So tell us a little bit about what total expert does.

Yeah, so total expert, we are a fintech and one of the things that we really are proud of is what I would call we are action forward. So in the industry, a lot of platforms have leveraged investment in order to normalise data. And what we do is obviously normalise data because that is required, but really focus on the action side. And so our platform is a marketing automation as well as a customer engagement or member engagement platform where we are able to drive relevance and intent for personalisation for engagement of either customers or members.

You know, that is interesting to say that because a lot of our solutions out there, really, and we talked a little bit about before we got on air, but there are so many great solutions out there. So many composable solutions that finance institutions can put to work. But the challenge is a lot of times many organisations don't really think about that final mile. You know, I use Salesforce as an example, an extraordinarily powerful platform, a very good platform, but I can show you that a lot of organisations have Salesforce in place, but they are not really using it. They are not using it for its most powerful ability to go forward. So let's dig right in. Can you share your perspective on why relationship banking is gaining importance in today's financial landscape and the shift of importance from building just better experiences to building stronger engagement? Yeah, absolutely.

So one of the things that benefits you and I both personally is the way the world works is what's old is new again. So you and I are new again. And we've gotten away from relationship banking. That was something of the 80s and 90s, maybe early 2000s and have really gotten so focused on transactions that it is really fractioned to all of our customer base and caused us problems, even though there were benefits to it as well. But now because of deposit runoff and because of the lack of loyalty, lack of interactions with our customers or members, we've got to focus on that relationship side. And so many other industries have done a great job of manufacturing that loyalty of those consumers. And banking, we've got to do the same. And the way we do that is through engaging our customers and members and building that relationship, the way that we have done in the past, even though it's a little bit different. In the past, we did it person to person. Now it has to be a balance of high tech and high

touch. You know, it's so interesting because we talked about this as you mentioned, relationship banking and trying to use data to drive some type of increase in relationships. But unfortunately, as I've written about it, there's so many organizations that are losing touch with the fact that they have silent nutrition going on. I'm at events quite often and I'll have people raise their hand if they've closed any major financial relationship in the last five years. And virtually nobody raised their hand. Most people don't close relationships. And then I ask them how many of you have opened some type of relationship that's a financial relationship outside your traditional bank that may help you with a specific problem, a specific solution that's being delivered or something like that. And virtually everybody raised their hand. I said, look around the room. This is the sign of the nutritionist going on because you haven't given the consumer a reason to stay connected with you. And therefore, your primary financial institution loses more and more of that relationship value because you haven't built engagement. So what are some examples that you can give around the difference between a transactional conversation and what's going on in the sphere of building better engagement?

Yeah, absolutely. So first off, just a build on your point, Accenture released a global banking report earlier this year. And 82% of the younger demographics, 24 and below, had opened a new financial account outside of their primary banking relationship in the last 18 to 24 months. On the flip side, only 34% greater than the age of 65 have done the same. So we've got to engage, especially those younger consumers. And so what we've seen is this whole shift, and you can actually see it by how a bank or credit union measures success on focusing on the transaction where I'm coming into a branch. Typically, it's now these days more for a complex transaction than it is for a deposit and cash back like it has been historically, but that still occurs. And it's so focused on that interaction and the success of that transaction because the banking credit union is so focused on making sure that the service is of a high quality that they aren't necessarily interacting with that customer or member in a meaningful way, making sure that they're talking to them about financial wellness as an example, which has been a hot topic for a couple years, or talking to them about things that are going on in their life so that you can help identify in a future intent, you know, things of that sort. So one of the cultural items, I believe, for banks and credit unions is they don't feel like they should sell to their customers or members because they don't want to come across as selling, even though they should be selling through service because I would argue if your community bank or a credit union, it's your responsibility to keep your customer or member financially healthy. If you believe in your products and services and you believe that they are better than everybody else's, then you should be offering them to keep your customer member financially healthy. And so just the so focus on that interaction and the transaction being successful, and you see that through transaction surveys as an example, and instead of relationship surveys, which is the thing that everybody used to be focused on as we're going to send a survey out and focus on relationship and thoughts of the brand and all those things. Well, now it's all about MPS scores and the transaction success. I would argue if you can't take a deposit and give cash back, you probably shouldn't be working at the bank or credit union. We don't need to send a survey out to the customer member and see if that was okay. You know, it's really more about the relationship. Well, yeah.

Most consumers now take good service or great service even as being bottom line, that's why I'm there. And if you're not getting that, that's why they leave or they look for other services. A consumer now is looking for simplicity, speed, and empathy. And the empathy part is a part that really takes the data as you look at it and really takes it and says, I want the, what I call the GPS of financial services as opposed to rear view mirror. I don't want to know what I've already done because you can tell me I overdo my account. What I want you to do is understand my relationship enough to help me warn myself about, oh, by the way, you need to make it a positive or you need to look at your financial relationships differently than you do today. You know, what are some of the biggest challenges that you see banks facing today in the whole idea of understanding their customers and personalizing engagements? Yeah.

So first is to read, to add on to what you were saying. I recently read a book called Unreasonable Hospitality by Wilgood era. And what he talks about is service is black and white. That's the black and white. The hospitality or the way you make them feel is the color in between. And so the service is, that's table stakes. No one in financial services for the most part delivers poor service. It's about that relationship. And then banks and credit unions for a couple of things, I think, really hinder them. One is the culture and it has to start at the top and work its way down to be focused on truly the relationship and the interaction with the customer member versus making sure that the transaction is successful. And then you've got the overwhelming concern around data. You know, data at a bank or credit union is an absolute mess these days from all the M&A activity that has occurred over the years, the legacy systems that are out there. Culturally, those vendors had not wanted to allow other platforms to connect in. You know, that's how you ended up with the bundled solutions from your core provider over the years now through open banking and a shift in just the way technology works. That's much different now. But it can be overwhelming. It's like, okay, that sounds great, Jim and James, but where do I start? And so it's a crawl, walk, run. You can have a personalized experience with, say, for example, CDs because everybody cares about CDs right now with four or five data elements. You don't need to know that customer members, social security number and what kind of car they drive and their kids' names to be able to have a personalized experience. And so start with small steps and then build onto it. And every journey starts with the first step, right?

So how does total, you know, I'm sorry, most banks and credit unions realize that their data sucks. It's in silos, it's not clean in many cases. And it almost provides them an excuse for not moving forward. How does total experts assist financial institutions in making their data platform ready, at least even in a small component of their business? How do you make that work? I know so many institutions will not move forward because they're concerned about what their data looks like. When the reality is, every day you wait is a lost day. You can't get that back.

Yeah, I agree. I have an analogy about that that I find funny. Waiting to move forward with personalization because your data might not be clean is like not going outside wearing shorts because your legs are wide. The only way they get 10 is to see the sun, you know, and so you got to start somewhere. And so getting that data, what we do is first off, we break down the myth that you've got to have 50 data sources and 50 data elements in order to be personalized because that's what we've been doing in this industry since the 90s when really data warehouses started to become popular is, you know, getting all this data and focus on normalize. What we do is start on just very simple data elements that also limits our compliance risk and concerns as well. We don't have to worry about PCI or, you know, account numbers or, you know, pans or anything like that. Just focus on as a great example would be you can identify that someone has a tremendous amount of equity in their home. All you need to know is their age and income. And then you can personalize that. If they're a younger demographic, then perhaps you want to offer them a a HELOC or a home equity. Perhaps if you see that they have other data out there, then you can offer them a cashout refi to help them, you know, debt consolidate. But if they're over 50, maybe in your end to reverse mortgages, maybe you offer them reverse mortgage instead. But you don't send a 72 year old a home equity, you know, offer and you don't send a 29 year old a reverse mortgage offer. But it doesn't take a tremendous amount just in one example. Yeah.

Can you provide some examples of how bank and fit tech companies have really successfully transitioned to a relationship driven model or engagement model and what lessons that others can learn from these experiences? Yeah.

And there's a great question. There's a lot of articles out there that you can read as well. And there is a concern around fintechs and what placement that they are as far as funding and things like that and compliance and risk. And there's great ways that you can score a vendor to ensure that they're in the place you want them to be. But then it's leveraging the ability to pivot the ability to be innovative by the fintech. And for us to have a more innovative culture to be able to solve these problems and then bolt on to these legacy platforms in a new and interesting way where things like almost real time is nothing for a fintech, which is something that's a big deal for legacy platforms so that you can then leverage just those small data elements to start to engage whether that be online or mobile banking, SMS, even some of the more legacy channels like print mail still not dead. You know, there are other ways to do that. But there's a lot of financial institutions that are overcoming that concern and really starting to see a big benefit.

So it's interesting because every organization knows, number one, they have to build better experiences, which I still believe that that's a key element. Number two, more and more are talking about using data to provide prompts or relationships or build some type of engagement where you're going to work on behalf of the consumer, showing empathy, hopefully. When you talk about some really big platform issues and using of data, from what you just said, it sounds like you're saying you start small, you can start with the low hanging fruit, the things that don't take as much risk, but they bring some great value to build that platform. If a financial institution was to work with total expert and try to build, let's say, a platform around their lending platform, for instance, their lending product area, how long would that engagement take to get up and moving a little bit?

Yeah, it really comes down to how much resources they can dedicate on their side. We typically would look at about a 90-day time to value. So it takes us about 90 days from start to finish to start to get value from the platform. And we have different ways to stagger that so that we can start to get value as an ROI as quickly as possible. But a lot of it really comes down to allowing us the ability to connect in either via API or taking flat files if that's the way that you so choose. It's interesting. We both get back to the day where

almost everything we were working on was an annual plan. Everything was built into annual cycles. And the reality is what you just said is something I'm seeing that organizations now, especially smaller organizations surprisingly, are really finding these solutions. They can implement in a 36-year 90-day period and then build the success to build the financing capability to move forward. And it's great that companies like yours can really work on this composable basis to build a relationship over time that expands as opposed to saying, I've got to do a complete core conversion. So, you know, in a world where digital banking is on a rise and where we need to use data to build better experiences, how does she technology play in a role in really improving financial relationships?

Oh, yeah. So it's going to be, or it continues to be huge. I mean, it's got, you always have to have a balance of human and tech. You know, the human interaction is not going to go away. But you have to understand the segment that you're talking to, you know, the demographic that you're talking to and have that balance shift according to that segment. You or I probably want a lot more human interaction than our children do. And so being able to leverage data to be personalized, first off, which is table stakes these days. I mean, I think Amazon and Facebook and X, the formula, only known as Twitter, they've proven personalization. And so the consumer just expects that now you can lose more credibility by having something unpersonalized than you probably gained by having it personalized. But then, you know, we've been talking about this for years as transaction or branch volume has slowed down. Every interaction is gold now with your customers or members as a financial institution. And you got to take that interaction seriously and make sure that you're providing, you know, something that helps build loyalty and credibility and helps with that relationship as well as making sure that that transaction is easy and successful. So

how do you help banks and credit and determine the right time and the right channel to engage with customers

and members? Yeah. So what the way I talk about it is there's two factors. So first is relevance and the second is intent. So first you want to understand that customer, remember well enough that you can provide a relevant message to them. You know, and that can be very simple like census data, you know, age income, home ownership, presence of children, you know, those kinds of things. And then the other is really around intent. And intent, actually, I just had a peace drop last week, I think, at BAI around life events. And so what we're doing is building out this whole intent alert system where we've started with credit polls, we have home equity, we have MLS posting, if they post a house on the MLS, we have credit improvement and life events that are coming and we'll continue to add more and more so that as those items occur for your customers or members, now it's creating an alert that either can feed the automation so that you're starting to nurture that brand, whether that be a newsletter or financial wellness or send it to a lead or a pop up, you know, on a particular online or mobile banking channel, you know, those types of things. So that whole encompassed relevance and intent together, I think, is

important.