has to buy into this as well, obviously.

Andy Max:    The very last thing, the small R, I call it, is the reporting, or what we get out of this from a financial standpoint.

Andy Max:    So I don't know how much time we have left, but the point that I wanted to make today is that when I left last year, I was overwhelmed about the opportunity that was in front of us. And when I stepped back, and we just took step, by step, by step, we started to learn. And the big things that we saw at the beginning, the machine learning, the AI, the predictive analytics are very important things that I think are going to be a real help to what we do today. But don't forget about all the little things that we can solve along the way as well. And that's helped us to build our roadmap and know what we would like to build Andy into this next year.

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