The Future of Customer Experience in Banking

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Transcription:

Miriam Cross (00:10):
Welcome to Digital Banking 2024. My name is Miriam Cross and I'm a Technology Reporter at American Banker. Today's session is on the Future of Customer Experience in Banking, which is a big topic to get through in 45 minutes, but I'm excited to have four panelists here who can talk about all different angles to the Future of Customer Experience. We had a prep call last week, and Jack and Susan, who come from two credit unions had some really interesting insights that I'm excited to get into. Things I haven't really thought about before, like the importance of employee facing technology and how that feeds into good customer experience and the constraints of being a state chartered community financial institution that I think will be interesting to banks and credit unions of all sizes. So I'll start by asking each of you to introduce yourselves, your names, your roles, and a bit about your organization. DK, I'll start with you.

DK Sharma (01:08):
Hi, Good Afternoon. My name is DK Sharma. I'm the President and Chief Operating Officer of kore.ai. Kore is the leader in enterprise and deployment of generative and conversational AI. I've been a career banker. Look forward to an interesting discussion today.

Nageswar Cherukupalli (01:24):
Hi, my name is Nageswar Cherukupalli. In short, Nagesh I Head the Banking and Capital Markets business unit for Cognizant. Cognizant is $20 billion technology consulting company and we've been working with banks for the last 30 years and helping them in transform their landscapes.

Jack Ingram (01:44):
Hi, I'm Jack Ingram. I'm Chief Information and Innovation Officer for WECU , which is a community-based credit union in Washington state. We're roughly 3 billion in assets.

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (01:57):
Hi, I'm Susan Fogarty-Jacques. I'm the Chief Investment Officer and Chief Experience Officer at Broadview Federal Credit Union. We're about a $9 billion credit union in New York State. Makes us top five in New York and about top 30 in the United States dates.

Miriam Cross (02:12):
So the Future of Customer Experience in Banking is a very broad topic. What are the first few things that come to mind when you think about it? Susan, I'll start with you.

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (02:22):
Yeah, so it's been an interesting being here at this conference in particular, and obviously our focus is on digital and innovation and we're talking a lot about UAT and agile and all these great things. Employee experience seems to be something that we're not talking about a lot. I see some heads nodding. We talked yesterday in a forum about you can have fantastic technology if you don't have the right change management systems, if you don't have the right training, you are sitting with very expensive paperweights, very expensive Rolodexes instead of what you should be doing with your technology. So bridging that gap between the best in class technology and the users seems to be a gap that is preventing some of the expansion. And we talk a lot in our space, especially at our size. The larger financial institutions are leading the way in innovation. They are doing the bold moves. We tend to have to be a little bit of the followers, but technology should be the great equalizer. It should be the thing that anyone can use in order to get faster, smarter, stronger, better serving our clients and customers. And again, bridging that gap I think has to do with the end user. And so that's something we're talking a lot about and I think the folks who can help us solve that are going to be in a good position to help move this forward.

Miriam Cross (03:47):
You brought up a bunch of things I want to follow up on later, but Jack, what comes to mind for you?

Jack Ingram (03:52):
I think for financial institutions of all sizes, I think a key component is leadership and really getting the business units to help support and drive change. Too often technology initiatives sort of come from the CIO or CTO wheelhouse and realistically buy-in becomes incredibly difficult. So you really have to start from the business and then drive change that way in partnership with the technology teams. And I think that the folks that are most successful at driving change within an organization take that approach. I know that's been a big tactic that we've used as we've sort of refactored operations internally. And I think it's key.

Nageswar Cherukupalli (04:39):
So from future of customer experience perspective, I think it is definitely going to change, but the experience also will bring its own challenges. I think Susan talked about being an equalizer, which means it's now accessible to everyone. People have access to the same technology, but it also becomes an equalizer for committing more fraud, more challenges, there are more risks and compliance issues that you would continue to face. I think how do we use technology to be able to solve all of these problems? I think that's where we got to invest and that's where we got to focus on.

DK Sharma (05:16):
So I used to work at Citi and Citi handles about 300 million calls agent supported per year. And I used to listen to the calls and it, it's one of the highest attrition areas. It's not an easy job listening to calls, trying to help people who are frustrated for one reason or the other. And you have to look at multiple documents, multiple policies and procedures. And there is 30 40% attrition because when jobs are going offshore. So how in this whole context you use technology to make that experience such that the person who's handling the call becomes like an apple genie. One of the things which I really think about is that you go to an Apple shop and the person who's helping you is treated like with reverence. So how do we make the use of technology in such a way that everyone who is dealing with the customer is somebody that you look up to? And that's where our holy mission is to use technology to do that type of support of the people and do it in a very responsible way.

Miriam Cross (06:17):
So I want to get to customer facing technology for sure. But let's start with the point you brought up, Susan, when you spoke last week, I have my notes from it. You said that employee experience is the number one driver of customer experience and that the difference in client experience when we give employees better technology is exponential. Can you expound on that?

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (06:37):
Sure. So many years ago, I had the privilege of working for Richard Branson and helped him start one of his companies here in the us. I spent about five years on the build with him, and he's sort of famous for that saying that customers don't come first, employees do. And when that is really put into action, that's where you get client experience. We certainly experience it at our credit union. We make tremendous, tremendous investments in our people, large and small, but we essentially have a philosophy that we have to understand each of our employees currency. So you can do broad sweeping things across your financial institution or any company. You can have a great 401k match, you can have educational reimbursement, you can have great paternity and maternity leave. We have to understand what is the currency of your individual and group employees and understanding the different experience that a teller has or a call center employee has or that a middle manager has.

(07:33):
And then the difference between what Jack experiences and Sophie experiences and what is going to drive those individual people. So you can layer the technology, but if you don't do the work to understand what is actually going to drive employee success, you are not going to get the ultimate client experience. Our best client experience has come from our most engaged employees, especially this upcoming generation, who I think are fantastic in the ways they're pushing us to think more about what work-life balances and what work is. But there is a demand for recognition. There is a demand to be seen, not necessarily a bad thing, but we all have to figure out how we're going to adapt to that.

Miriam Cross (08:19):
What are some examples if technology you've invested in for your employees to help them deliver a better customer experience?

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (08:27):
Obviously Salesforce, we've used, we've done Glia virtual assistant, which is in our call center, but really even the internal technologies to drive employee engagement, whether that's our internal websites, whether that's our work, the use of Workday, ways that you can recognize people digitally within the organization. We just went through a major conversion and we were able to issue conversion rockstar badges to people. So people who were toiling away working sometimes seven days a week for weeks on end to help us achieve the successful conversion of half a million members into the newly merged credit union. There was a way to make them feel recognized.

Miriam Cross (09:08):
And Jack, how does this resonate for you at WECU?

Jack Ingram (09:12):
I think Susan's spot on. I think for us, right? The ultimate experience for most of us is that happy merger of bricks and clicks, right? So there's this notion, I think especially in financial services, is everybody's trying to speed up and everybody's trying to make seamless experiences and everybody's trying to rapidly onboard new clients, whether it's on the deposit side or the lending side, that that's the focus, especially from the technology space. But the reality is, is that the experience is only good as the people driving it and then who can ultimately come alongside those digital experiences and act in a consultative fashion. So I think everything Susan said is accurate and internally for us, it's really how well you are able to integrate your tech stacks to provide as equally of seamless of an experience to resources or affirmation and celebration or internal communications as it is with those digital experiences you're giving your clients. So it resonates completely.

Miriam Cross (10:16):
Nagesh, when you're working with banks and credit unions, how do you suggest that they invest in employee facing technology to then feed into a better customer experience?

Nageswar Cherukupalli (10:26):
Absolutely. No, I'll take a small example, right? I mean, we were working with a bank with some of their advisors and one of the biggest complaint that many of the advisors had is every client today, I mean, it's a big equalizer. Again, going back to this, the information is available to every investor, every detail investor has information about every stock, every mutual fund, they can drill down, they can look at everything, right? Today, the technology is available. So the advisors are coming back and saying, we know what the industry is saying is actually not right, but we don't have the adequate tools, technologies, and capabilities to be able to respond. Where do we actually get all that information? How do I know what my retail investor is talking about and how can I counter that? I know it's not the right investment decision, but for me to tell with the proper data points, I should be able to capture all that information. So internally, we are leveraging technologies. Of course we've got ChatGPT, which is a very powerful tool, open ai, and there are many other tools that would actually help you get all that information, summarize, synthesize, and respond with an appropriate answer. Again, there's a human element that is involved. The human has the gut feeling that this is not the right investment for the retail investor based on the profile, but should be able to counter that with proper data points. So that's how we are enabling.

Miriam Cross (11:46):
And on the topic of advice, what do you find bank and credit union customers want from their institutions in terms of financial advice?

Nageswar Cherukupalli (11:55):
Yeah, I mean, everyone wants to obviously get more money and make more money when they make the investments, but I think the thing that every investor is looking for from the advisor is actually a right advice, a balanced advice, something that will help them continue and keep trusting their advisor. And the only way it is possible is by leveraging some of these technologies and providing it to the advisor. If the advisor does not have an adequate knowledge, then obviously the member would not trust the advisor and they would start looking for alternate options. That means actually you've started having an attrition of your client. So I think that's something that we always have to watch out for and be ahead with respect to leveraging these technologies and trying to provide to the advisors first and adding that element.

Miriam Cross (12:47):
And Susan, how does this come into play at Broadview? How are you using technology? What do you find that your customers want in terms of device and how are you using technology to help deliver that?

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (12:56):
Yeah, so I think we're really at an inflection point as financial institutions, right? We've got customers, clients, members demanding higher end technology every day. They want to do everything through their phone. They want to be texted when their loan's going to close. You want to DocuSign, you want to provide that seamless opportunity. And as a executive of the organization, we're looking at ways. So how do we create those efficiencies? How do we deliver digital to in those transactions as an efficient way as possible? At the same time, they're looking to us for trusted advice. There was a really interesting 2023 Forbes study. It asked, do you want to see a brick and mortar of your financial institution in your community? 66% across every single age group said yes, 65, 66, 64 each age group. So it was not just the 70 years old who wanted to come to their bank.

(13:59):
People don't know where to get advice. You can Google something and not know how it applies to your own situation. And if any of you have children like I do, they are not learning about financial education in school. They don't know what a credit card is, they don't know what it well, they certainly dunno what checks are anymore, but they're not learning some of these basic things. And if they're learning them, it's not applicable until later in life. So you can look up what is a mortgage, but until you need one, you don't know. I don't know, should I put this much down? Should I do PMI, should i escrow? So we're finding that we're really in this interesting space where you're trying to streamline, you're trying to provide digital technology, but people want trusted advice more now than ever. So that's what we're trying to solve for.

(14:53):
We still have a very healthy branch presence. We really try and talk about as a credit union, particularly that we have trusted advisors, that we, all of our people across our organization are incented in different ways than a for-profit institution. But we have to really talk about the professionalization of our people. Credit unions are known for being really nice. We're really nice in credit unions. What we need to talk more about is that we have really excellent tenured financial advisors and financial professionals, and that will help people trust the technology because they trust the person who's saying, it's okay, you can use this for the DocuSign. It's okay. You can trust that your stock portfolio is safe in this app.

Miriam Cross (15:41):
What techniques have you found that have worked well for you at Broadview?

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (15:45):
It really is that person to person. And I think we're all, any of us with the financial institutions trying to balance mass marketing, we want to get emails out. We want to get to the people who are not walking in the branches, but really that person to person and gaining those trusted relationships. And we're in Albany, New York where the state capital, it's a little bit of a parochial community. People definitely do business with people that they know. So it's really getting the word out. We're in a very overbanked market. We have all the large nationals and super regionals. So it really is being a part of the community, but also talking about what we do as financial professionals.

Miriam Cross (16:25):
Alright, let's talk about AI and uses of AI in terms of customer experience. DK, what use cases are you working on at Core AI?

DK Sharma (16:34):
Yeah, one of the things which I will talk about is that we are looking at democratizing access to AI. When Susan talked about credit unions enabling the financial advisors with technology, typically credit unions don't have that type of budget that some of the large banks have. So how do you sort of demystify and take out some of the work that is required by the data scientists, natural language trainers and stuff like that and make it a part of your platform? So the use cases that we are working on are all the way from self-service agent assisted conversations, copilots, as well as enabling organizations to build generative AI experiences in a way that doesn't require an army of people and in essence truly democratizing the excess. I used to be with Citi, and Citi was still one of the big four banks and they spent a lot of money on banking.

(17:29):
I had a huge budget. And now since I began the president of Core, I'm finding that a lot of banks have a fraction of that budget. And how do you make sure that you still deliver the type of capability which automates to the extent possible with the human in the middle experience at an affordable level. So when somebody calls in, the agent who's serving the customer has got real time access to systems of knowledge and those are being prompted to him in the context, these appropriate sort of adherence playbooks that you can sort of support automatic fulfillment of the work, that as you're going through the conversation, you want to pay bills. And that's automatically captured what the information is regarding paying the bill. And at the end of it summarization and following that, there's a massive amount of coaching that gets done. So today, in a legacy environment, all of these calls are listened to on a post-fact basis, and then people interrogate them and see whether everything was done appropriately or not. And it takes a lot of manpower. In one of the banks that I'm working with, there are 750 people doing this manual sampling of 6% of the calls. And through technology, we are looking at significantly automating that and making it more of an exception review process of a hundred percent of the calls that you sample. So how do you take technology and make everybody perform as the best person is our mission. So that's what we are working in our company.

Miriam Cross (18:56):
And do you find that your banker, credit union customers are ever concerned about getting their customers to trust ai?

DK Sharma (19:05):
I think it's a journey. So as Susan mentioned, first, some of the simpler transactions like paying your bills, inquiring on a balance, et cetera, are relatively easy. I think people don't trust automation of things like claims management, dispute management, and they want somebody in the middle. And especially on things like, have I planned to spend this money and where am I and what's the opportunity? Where can I spend what's happening with my IRA and things like that. Those are some of the more complex transactions where you want an advisor to tell you what exactly to do, but as long as that advisor is appropriately aided by the right sources of knowledge and is able to effectively execute immediately, not have, take your instructions, send it down, and it gets executed three days later, then that further empowers the advisor. So we are finding that some of the routine transactions are really getting automated. 80% of them can be done through AI. And for the remaining 20%, you bring the efficiency of the agent in handling those transactions significantly improved, like about 25, 30% improvement. So that's the model, automate routine tasks and then more complex transactions enable the human being in the middle to do them with empathy, withdrew them as a person, really cares about the customer and do it in the context.

Miriam Cross (20:22):
And Jack, how are you integrating AI into the WECU app?

Jack Ingram (20:27):
So we've been on quite a journey with AI for some time. Like many of you, you've been leveraging AI across simple things like chat bots or automated underwriting fraud analysis, those types of things. But we're sort of doing some different stuff with it. One of the things that we've been really building out and playing with internally is leveraging AI as a form of the app instead. So typically if you think about an app experience, you sign in, you get a list of all your accounts, you drill into an account, you get a list of your transactions, great, you can make a deposit, you can move some money. But if you really think about how you can simplify the app and up in that model, what does that look like? So we're running an internal pilot now using an API gateway and sort of moving down that road around how we sort of change the app to be more about that personal assistant in your pocket and not just a touch touchpoint to an assistant in your pocket. But of course the challenge like we've discussed is how do you keep the human in the middle? How do you augment that experience with the human element?

Miriam Cross (21:35):
So I'm trying to imagine this, what will weak you customers, what will they experience in the app when, what are you envisioning?

Jack Ingram (21:43):
Yeah, so early MVP early pilot for us has been basically here's the list of account balances, available balance, top 10 transactions. Of course you have all the niceties there, merchant logos, et cetera. But then it's really a what do you need today? And it's conversational. So at that point really the AI steps in and can facilitate either that soft handoff to an advisor, can facilitate money movement activities, can facilitate insights into your data and sort of surface those in an intelligent way. And we'll see where it goes At this point during early pilot testing within the org, it's been sort of mixed feedback truthfully, some people are really comfortable with this and some people aren't similar to engagement with the Siri or Alexa or what have you. And I think the smart financial institutions are going to be the ones that can somehow marry these two sort of concepts successfully.

Miriam Cross (22:46):
And I know one thing you've done a lot of at WECU is engage in member listening. So you talk about how you do that and kind of how you take that feedback and invest it back in the website of the app.

Jack Ingram (22:59):
So one of the things I think that financial institutions really struggle with historically is typically fis go out and buy solutions in a box from one of the big three or big four. This is what you get. Oh, you can customize it, but you really can't, right? Oh, logo colors, maybe there's a bit of stuff. One of the things that came out of a session yesterday with McKinsey was you can't outsource your weight to success. And I think historically financial institutions have been really, really focused on efficiency ratio and the bottom line, and they sacrifice that control and they don't make those investments. And at WeQ we've done very much the opposite. So we have a custom built mobile app, we've partnered with multiple fintechs, and part of that starts with listening right up front. We have a large member community where we solicit that feedback. We involve our members with AB testing of new app functionality. We're asking and engaging them for what they want because unlike a bank, a credit union is a cooperative, it's member owned and member driven. So for us, that's part of our core DNA and it's been really successful.

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (24:10):
Is what Jack is describing something you've seen among your bank and credit union clients?

Nageswar Cherukupalli (24:15):
Absolutely. One thing that I want to actually say, right? I've been here for 20 years in US credit unions have always been in the forefront of technology. I mean, I actually started with a credit union and I don't know, many of the first remote check deposit was actually started by credit union. It was not the big banks who started that. So they actually removed that friction. So they always were ahead in adopting the technology. So I actually wanted to bring out an interesting topic here. We did a study jointly with Oxford University, and one observation that we have had is over the next 10 years, it doesn't matter whether it's big or small, this particular technology, AI is going to be the biggest equalizer that you would have ever in this revolution. And this is what will happen. So today, the credit unions are able to offer a lot more capabilities by leveraging the technology in much more faster way than the big banks.

(25:14):
I mean, if you have to launch, I mean today you can just take any of the big banks, A gen AI program would actually take months and months to actually realize the benefits out of it. But in a credit union, they've been able to launch many of those things, mostly internal facing, but they've been able to do it in a few weeks, do a POC, complete and move pilot. So I think the adoption of technology is much more faster in smaller banks and in credit unions, and they always care for their members. It's not about caring for investors, caring for many others, it's care for the members. And how do I make sure the members get best out of it.

Miriam Cross (25:50):
And Susan, when we spoke last week, you talked about scalability, the importance of scalability. How are you using technology to make that possible at Broadview?

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (25:59):
So things like what DK said really resonated on things like QA and the call center. Right now we have individuals, we have X number of individuals per number of X number of agents to QA and QC are calls very manual. It's literally listening in to the calls. We keep all of our call agents in-house. We do not outsource certainly on some special projects we've engaged with an outside source, but the appetite is to have locally hired people who live in our community, who talk to our members on the phone. That is not a very efficient model. So the copilot model is the one that we're really exploring so that we can keep our agents on the phone, many of them who know our members and have known them for a long time, but that they can have assistance in terms of how to best answer the questions.

(26:51):
Because even what we've found in credit unions, and I'm not surprised to hear what you had to say, is that we are incredibly service driven. So I come from the banks, I came from Bank of America, HSBC and KeyBank. When I came to the credit union, I loved, it's the sort of best quality is your worst quality kind of scenario that we were very, very service oriented. So much so that we would let people leave our credit union without actually doing anything other than say applying for a car loan. And I went through this experience myself. I applied for a car loan at the credit union prior to working there. It was fantastic. Used digital technology to help me through the process. Quick, easy, extremely service oriented. So much so that they said, you don't even have to have your direct deposit here. You can just transfer your money out to your other institution.

(27:44):
And I was dying inside as they said this. And so when I eventually became an executive of the same credit union, I changed the names to protect the innocent. But I used that story as an example of great way that you wanted to serve a member, you wanted to get them in and out. You had a busy person who needed an auto loan. What we didn't do was talk about anything else we could do for the member. So taking that instinct to use technology to faster serve the member, but then how do we build upon that? How do we give some of our folks who don't know what the next question is to ask? How do we help people build those relationships? How to talk about more about what we do is going to be really critical.

Miriam Cross (28:28):
And then let's follow up on something both you and DK, were talking about technology being an equalizer and your relationship with vendors. Another thing you mentioned to me was you felt like your vendors have been more hospitable to you as a small credit union over the past few years. Can you talk more about that?

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (28:46):
Yes, but that's a challenge for us, that part of the member journey that we don't control. They certainly are looking to us and I think are recognizing that it is going to be the great equalizer that we're going to be a good customer for vendors. And there's massive consolidation in the credit union space. Our credit union Broadview, which is 9 billion, is the consolidation of the New York State employees, federal credit Union and capital communication, which was the New York State Verizon Credit Union. This is going to continue to happen. There's a massive regulatory environment. Once you get to the 10 billion space, that ceiling starting to drop. Smaller credit unions, many will have to consolidate to survive. Not all, there should always be a thriving movement, but there's going to be much more consolidation. So I think the vendors are starting to understand, they are starting to, I think genuinely partner with us more and be solutions oriented.

(29:46):
But it's sort of like the call is coming from within the house. We are not getting our internal folks talking enough. I had a situation when we were launching Salesforce, and as head of the chief experience officer at the time, I said, we need to do this. Here are all the ways we can utilize this with our business units. And technology said, great, tell us how we're going to do that. And I was like, well, you have to tell me how we're going to do that. And so that exists in a big way. No vendor can solve that. And in fact, the way that we can utilize our vendors better is when they can help us bridge those gaps and say, what we've seen in best in class institutions is this kind of structure and these kinds of conversations and this way of launching the product. We just don't, don't have the bandwidth. We don't have the number of employees. And so that's where we really have to rely on our third parties,

DK Sharma (30:41):
And that's where we have been investing a lot of our time. So when you look at implementing an AI ecosystem in a credit union, there are multiple things you need to touch. You need to touch your telephone platform. You need to touch how you're storing your call recordings. You're looking at integrating your systems of record. You're thinking about how do you do this natural language training. And when you start adding all these up, it becomes a really big initiative. So what we have been working on is to create a massive accelerator to take all that complexity away from a credit union so that you can focus on the experience. You can focus on disseminating your product information to your advisors and to your member servicers, and leave the grunge work with respect to the operationalization of that entire AI implementation to the platform and to the people who are implementing. So if you can take that complexity away, and typically something like this would take 12 to 15 months to implement. And if you can bring it down to faster value realization in let's say three to six months, then that's the aim to kind of declutter, simplify and fast time to market. Right.

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (31:48):
And Jack, I know you and I talked about this. I'm curious in the room, how many folks have had to deal with the issue of you have a great digital initiative, but culture is sort of what gets in the way. Has anybody experienced that? Raise your hands. I can't see. Okay. A few people. Okay. Some of you're with your bosses, you're not going to raise your hands.

Miriam Cross (32:08):
Susan, what do you mean by culture in this case?

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (32:10):
So again, I'll give you an example from our credit union, very service-oriented culture, not the S word. Sales was a dirty word. So you could bring great technology to enhance your relationship with your member or client, but folks were sort of allergic to the idea that we would be pushing product. So before we could get them to really use Salesforce or to use some of these other tools that were about building relationships, we had to explain the radical notion that sales is just telling people the things that we do and finding out more about the things that they need. And we had to really break that down. And what we had to do was take wonderfully member client centric, community oriented people and tell them that this was for the good. This was not about making the credit union more money. This was about doing the right thing for our membership. So if we didn't set that foundational work, you could have all the bells and whistles you want and people were not going to use it.

Jack Ingram (33:15):
And I might add, if you think about your typical relationship officer or service consultant at the teller line, think about the demographic for that employee. Oftentimes the people serving your customers, your members, they may not even use the products themselves. They've never had a mortgage, maybe they've never had an auto loan or a line of credit. So for us, technology, going back to it being the great equalizer, it's really about leveling up your employees if you're talking about internal use and getting them to the point where they can lean into those tools to act as that trusted service advisor and bring them along their own financial education journey, because without it, they don't feel comfortable selling product to begin with. So it's really trying to marry these concepts together. I think that really delivers on that vision. But it's hard. I think everybody in this room who's in a financial services sector who works in an FI can attest to how hard that is. I think we're all on that journey.

Miriam Cross (34:14):
How are you doing that at WECU? More specifically,

Jack Ingram (34:18):
Everybody has internal chatbots or external chatbots. These days, it seems like we are starting to leverage internal chatbots paired with our knowledge base, which in this case is Atlassian's Confluence to service or surface those things up, but do it embedded in the core so that way when the member's engaged in that transaction, if they get stumped, they're not dealing with some kind of toggle tax back and forth between platforms, they can quickly try and surface that content up to help in the moment. But it's also trying to pare down procedures and policy and bring that stuff to the point where it's digestible. I think too often in fis, we have a tendency to sort of layer on and the next thing you know have 90 procedures for this sort of family of items. And on top of that, you have these playbooks or these one sheeters, and it really becomes overwhelming, especially when you're trying to onboard and train people to it. And then inevitably things are lost or they're miscommunicated. And then you have somebody walking out the door who's a member, and maybe they only end up with that auto loan and maybe there was another product that fit them really well. Maybe even have AI or Salesforce or some other tool that can surface it, but they don't know about it or they've read conflicting information about it so they don't feel comfortable selling it. And so it's really trying to pair that stuff down and simplify that employee experience so they can be effective.

Miriam Cross (35:44):
And Nagesh, do you find that to be a problem with the banks and credit unions you work with ensuring that customer service and other representatives can deliver good advice and service even if it's something they haven't personally experienced? The way Jack was describing,

Nageswar Cherukupalli (36:00):
See, sorry. One thing that have observed in many of these more specifically credit unions is they all have, each one of them have a unique mission against which they work. The employees and members are tied to that particular mission, whether it's Broadview or any of these credit unions, they've got a particular mission with which they're tied. So there is already a connection that's established, and it's only how can you help them with the technology to elevate that connection. How can you actually bring in that whole culture aspect that Susan talked about? Right. I think it's not very difficult. It's possible today. And I feel that the employees are definitely trying to embrace that, embrace the technology and see how they can do better. And they always want to do better, but we also have to make sure that they get educated on what they need to do better. And once we do that, I think they are willing to invest themselves and help the vendors.

Miriam Cross (37:04):
And then Susan and Jack, we've talked a little bit about your relationship with vendors, other challenges with technology. What are the, I guess maybe limitations or advantages as well of being a state chartered financial institution?

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (37:20):
The challenge is always scale. Being able to grow large enough to be able to implement the best in class technologies to be able to afford the investment and to get that utilization rate. So in the credit union world, you have state or federal charters. It defines the boundaries in which you can open branches and serve members. And so finding creative ways to do that within the charter system. So working with large employer groups and leveraging the geography you have is one way. Obviously acquisition, many of the credit unions are incredibly acquisitive right now. But then also toying with the idea of expanding the charters and being able to expand the geography.

Jack Ingram (38:03):
Yeah, I think, right. So as Susan mentioned, right, there's state and federal charter, there's also segment based charters, which is really serving very specific communities as was alluded to here. Part of that scale challenge really becomes who you serve and then how you serve them, and then your ability to make those investments. Because let's be honest, none of this stuff's cheap, and it really only starts to pay at scale typically. And so one of the things we're constantly batting around beyond m and a is do we pursue that federal charter, right? I mean, digital tools are great, they're wonderful, but when you can only deploy them within a specific segment group or a state, it really limits that ability to scale. And I think that's something that many financial institutions are struggling with. I mean, if you're FDIC and state chartered, right? Okay, well great, what are you going to pursue that charter with the OCC and go national? So you can start to break down those barriers. And especially for folks who are toying with digital brands, unique brands, those don't really pay unless you can go national. So I think this is something that's a struggle. I know at least it is for our institution.

Miriam Cross (39:13):
We have about five minutes, so I have one more broad question for each of you, and then maybe we can open it up to questions. When you think about the future of the customer experience in banking, where are the limits of technology and where is the human touch still essential DK as a purveyor of technology? I'll start with you.

DK Sharma (39:33):
So I wanted to share this anecdotal information about you go to ChatGPT and you ask that, can you summarize Romeo Juliet for me? And I'll say star cross lovers whose paths intertwined feuding, families leading to them being killed, and the families came together in grief. So that's a nice summary and you keep trying to bring it down and then say, okay, can you summarize Romeo Juliet in two words, and it says, love kills. So that's hallucination, right? So how do you sort of use this entire AI in a responsible way, this very powerful, but factually not really the strength. So how do you sort of leverage the technology, leverage the power of content generation, but yet do it in the context and do it responsibly, and making sure that you never have a leakage of information that is private and secure. So that's where I think the future lies. How do you reign in this beast in a way that gives you the ride of your life but doesn't kill you? Right? So that's what we are working on,

Miriam Cross (40:38):
Very colorful.

Nageswar Cherukupalli (40:41):
So I thought I learned a story. I guess as Dick said last time when I was in Miami, I actually was visiting F1. It was F1 race, and it was fun, speed, no stop. I guess speed is what happens there. But actually getting to F1 was the most difficult thing. There were so many traps in between. They had traffic lights, mammy. I don't know how many of you actually live here. The traffic here is horrible, right? And it took one and a half hour to get there. So I mean, it's just about 15 miles. So what I would think the technology is great customer experience is all about how efficiently and how fast you can deliver the experiences. But the issues would be the regulations, the risk, compliance, fraud, what kind of challenges that you would face. Because now equalizer is also has become when fraudsters can access much more faster, they have access to the data. I mean, we are seeing so many breaches that are happening across the board. So I think that's what I see as the biggest impediment, and that would inhibit the trust of the members, trust of the retail investors, the retail, the people like us in terms of using.

Miriam Cross (42:04):
Okay. Jack, what are the limits of technology in your future?

Jack Ingram (42:08):
Well, I think technology is a fantastic tool, but I think it's critical to remember that these are just tools at the heart of all the conversations we have, whether it's a member, whether it's a customer, it's people. And technology should be used in a way to facilitate quick movement of tasks that you can automate, but really support that handoff to people when needed. And so I think everybody's still sort of struggling how to do that well and where to invest in the right way to really sort of not only deliver an ROI, but deliver on that customer experience. But I think ultimately that's sort of the limit, right? Or that stop point is it has to stop with that person component, that people component.

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (43:00):
Yeah, I think for us it's about using technology in order to free up the space to create these incredible, unique, without equal experiences for our clients and customers. When we look at customer experience, we don't look at other banks and credit unions. We look at hospitality. We look at how the Ritz-Carlton delivers, we look at how the Rosewood delivers, we look at how this hotel delivers, and we look to create unique and extraordinary experiences. I was in private banking for many years and we built a really, really sticky relationships with our clients and their families because of the team of humans that we put around them. We used technology to make sure we remembered their birthdays, that their son was graduating from college, that there was money in motion, all those things. But it was about the relationships and it was about the human interaction and the humans who decided what was going to be important to remember for each and every client, and goes back to what I was talking about earlier with employees as well. So the limits, the technology is limited by the people you have delivering it, and you have to have that culture. You have to have that engagement. You've got to get the people who want to leverage the technology in the way to deliver this extraordinary experience.

Miriam Cross (44:21):
I love that idea of using technology to boost the human relationships. That pretty much leaves us to the end of time. I won't hold everybody back from lunch, but thank you all for joining us.

Susan Fogarty-Jacques (44:30):
Thank You.

Jack Ingram (44:31):
Thank you.