What you'll learn
- How Citizen's comprehensive bill pay solutions enhance payables and receivables and cash flow essentials,
- Latest on on-demand banking and its synergy with human capital, including a look at digital account opening through self-guided tools.
- How Citizens' integrated solutions that embed self-service merchant services within online banking platforms are increasing loyalty with small businesses
- How Citizens coordinates its small business, merchant, and card services teams to deliver a cohesive financial ecosystem for its clients.
Transcription:
Stu Richards (00:10):
Good morning and welcome to the next virtual fireside chat. And this time we are privileged to be joined by Mark Williams from Citizens Bank in the Boston area. And I think most of you were here, so I won't introduce myself. But Mark, I'd love to have you introduce yourself and discuss your role at Citizens.
Mark Williams (00:34):
Sure awesome. Thanks Stu. I appreciate being here. Thank you everybody for coming. My name is Mark Williams and I am the Head of Treasury Solutions for Business Banking at Citizens. I've been there for about just about five years, and I manage our treasury solutions, sales operations teams, as well as some other ancillary sort of fee income products that are transactional in nature. So fx, commercial card, small business card with a mix of both sales operations and even some product leadership as well. So it's fun.
Stu Richards (01:10):
That's great. So I'd love to ask this question of bankers because the answer always varies, but how does citizens define small business?
Mark Williams (01:17):
Yeah, it's a good question. I think we all have slightly different definitions and some changes too. So small business for us is really zero to 50 million. So it's kind a broader range, right? And it's has some unique challenges. I mean, you guys all know, so at the lower end, you've got to really focus on how do you be really relevant and contextual and meet customers where they're at when they need you, right? Because the guy that runs his landscaping company, he doesn't have time at three o'clock to sit down and research banking solutions. He's doing it at 2:00 AM watching YouTube videos where on the higher end of our spectrum, we're putting together highly custom bespoke solutions to help that customer accomplish something specific. So you have to be incredibly nimble and agile in how you think about delivery experiences.
Stu Richards (02:10):
Yeah. And on that note, John talked a little bit about what Chase is seeing in terms of payments and would love to get your perspective on what citizens is seeing both in terms of adoption of payment types and in terms of basically revenue or transactions by small business. Are you seeing the same thing where enterprise is doing better than small business? Are you seeing any sectors doing particularly well?
Mark Williams (02:38):
Sure. So actually I would say that small business, we're actually outpacing enterprise. I mean, they're obviously larger, but in terms of growth, we're significantly ahead of their curve because we're growing at about probably 13% year over year. So that's significant and probably outside of the industry norm as well, which I'm proud of. But there's a couple factors of that I think. And there's a few key things. One, I'm sure you are all familiar with the fact that fraud is just completely rampant. Customers are looking to us for advice. When that happens, you can have a conversation, lean into it, and then solutions often fall out of that conversation so you wind up selling additional. So that's actually, it's been a boon for us because customers really need advice. That's part of it. Then obviously the shift to digital with the pandemic and acceleration of that, that's made a difference. Plus, look, inflation has had an impact and it's forced come small businesses especially to really think about cashflow and really think about minimizing costs and really think about maximizing liquidity. And so again, they're looking for advice that's helped us out tremendously. I'm thinking everybody's probably feeling it, but yeah.
Stu Richards (03:57):
Yeah, fortunately it seems to be cooling a little bit, but
Mark Williams (04:00):
A little bit, yeah, hopefully. One of my salespeople was complaining to me the other day. I actually, I have a large team, but I always keep a few salespeople reporting to me. I just like to keep close. And he's one of my commercial card people. He, and he could go run a bank if he wanted to, and he said, he is like, no, I've had a bad month, but I've never had two bad months in a row. And he just did. His definition of bad is amusing though.
Stu Richards (04:21):
So when we were preparing for this conversation, you mentioned that Citizens is rolling out a new bill pay solution and would love to hear about that. And you mentioned that improves both payables and receivables.
Mark Williams (04:35):
Well, it does. So there's a few pieces to it. So we're rolling out a new bill pay solution that's going to be an embedded solution for the mass vast majority of our customers, but we're also rolling out an integrated payables solution that's sort of for upper business banking and lower middle market. So what we're trying to do, so back to my original comment about the way we segment is to create different experiences that drive a similar results, but are contextual to meet those customers where they're at. So yeah, we're rolling it out here pretty soon, and it's actually, it's fairly innovative and I think, knock on wood, probably one, we'll sell a bunch of it, but two, we'll win some awards. We just actually won some awards for another solution that we released last year too, so that's pretty cool.
Stu Richards (05:19):
Oh, that's great. Tell us what makes it innovative?
Mark Williams (05:22):
Which one? The BillPay or the other solution?
Stu Richards (05:24):
The BillPay.
Mark Williams (05:24):
The BillPay, yeah, sure. I think that it's the integration and the integration of the AP and the AR that we're looking to build into it, it's going to differentiate in a way that will almost become a wraparound solution that's connected into the basic online banking services. So it'll allow them to manage invoices and manage vendor payments. It's like seamlessly and connect things like their small business card, commercial card if they have it. So it's a really fulsome application, but they don't ever have to exit our vanilla online banking platform. So it's dynamic and it'll give them a specific point of view when they log in as a opposed to just their typical consumer, but they don't have to do anything extra to do it. It's pretty cool.
Stu Richards (06:06):
Yeah, that's great. Yeah. And I'm curious about account management, especially given the range of small business. How does your team or your partners recommend solutions that are appropriate for a given business?
Mark Williams (06:22):
Well, right now we kind of do it the old fashioned way, but we're actually experimenting with and have been for the last few months, and we're rolling out a new completely different way of doing it now. It's sort of a wedding of what's old and what's new. So we're taking more of a traditional treasury business process review where you really sit down and you understand a customer's process from A to Z, right, their AR and AP process. And then we're, instead of just coming back to them with some recommended solutions, we're actually doing a full analysis of what that looks like in terms of impact to the customer's financial goals, specifically around working capital typically. But there are other pieces as well, how hardened is your fraud prevention system? So we kind of package that all up and to a actual digital plan that we then communicate with the customer. So it is a very sophisticated way of delivering solutions and educating customers who don't typically get that level of service because we're really focused on actually advising customers and not just showing up and trying to position products, but advising them on the impact and then actually showing them how to use it and adopt it and integrate it into their process. So that's how we're kind of doing it. Yeah.
Stu Richards (07:38):
That's great. So how do you coordinate the efforts of, for example, the classic small business lending and deposits along with the card and the merchant services team?
Mark Williams (07:48):
Sure. So that's another thing I'm responsible for is the merchant relationship, but we do it with a lot of partnership. So business banking is the ultimate team sport. I think we all know that. It really is. That's a true statement. And so what you do is you focus on having clearly defined areas of responsibility, because I always find that when you clearly define somebody's role or somebody's what they're responsible for, they can lean in and do other stuff easier. Whenever people don't have clarity is they have them like, well, I don't know if I should be stepping in and doing that because that's not really my thing, as opposed to, well, I know that's not my thing, but nobody else is here to do it, so I'm going to step in and do it. So really just highly functioning dynamic relationship teams, which seems like maybe a little bit of a cop out, but it's the best way to do it.
Stu Richards (08:38):
Yeah, that's great. And you mentioned as well there's a cashflow essentials program that you're offering. Tell us a little bit about that.
Mark Williams (08:45):
Sure. So really cool. My career is over 20 years, I've never developed a product. I was always just a sales leader, just a sales leader, but I got to develop a product. And what we did is we basically took a fairly fulsome treasury, sort of typical treasury workstation kind of application, slimmed it down into more of a mobile experience and changed the terms so it would resonate more with a small business owner as opposed to an upper business banking, lower middle market customer, and made it way more accessible and affordable. And a lot of our competitors will do things where they'll put transaction limits, oh, it's free up until this point, we actually don't do that. We just charge a flat fee and you get unlimited transactions, A-C-H-R-T-P, whatever it is that your business requires. And the success has been significant. We've won two awards and lots of customers have adopted.
(09:42):
And what's interesting too, actually, this is my favorite part of it. So our customers are able to wrap their head around a much less expensive solution, but then when we go through what its capabilities are versus our full offering, we're actually, we're 25% up in sales year over year on the more fulsome offering as well, because customers like, well, you know what? I really do need full positive pay in my platform. And so it winds up opening conversations that the price would've probably prohibited in the first place, but because we've kind of taken that off the table as a concern, because you can get at least part of this without spending the money, it's been wildly successful.
Stu Richards (10:23):
That's fantastic. What I wanted to do, we've covered a fair amount of topics in terms of innovation, product support, account coverage. Does anyone have any questions for Mark on any of those topics in the back?
Audience Member 1 (10:49):
Thank you. Hopefully the suspense was worth it. When you think about your fraud protection and fraud prevention services, do those like positive pay, do those look any different in the offering to a small business versus a larger company?
Mark Williams (11:04):
So they do by platform, but not by business segment. If you use our cashflow essentials, it's just reverse positive pay where the full blown positive pay you have to move into our larger offering. And honestly, it has to do with the combination of cost and complexity associated with it. We're trying to figure out ways to kind of streamline it and do it, but that'll take a little bit, but it's a great question. It's one that my bankers ask me all the time, by the way. I feel like there should be hold music, maybe stupid sing.
Audience Member 2 (11:49):
Yeah. Thank you for the insights today, Mark and Stu for hosting. My question was around really the coming together of both payments with business banking. So you're talking about treasury solutions, talking about lending's, talking about payments capabilities. So two parts to this. One is what sort of benefit do you see when you're able to empower your SMB clients with multiple products, multiple solutions, right? Sort of package cross sell up sell, if you want to say something along those lines. And then how are you thinking about making that even better and carrying that forward at the bank?
Mark Williams (12:31):
That's a great question. Thank you. So a few things I'd like to address and unpack in that. And the first thing is making sure that I understand your question, is that how do you kind of arrange those services for the customer to experience? Is that it or was it?
Audience Member 2 (12:51):
Yeah. Yes.
Mark Williams (12:54):
Bringing those together. Yeah, bringing those together. Okay. Absolutely. Yeah. So look, it's a few things, right? It can be hard for legacy banks and financial organizations to work together and partner together to build solutions for customers in a quick and nimble way at times. But you've got to really stay focused on the client experience. That's the very first thing that I would say. If you really think and put the customer at the center, everything you do kind of cascades from there. So that's the first thing I would say. The next thing I would say is that you buy, look, small businesses are, they tend to not care so much about if you're a treasury solutions officer or a lender or they just don't care. I am unique. I started my career in actually merchant, and then I only did that for about five to seven years.
(13:46):
And then I was really a lender for 15 years. And then I went into treasury, and I've been in treasury for about six or seven years now. So I've kind of got a unique background. So my perspective is I bring all these solutions to people because it's not, ultimately, it's not about the products, it's about how cash moves the in and out of their business, and then how they finance operations and what gaps do they have in that, and then what other do they understand the risks associated with whatever their operating model is and whatever they potentially can and can't control. And so when I build bundles and when I package things together, I try and think of those very three basic things. How do we provide access to capital? How do we help them manage process and account for cash? And then how do we help them understand all of the domains of risk associated with their business? So you put those things together and then you bring together partners from a diverse set of backgrounds, you focus on client outcomes, and then you put the right capabilities around that conversation. I dunno if that answers your question helpful. I can ask you more. I'll sit here and talk to you all day.
Audience Member 3 (15:01):
Appreciate it. Mark, can you talk a bit about the sales process and in a package model deepening the relationship over time with clients for cashflow essentials?
Mark Williams (15:12):
Sure. That's a really good question. So we actually use a pretty similar approach, and we tend to focus on a robust discovery. Whether you are a $800,000 customer, right? An $8 million customer or a $40 million customer, we're going to focus on a robust discovery. Now the questions will differ, right? They're probably asking similar things, but how you word them, phrase them, and what context you put them in, it's probably slightly different. And so you do that, but then you also think about understanding what the customer's objectives are, where they're at, and then how do yours, your toolkit fit into that. And sometimes it's a package and sometimes it's not. But what you have to do is, and one of the things we've been focused on is we really lean into giving advice is how do things like your incentive plans drive fulsome conversations versus transactional thinking, right?
(16:14):
It's really important, but then how do you align that and understand and get the sales colleague to understand how that connects to both customer outcomes, but also value to shareholder, how you're going to drive that. So I'm kind of dancing around all of them so much in that question to answer, but so the first step is to do that discovery, but then it's also to really meet the customer where they're at and help them figure out what's best for them. It's really you're assisting their buying journey. You're not selling them things, if that resonates at all. I dunno.
Stu Richards (16:52):
Any other questions? Alright, I have one. So in terms of meeting the customer where they're at, you mentioned that Citizens has on-demand banking and you would love to hear about the experience you've had with digital account opening and how that's been working with your small business clients.
Mark Williams (17:11):
It's been working fantastically, and so we just recently launched it, and it's actually not a product that I was necessarily involved in, but I've benefited from it. So on what it's done, it's created a chassis for us that now we're able to be able to connect a whole bunch of different experiences. Back to actually Don's earlier question, you think less about the products that you're selling the customer and more about the opportunities for solutions that they have to a problem they now have, they're in the digital account opening ecosystem, and that just really speeds your ability to deliver other services. So it's been fantastic. That's great.
Stu Richards (17:47):
And fraud hasn't been an issue.
Mark Williams (17:49):
Yeah, I mean it's always an issue, but never say never. Yeah, right.
Stu Richards (17:55):
And you mentioned also an integrated offering that embeds self-service merchant services. I would love to hear more about that.
Mark Williams (18:01):
So we're in the process of, well, we've got some of it right now. So we've got an invoicing solution that connects customers and they can have an MID in 20 minutes,
(18:13):
Which that's really, a lot of banks would probably be challenged to do that, so that's awesome. But it's a specific card, not present kind of environment. But we're actually working on developing another solution now that's going to embed it more into our system, but also create a fulsome ecosystem, not just around, I can transact, but I can control and see the information associated with that in a relevant way that doesn't look like a statement that was designed to make it hard to figure out what you're paying. It actually explains how cards, what types of cards you're taking and how you're taking them, and then how that impacts your cost and your risk.
Stu Richards (18:55):
Yeah, great. Yeah, and what I'd also love to understand is what you're doing on the advisory side. How are you helping your clients from the very small who need a lot of support, but don't have time to integrate it necessarily to the larger and more sophisticated, what citizens' approach to helping them to market themselves more efficiently or take advantage of your solutions more efficiently?
Mark Williams (19:21):
So we actually just recently built a more fulsome guided process that's on our website that we just launched it in August, like August 5th or something. And what it does is it's almost like a decision engine, right? Is with a yes no if then, but it allows the customers to answer questions and it takes about 20 minutes probably to fill out. And then it recommends solutions to them and then it allows them, we'll follow up with a banker actually calling that customer. And what's been remarkable is I was like, okay, well we'll probably get a few hundred of these filled out. I've gotten thousands of these filled out within weeks of launching this, which tells you customers really want on-demand solutions and on-demand advice. So that's part of it. And then the other piece is we've launched something called Digital Doors last year, which is a series of content pieces, videos, et cetera, that provide advice to customers, which has really been very successful as customers. The feedback has been fantastic.
Stu Richards (20:24):
Yep. That's great. And on the flip side, how are you getting feedback from the marketplace? What's been guiding you and all of the innovation that you guys have been undertaking?
Mark Williams (20:32):
So we actually, we take a pretty fulsome approach. One, we work with folks to do surveys and we appreciate it, and those are really valuable. The other piece is we have an internal marketing studio and they'll do both qualitative and quantitative. And I've actually, you get to go in a two-way, mirror room and watch customers get interviewed about the products that you're developing. And it's absolutely fascinating if you get the chance to go and watch that and have, not a salesperson, but a professional ethnographer really is what they are. Have a conversation with the customer and take apart their business. You'll learn a ton. And so just crazy, wild, innovative stuff like that. It's really cool.
Stu Richards (21:11):
Yeah, yeah, it's fun. Now the focus groups are really eye openers. You really learn a lot. Some businesses are very sophisticated and some not so much.
Mark Williams (21:19):
And you wouldn't always expect, you're expecting, well, the 25 million business is always this sophisticated one. No, no, no, no. They're still using a spreadsheet. You could find that person who's got a startup, but this is their fifth startup and you have no idea what's behind 'em. And you listen to them, you're like, my goodness, they should be running this bank. And then some folks was like, well, we do it that way. My great-grandmother did it that way. It's like, okay.
Stu Richards (21:42):
That's great. Well, we're pretty close to the end, but I wanted to see any other questions for Mark. Well, thank you for attending. I hope you got great insights from Mark. Mark, thank you so much. This is fantastic fun.
Mark Williams (21:58):
Thank you. Appreciate everybody. Had fun.