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Tyler Brown: Stable modernization first is about priorities for the FI. We talked a lot about risk management within a comfort zone for the FI based on its strategy and its existing technology stack. What’s important for the financial institution to do in this context is to say, Hey, We know and understand everything that’s going on with our technology and are able to are able to say we have within a reasonable degree of certainty an idea of what’s going to happen when we make certain changes and what’s going to improve and what possibly could be our downside risk of making this change

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Josh DeTar: [00:02:00] Welcome to another episode of the Digital Banking Podcast. My guest today is Tyler Brown, a Senior Research Analyst at CCG Catalyst. As Tyler was making this statement, I thought, what a perfect and fun way to give you some context on Tyler’s personality and what you might expect out of today’s episode.

He said, I love the idea of travel, looking through brochures, hours of endless research, diving deep into Wikipedia [00:03:00] rabbit holes, planning it out meticulously, imagining what each element of the trip will bring to the experience. Honestly, it’s almost better than the trip itself for me. You see deep down, while his personality today as a thought leader will come out as extroverted, he’s really a total introvert.

Tyler said he’d be perfectly content living in a dark cave, just reading books and researching things for the rest of his life. However, you kind of have to earn a paycheck, and that’s not a great way to do it. So he channels the buried extrovert side of himself and the constitutionally researched focused side of himself.

to bring out the thoughts in his head to create thought provoking dialogue for discussion and debate. While he says he tripped into this industry, I can say firsthand that if you subscribe to his email research newsletter, you can see how immensely passionate he is about bringing insightful Intel to community FI operators.

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So they can focus on the day to day and he can help them see a full 360 picture of what’s happening both in and out of our industry. Tyler has his finger on the pulse of all the buzzwords, both current and past, and we plan to dive deep into some of them today. So like Tyler sometimes wishes he could, you get to stay at home and not have to interact with anyone at a conference, but still get to hear Tyler’s intel.

Although he’ll be the first one to tell you, To really learn and grow and evolve you can only read so much you got to just get out and talk with people sometimes While Tyler thinks would anyone really want to get to know me that well I can tell you you would and you’re gonna get to a little bit today and you won’t regret it So Tyler, thanks for joining me on the podcast

Tyler: Thanks, Josh. I appreciate that. Happy to be here, and thanks for bringing me out of my shell.

Josh: Yeah, well apparently you do that yourself pretty well, so

Tyler: It takes a little help every once in a while, just a [00:05:00] little nudge.

Josh: Yeah, but like we were saying, you know, this is kind of like the prime interaction for people like us who are like, um, you know, career extroverts. And by that, I mean, our career makes us be an extrovert. And, you know, this is kind of like the best form of it. Cause I’m like, yeah, I get to look all extroverted and, uh, really I’m just having a one on one conversation with Tyler.

So it’s kind of managed and that helps.

Tyler: Well, look at this. The doors are closed behind me. There is nobody else here. It’s beautiful.

Josh: It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. Uh, you know, I, I’ve been really looking forward to having you on the podcast. Um, and it really came out of a friend in the industry, um, connected me to your newsletter. And what’s funny is, you know, one of the questions that I always ask all of our guests at the end of the, um, episode is like, where do you go to get Intel?

Right. And I’m always trying to look for new sources to gather information on what’s happening in our industry. And, you know, there’s such a wide range of different types of content. And even I’m going to kind of poke fun at [00:06:00] myself, right? Like this podcast. I mean, I think our shortest episodes are around an hour, right?

So it’s a lot of content to try and digest. It’s a pretty big time commitment for people to stick around and hear my obnoxious voice occasionally in this. Um, and sometimes like other people, I just want like a really condensed, like hit me with the facts. I want to know what’s going on, but not just like what’s going on, but I really want somebody’s educated take on what does that mean, right?

And that’s what I found in your newsletter was it was really succinct. It’s pretty quick. It takes me maybe 60 seconds to read. Um, usually a little bit longer because I have to go research something you said because I’m not smart enough to understand what it meant. But, um, it’s really just kind of a quick bite size digest, but very impactful in terms of giving me some insight into it.

Um, And so, you know, you talk a lot about some of these different buzzwords and things and like, why is it the buzzword? Why is it the common talk? So what are the, some of the things that you’ve been kind of researching [00:07:00] lately and writing about and what’s kind of piqued your interest?

Tyler: Well, when I read, it’s as widely as possible, given the number of hours in the day. So, I tend to aggregate my news, and when I read, it’s If I’m lucky, it’s every few lines, and I try and pull together the picture for myself. Of course, when I’m writing the newsletter for CCG Catalyst, I have to proofread myself, and so it’s a good check on whether what I think about the industry is actually making sense, and is something that’s going to come across in a way that’s clear and cogent to a reader.

So recently, a few things I’ve been thinking about and writing about are migration and modernization. Two big issues for community FIs. AI, artificial intelligence, has been everywhere as a broad topic. I’ve really never heard [00:08:00] of it. Okay.

Josh: Um,

Tyler: but It’s not always easy to understand within AI what matters, what’s important, and what the practical applications are.

So, digging deeper, I think, is important. We’ve seen problems with BAS. That’s been everywhere, both from a risk perspective, a regulatory issue, and then from a technology and operational problem. Open banking, of course, I think that’s been a big one because there’s been the policy issue with a final rule coming from the CFPB, but there’s also a big technology issue related to particularly smaller financial institutions that gets a little bit less attention than the philosophy of open banking and kind of how it has enriched the fintech ecosystem.

Josh: well let’s, I want to [00:09:00] start with, um, You know, you were kind of talking about the just modernization as a whole, right? Um, so what has kind of piqued your interest in, uh, kind of just technology modernization as a whole? And, you know, how does that, how does that parlay into modernization? Some of the technology choices that CFIs are making.

And you talked a little bit about before we started recording kind of the pendulum swing of like, um, you know, do I buy everything from one provider versus best in breed and what are you seeing there?

Tyler: One other thing that’s amazed me about modernization. Coming into the final financial industry as a researcher is just how hard it is and what options you have for modernization, whether it’s a very tactical approach, thinking about whether you’re going to middleware, for example, or gradual replacement of applications, whether you’re going to do a sidecar core with a migration and then the greater technology strategy and the, uh, organizational [00:10:00] impetus behind it, because there’s a big tendency or a big risk of inertia going forward with what you have, what you’ve always had, and being too afraid to make a change, even though that may be in the long term best interest of the institution.

Yeah,

Josh: Yeah. You know, that’s one of the topics I feel like comes up a lot is the like impetus for change, right? And what does that actually look like from each institution to each institution? And it’s, I mean, just given the sheer scale of number of institutions that we’re talking about in kind of the CFI space, right?

I mean, it’s roughly what, six to 7, 000, depending on what you classify as. and that plus just all the different technology choices that they could have made up until this point puts them all in such a like wide spectrum of what are they? Need and want to do. [00:11:00] And then what would be the step to get to where they want to go to from where they are now in like, for some that may be pretty small and they could do small incremental things for some, that would be a cataclysmic leap.

Um, and so just being able to give a blanket statement like, Oh, everybody should do this. It’s not really possible, right? Because like your decision for change and what is, you know, your risk appetite for that look like at your institution. Could be totally different because of those factors. Yeah, uh, I mean, yeah, I think that’s a big part of it too, right? Is we, we kind of talked about this in, in other episodes, how there’s almost two main pillars to, you know, this quote unquote modernization of, The CFI, right? And it’s people in tech, right? And you may have people within the organization that are really gung ho about it or not so much.

And then you may have technology that’s [00:12:00] really capable of it or not so much. And any varying combination of that. Um, what have you seen in just some of your research of like, how are people kind of navigating that?

Tyler: CFIs in particular. There’s a board level push that has to happen when it comes to modernization. It’s all about the greater strategy of the institution and whether the business strategy supports the technical change that could be very risky for the financial institution. And what ultimately could put the job on the line for people who are involved in technology strategy and implementation.

So when. FIs look to do this. Most often, they’re looking at a strategy that’s going to be relatively piecemeal, taking slow steps toward modernization because a big [00:13:00] change, while it’s a little bit easier for smaller FIs than it is for bigger ones, carries with it a lot of operational risk that becomes potentially a problem.

for customers and not just something that is internal, which then snowballs into it can ultimately be a pretty big problem for the financial institution. So what we see is you may have a middleware layer that’s going to enable extensibility with new applications, pulling out piece by piece, um, old technology and Plugging in what’s new, what you can.

To the point that sometimes you’re running old applications that have been around for decades, but your most recent have just been plugged in, say, the last two years. Another big one though, um, if we avoid the whole idea of a rip and replace, rip and replace core modernization, Is to build something on the side and gradually move over to it.

And that may be, [00:14:00] for example, building a separate brand that has its own ledger to bring in deposits and then starting to migrate customers over. It may be just in general operating a core for a different business line entirely, like banking as a service, for example. And making the decision that we can operate our bank.

as our customers expect it to, and as we’re used to it happening, and ultimately make this modernization step, but be able to do it over a period of time that we’re comfortable with. Appleguy,

Josh: I, as you were talking, I was thinking about, I feel like there’s also this almost weird expectation from us consumers. Of financial services that like I want my bank or my credit union to be super solid and stable and I don’t want them to rock the boat because our entire relationship is built on trust and I don’t want to see you go SVB on [00:15:00] me, right? But at the same time, I have this expectation that you move at the technological pace of Amazon and Google and Apple. And I expect all of these things. You’re like, wait, sometimes these things don’t line up. Like if you want me to move at that pace, like how many, uh, are you an Apple guy, Tyler, or an Android?

Yeah, I mean, it is just so is, I mean, you’re just so sucked into the ecosystem. I’m so screwed at this point. I could never leave Apple even if I wanted to, and they know it. I’m sure they do. They have the data. That’s why

Tyler: I’m not sad about it, at least for now.

Josh: Yeah, no, it works great. So, but at the same time, right?

Like how many Apple, uh, iOS releases have you had that have broken something? I mean, it’s every single

Tyler: Every single one, unless I wait for it. Yeah.

Josh: it’s never flawless. Ever. And I’m totally okay with it. Right. But man, goodness gracious, God forbid you [00:16:00] ever do a rollout of digital banking where one microscopic feature that one aunt Edna at the credit union uses breaks, right?

That’s a

Tyler: I can think of a certain regional bank with a big merger recently that had some issues related to digital banking and ATMs and other critical systems that did not go over well with consumers and certainly made it into the news.

Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and so there you go, right? Like then that happens. Right. And then everybody’s upset, but at the same time, they were probably saying, we’re upset that you don’t have the latest and greatest. Please do this huge move to do this latest and greatest.

Tyler: Yeah, it’s a tough tension, especially on the consumer side. It’s made me think about that and say, well, on the consumer side, it’s going to be expensive to keep your customers because of the digital expectations, both set by big tech. And then when you’re looking at the larger banks who have the money to invest in the technology and the experience, they can just do it because it’s part of the multi billion dollar budget.

But if you have a smaller FI, that’s [00:17:00] depending on particularly a perhaps a core vendor to provide them all of their technology on their road map, then it becomes a lot more difficult. Then maybe you have this shift to commercial, for example, where it’s a lot more comfortable to handle that side of the business because you don’t have this high volume of customers who are coming in and expecting this front end experience that’s happening day to day on mobile and has to compete with consumer brands.

I

Josh: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. You know, I was talking to somebody about this recently to Tyler where, um, Um, or we were just talking about doing something like an update to digital banking, right? And how, let’s say a small, uh, you know, 10, 000 member, um, you know, chartered credit union is doing a digital banking conversion and it’s a night and day switch from one system to another.

And how that inevitably always rocks the boat. And you always get the people that reach out and they’re ticked off because you move their cheese and whatever. But at the same time, they were the same [00:18:00] people probably that last week that were, you know, complaining about how you have crappy tech and you’re like, I can’t win.

Okay. I’m trying, I’m trying to give you the new stuff, you know, but, um, but my comment was like, think about Google, for example, right? If you use Gmail, how many times have you just logged into Gmail? It looks totally different. Or something is radically changed.

Tyler: have lost count.

Josh: Yeah, it happens all the time, right? Like, we’ve set that expectation for consumers from Google.

And I think the big difference between Google doing that, I mean, yes, there’s many differences, but a big difference in my opinion, right, is that when my credit union does that, I know exactly who to call and bitch at.

Tyler: That is

Josh: does that, like there’s no phone number to call Google and be like, I’m really upset about this change that you made in your software.

We’re just like, well, it’s Google. Like, I guess it is what it is. I’ll get used to it and next week I’ll be over it. Whereas

Tyler: you’ll give up and move on.

Josh: yeah. Whereas I think a lot of times too, right? Like that same kind of thing. Again, barring anything catastrophic [00:19:00] happening, right? Like a complete outage or yeah, you can’t access an ATM network or something like that.

Barring that, yeah. Yeah, you’re going to hear some complaining, but it subsides pretty quickly. And you know, which of the complaining do you want to hear? The, you don’t have the great stuff, so I’m moving on, or you brought us new great stuff and I didn’t like the change at first, but now I figured out how to use it and now I’m satisfied and I’m staying around.

I don’t know. And that’s sometimes hard to quantify, I feel like,

Tyler: Yeah, but you talked about trust. You mentioned that a little while ago. Yeah. It’s all about the downside risk. If something really goes wrong with something you have a high amount of trust in, then there’s just that bigger fall. And when you’re trusting your money as opposed to pieces of data that may or may not be critical, there’s this bigger concern, I think, from consumers.

And then this bigger reaction from advisor is saying, if we make these big changes, well, Maybe it’s worse if there’s even a small risk of a glitch, [00:20:00] because it’s going to cause a lot of customers to back away, even if an improvement might cause slightly better engagement or retention among a small group.

Josh: Yeah, well, that goes back to what you’re talking about with, um, kind of managing that risk, right? And looking at, do I get everything from one provider? Do I get everything from niche providers? Like a part of that conversation is how do we one, um, evaluate and identify risk, right? And then how do we kind of classify that within our institution?

And like you were saying, like, is this a high risk, low reward or a low risk, high reward, or, you know, something in between those two things. And then, you know, making your decision through that. Right.

Tyler: It’s like walking a tightrope.

Josh: Not something I would do. Well, I don’t think.

Tyler: I tried, sort of, once and it didn’t end well. Better try it again.

Josh: Wait, seriously. Okay. Like real heights or like, you know, balance beam at

Tyler: Oh no, like a slackline.

Josh: Oh, really?

Tyler: [00:21:00] Yeah, like three feet off the ground. I tried. Tried a second time and then never tried again. You notice I didn’t say succeeded anywhere in there.

Josh: Yeah. Yeah. So, well, I think that’s, I don’t know how we got on that, but all of a sudden, like, that is a good example of that. Right. And two, um, going back to our. You know, looking at just the reasons FIs may take certain strategies through, you know, quote unquote, this modernization period of, you know, what the traditional banking model looks like, right?

Past experience is going to play into that as well. Um, and if you’ve got folks who have tried other types of projects, um, you know, one that always comes up for, for me, at least I always find funny. I kind of feel like I need an internal Slack channel to just like keep track of some of these jokes. Um,

Tyler: Well, you’ve got one. Me, down in the bottom left hand corner. Or you write jokes to yourself.

Josh: uh, nobody gets to see that. So you’re good. Um, but, uh, is, you know, anytime we get into, to red lines with [00:22:00] a, with a financial institution, it’s always interesting to me to see some of the things that come out of that. And a lot of times I’m always like, Oh, who burned you? Like you’d only ever ask for that if somebody burned you because of that.

And so I think, you know, all of those factors is we, you know, start with a very simple topic of just like, how do you make decisions about modernizing your financial institution? I mean, in 20 minutes, we’ve already gone down a rabbit hole where you, you know, we’ve opened up 10 different branches of, you know, reasons why this becomes a challenge versus just, uh, Oh, everybody can just do this.

Yeah.

Tyler: There’s looking ahead to the analysis paralysis of what do I do next. Going from the decision that we are actually going to change something and we are comfortable with that. to what are the decisions we actually made and where are those solutions coming from.

Josh: Yeah. Well, okay. That actually brings us to one of the other kind of buzzword topics that you had brought up, right? I guess. Well, in a roundabout [00:23:00] way. Um, you know, you brought up the buzzword of AI, but you talked about how it like it’s got to be actually intentional and use case based. Um, and I think AI is just getting kind of lumped in with a lot of conversations around.

Yeah. You know, large language models, ai, machine learning. Like I, I feel like a lot of times a guy kind of gets put in its own box. But, um, you know, when we start talking about this kind of advancement in technology. I think a part of that is we’re also looking to how can we set ourselves up for better success in the future of technology is actually moving faster and doing things a lot quicker in um, you know, reiterating than we used to be able to do, right? And so something that maybe used to be a manual process that took somebody 40 hours in a week to do can now be done by Um, you know, an A. I. Model in four seconds. So all of a sudden that changes the [00:24:00] paralysis of, well, if we make this decision, like it’s going to be a 12 year commitment in making the decision or sorry, a 12 month commitment and making the decision and then 12 months implementing the decision.

And then we’ve got to be on that for at least five years cause that’s the contract or the length of time we would need to go through to even just to remotely think about putting ourselves through that whole two year process again. Right. And starting to make things actually happen a lot faster. Um, I would hope is giving us the ability to like, have less of that analysis paralysis to be like, Hey, it’s okay to make a decision now knowing what we know now, as long as it keeps us going towards the trajectory of what the future could hold, as opposed to just like, I feel like I have to make a decision and the right one because I’m going to be stuck with that decision for the next decade, like we used to be.

Tyler: That’s it, that’s the North Star. Where are you going and do you know? We were talking a little bit earlier about the shiny object issue and once upon a time when crypto was the big [00:25:00] thing for banks to adopt, crypto trading, crypto custody, and how it’s easy to jump on the bandwagon to go after a shiny object and it’s a little bit harder to think about.

What’s going to be in the best interest of the FI in the long run when you may be locked into a contract, for example. Or if you’re in a contract and you’re coming up on renewal, what kind of decisions do you need to make and how quickly do you need to make them if you’re going to move forward?

Josh: That would be a really interesting one. I’d love to, um, If you’re a community financial institution listening and you implemented buy, sell, hold of crypto, call me. I’d love to have you on the podcast. I’d love to talk to you through that one. Um, cause I’m genuinely curious, right? And it’s just no, uh, Uh, you know, ill intention towards the statement, but I’m genuinely curious, would you actually renew that contract again if it’s coming up for renewal?

And then if the answer is no, like, what do you feel the fallout would be from your, you know, end user base of that? Like what was the adoption of it actually like, and, um, [00:26:00] you know, how sticky was that product? But yeah, I mean, to your point, Tyler, I remember, um, I remember when it was all the rage, like everybody was talking about.

Um, you know, being able to buy, sell, hold crypto and digital banking. And we had lots of overnight fintechs pop up and some really awesome people with some really awesome products. But just unfortunately you look at kind of how the market responded to that buzzword and where we are today. And I feel like it’s probably a very different story.

Tyler: Well, there’s another piece of that that makes me think. If you have a great idea or chase something new, how do you know if you switch it on people are actually going to use it? And not just use it while it’s a hot term and everybody’s clamoring for it, but a feature that people are going to have and continue to think of as part of your customer experience over the next couple of years.

Josh: Yeah, I mean, but that leads us back to like, how [00:27:00] quickly can you actually Um, you know, make decisions, implement things, and then fail fast if necessary. I feel like this is a topic that comes up every once in a while on the podcast. Um, you know, and I referenced the, have you ever seen the meme of like Elon looking up at one of the SpaceX rockets as it’s blowing up?

He was smiling. And it’s like, you know, this is somebody who’s comfortable with failure cause he knows he’s learning from him. Like, or he’s just crazy. I don’t know. Like, or something in between. Right. But I feel like going back to what you were talking about, about the trust side of our industry, it’s a lot harder for us to like look back at, you know, an

Tyler: Look at a rocket blowing up and

Josh: Yeah. And be like, Oh, that was

Tyler: We learned

Josh: We learned something. Like, yeah, I’m pretty sure like the executives of SVB are not looking back, smiling, going, Oh, we learned something. Right. Like.

Tyler: when a lot of them aren’t there anymore, it’s

Josh: Yeah, exactly. That’s the point, right? So we don’t, we don’t necessarily get to do that. So we’re trying to kind of balance the risk side of things, but at the same [00:28:00] time, like we, we can’t be, you know, paralyzed by fear and say, well, we’re never going to implement something.

Um, you know, I use the example for us. We were one of the first companies, uh, to work on like an Alexa, a smart voice banking solution,

Tyler: I remember those

Josh: Yeah. Fun fact about us. Like we were the ones that actually worked with Amazon to make it happen. Like we beat capital one to market with a skill that could actually move money in the real world.

All of this. We were so proud of it, Tyler. Like we thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread. I loved it. Um, you know how many people used it? Actually, yeah, you nailed it on the head, like five, five. And I think three of them were our CEO, right? Like complete and utter flaw. Um, it was useless, right?

It wasn’t useless. It was a super cool product that worked really well. Like I could have done these things, but the market said, no. Right? And sometimes that happens, but we took a ton of that technology that we leveraged and it’s built into other things that have been far more successful, are setting us up [00:29:00] for the future and things like that.

But, but how do you kind of balance that process of, um, looking at things and saying, okay, these are the shiny squirrels I’m going to chase, And then if I catch one and realize that it’s no good, like how quickly can I get rid of it? Um, and I do think that that’s an interesting, interesting challenge in this industry where going back to like the, the whole trust thing is so paramount.

Tyler: And then you have to build it into the organization, the whole concept of Innovation, if you want to use the term or evolution iteration, which takes a certain amount of expertise that may be a little bit more technology focused. There’s a lot of FIs are used to, and, uh, sometimes what we’ve seen are actually dedicated teams who are responsible for saying, we actually want to find ways to change the bank in ways that are going to be good for us for the longterm.

And now let’s figure out how to. Both do the technology aspect of this, but also the [00:30:00] strategy and the cultural diffusion related to innovation. Because if you have the whole bank, the whole FI saying, we want to keep on doing things the way we’ve always done them because A, it may be easier or B, certainly it’s safer.

We know we’re going to maintain trust in our customers. You end up with a, uh, potential, uh, roadblock that you need to get past that requires, um, some pretty significant internal change that’s unrelated to your technology.

Josh: It’s funny that you use that the way you use that. So. recently had a recording, uh, of a podcast episode with Tyler Marshall from prime bank, and he literally has a sign on his desk, Tyler, and he held it up and showed it to me for the podcast. Um, that was like doing things the way we’ve always done them in a big red X.

And he was like, through like our core conversion, our team had t shirts made that had that [00:31:00] on it. And it was kind of a constant reminder to our team that, yes, just because this is the way we’ve always done it doesn’t mean that it’s right or wrong, like it could still be right. But the important thing to note was that we need to validate that every time and not

Tyler: the

Josh: make the assumption, right?

That, hey, if this is how we’ve always done it, that it still works today. He’s like, it may very well. Or it may need to change. And if it needs to change, we as an organization need to be okay with that. And that needs to come from leadership that it’s okay to change things the way that we’ve always done them.

Um, but you have to have that mindset.

Tyler: I love the sign and the t shirts. I love the commitment that that shows.

Josh: Yeah. I mean, he was like, you know, it’s something that it has to be a part of our vernacular because of the industry that we’re in. Um, because this industry is so incredibly focused on, you know, building longterm trust, um, and is a longterm industry. And like you said, like this deals with [00:32:00] people’s money.

You kind of can’t screw around with this. Um, but at the same time, we kind of can’t rest on our laurels and just say, Hey, we can continue to operate and as the bank that we started as a hundred years from now and we’ll be just fine. It’s not the case.

Tyler: Well, earlier you were talking about the fact that,

uh,

You were talking earlier about how we had big tech competition, for example, Or this evolving, uh, Consumer expectation related to technology outside the bank. And while you may not be able to run at the same pace from within an FI, when you have this mindset of continuous change, continuously moving forward and knowing what that looks like, then maybe, even if you can’t move as quickly as everybody else or as quickly as you would like to, you can have this marriage of risk management and [00:33:00] innovation that’s going to happen.

Help you in the long run, and perhaps if you’re the FI that makes this commitment to thrive.

Josh: Yeah. Well, and like you were mentioning, like seeing teams like that actually form inside the FIs is pretty cool. I do feel like that’s a change I’ve noticed as well. Just in the last decade, you’re starting to see more teams. Um, you know, we’ll get on calls with banks and credit unions now where they’re like, Hey, we are the team.

That has both the background and the skill set and the direction and the empowerment to go interact with technology, right? And to be kind of that conduit. And I think it’s a really important balance in, um, you know, the industry that we serve, that the financial institution needs to be really good at being a financial institution and understanding things like regulation and products and services and, um, you know, the relationship and the trust that they have with their consumers and all of that.

But they also need to know a little bit of [00:34:00] technology, right? They have to understand some terminology. They’ve got to understand the landscape. They’ve got to understand Like what’s coming down the pipe and what are some of the, um, you know, consumer expectations driven by big tech and FinTech. And then at the same time you need.

You know, the technology companies that are servicing them to be true tech companies that operate and think and move and act like tech companies, but also have an understanding of the industry that they serve and understand what a bank and a credit union is and and understand what they’re dealing with.

internally in, yeah, we’d love to do that, but just unfortunately our risk tolerance says we can’t, that just doesn’t meet our risk reward criteria. And then they have to find that way to like mesh in the middle well enough to make some cool things happen.

Tyler: well you just talked about the bank being the bank, and there’s a whole partnership aspect to this as well. When the buck stops at the bank, the FI, for anything that goes wrong [00:35:00] with a partner, which may be assisting them with innovation of some kind, whether it is a distribution channel partner, like in an embedded finance sense, or whether you’re looking at a new AI system and trying to understand how that works and vetted as a compliance team that may not have the depth of understanding or experience to say we are comfortable with this, we know our regulators are going to be comfortable with this and nothing is going to blow back on us in a big way as we try and look ahead.

Josh: Yeah, I’m really glad you brought that up because, um, while you’re talking, I went and looked and, uh, it was actually Literally just what six days ago is the time of recording this episode. You just sent out one of your newsletters was talking about like seeking stable modernization, right? So what does that look like to you?

Like what is seeking stable modernization mean?

Tyler: Stable modernization first is about priorities for the FI. We talked a lot about [00:36:00] risk management within a comfort zone for the FI based on its strategy and its existing technology stack. What’s important for the financial institution to do in this context is to say, Hey, We know and understand everything that’s going on with our technology and are able to are able to say we have within a reasonable degree of certainty an idea of what’s going to happen when we make certain changes and what’s going to improve and what possibly could be our downside risk of making this change.

A lot of it is about this planning process. given an understanding of what they’re working with. For a lot of smaller FIs, the challenge is going to be their governance is probably not going to be so robust, especially if they’re [00:37:00] older core systems are running a programming language that’s decades of years old.

They haven’t really at a leadership level thought about what they need to do to modernize. So it’s, I would say it’s, it takes this self insight within the financial institution, the understanding the detail orientation to figure out what it’s going to take to change things in ways that are not going to affect customers in a negative way, that are not going to lead to operational failures at the bank that are going to, I guess, be an issue for customers, but also raise the ire of regulators. And then over time, you were talking a little bit earlier about commitment, the sign on the desk that says, um, change is constant. We need to keep moving forward. And whatever gets in our way has to only be a temporary roadblock. [00:38:00] Because if we see something and it says stop because it’s too risky or it’s going to cause a problem, then That’s not a point you want to end at.

Because that says, within our technology stack, within our technology strategy, there’s something happening here. That’s keeping us from thinking about our North Star, the goal we actually want to get to.

Josh: Yeah, I like that you bring up, you know, it’s all got to come back to the strategy. And I think that goes back to what we were saying earlier of just like, that’s why this can’t be one size fits all too, right? Is well, yes, for all intents and purposes, if you boil it down really, really simply, the vast majority of community financial institutions here in the U.

1. are doing the same thing, right? So. where you’re differentiating is kind of your strategic objectives and how you’re approaching maybe doing the things that we all do [00:39:00] in a very commoditized market. Um, and so if you’re, you know, looking to do change, but it doesn’t align to your strategic objectives, then it’s probably going to fail from the start. So you have to start there. Like, what are our objectives? What are we trying to accomplish? And you know, you, you touched on this when you brought it up. Um, I think that’s a big part of the problem with buzzwords and like AI is the big one right now. And I actually just posted on my LinkedIn last week, and it’s gotten a ton of, uh, like comments from, from people sending me messages and things that was like, you remember the scene from, um, Wolf of wall street where he’s like, sell me this pen, you know?

Um, and so it’s, it’s the guy saying, yeah, sell me this pen. Right. And he holds up the pen and then the meme is, um, it’s powered by AI. And then the caption was like every freaking company right now. Right. And it’s like, it does. It feels like [00:40:00] everybody is like AI, this AI, that AI is all the things, but

Tyler: Well, and it could be powered by AI is the thing. It could be powered by AI.

Josh: But

Tyler: But if you use AI as the overarching term, what does that really mean? Because I mean, AI, when you call AI, AI, it sounds like a commodity, even though ultimately it’s not done properly or done in an interesting way.

Josh: Yeah. But I think it’s like any, any, you know, I hate to use the term buzzword. I think buzzword itself is a buzzword. Um, but like, whatever the, the thing is, this year and sometimes things span multiple years and sometimes there’s multiple things in years, but there’s always some big thing, right? And I feel like you always get an idea of what that thing is when you do go to conferences and things and you see like, what’s all the new signage from the vendors, um, saying, right?

And then what are the [00:41:00] keynotes talking about? What’s, what’s dominating the agenda in terms of, you know, a specific topic. And, you know, for whatever it is, it’s whatever that thing is, it usually does mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people,

Tyler: One year we had crypto, then we had embedded finance. Now we have AI. What’s next

Josh: Yeah. Well, and that’s a good point, right? Like embedded finance, open banking. That also is similar to AI in my humble opinion, which is that can mean a lot of things to a lot of people.

Tyler: Big, overarching term with a lot of practical issues, a lot of applications, and I think actually a lot of, maybe not a misunderstanding, but a lack of common definition.

Josh: Yeah,

Tyler: the issue with buzzwords is, an issue with buzzwords is, you use them for a common understanding or a common vernacular, but as a result, sometimes you get a term that’s so high level, not everyone knows they’re talking about the same thing.[00:42:00] 

Josh: I remember, um,

Tyler: Digital transformation would be another one.

Josh: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I remember when, um, when open banking was like kind of the big buzzword and not that it’s necessarily gone away, but just it was kind of a like predominant one that we were talking about. I used to laugh and say, if you ask five people what open banking means, you’ll get six answers. Like, just depends on who you ask and what their frame of reference is. Um, I think the, you know, the English language as a whole is really both good and terrible at that is that like a word can mean a lot of things. It’s the context around it.

Tyler: It’s very malleable in it, isn’t it? And that’s the, some days that’s a downside.

Josh: Yeah, but yeah, if you just make a comment and you’re like, yeah, we have a strategy on open banking. Okay,

Tyler: It’s like your AI strategy.

Josh: Yeah, I have an AI strategy. Okay, what is it? You know, I mean, we were talking about some of the examples of just how we use AI and like [00:43:00] our personal and professional lives, but yeah, saying that as a, you know, overarching statement of just your organization, like we’re going to use AI,

Tyler: I would say, how is AI an enabler for certain tools that you do use or want to use?

Josh: what are some of the interesting use cases you’ve been seeing pop up? Yeah.

Tyler: use cases, actually, I saw last week I guess you better scratch that because it’s not gonna be last week by the time you’re publishing this podcast.

One of the interesting use cases that I’ve seen is internally for FI’s observability of data. And that can mean just the aggregation of data from within the financial institution that may exist in different silos. But on top of that, it’s enriching the data in the way that it [00:44:00] can be segmented, analyzed, and usually create these predictive models that are actually going to tell the FI something about their customers, what their needs are going to be.

And I think it’s really important from a data management perspective that we think of AI. In one context, in that way, it’s how you better manage the data that a financial institution has, because when you’re thinking about AI as this big modernization concept, it’s also this nudge for something like, Well, we have a lot of data that an AI model could use for certain things, but because our tech stack is so old, with little pieces and parts plugged in over so many years, it’s not actually accessible by the same system, and therefore we actually can’t use it in the way we want to, even if we have these fancy new systems that say they are AI driven.[00:45:00] 

Josh: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Um, That, yeah, that brings up a really good point. I mean, it is trying to get as much data into it as possible, which, you know, is a in and of itself, depending on what your tech stack is and what your data architecture looks like today and in the past, depending on how far back you want to go.

But I mean, yeah, I think even just in my own personal life, like that’s been one of the good examples of how AI has changed how I think about. Data, And just think about a simple Google search, right? you go in and search something in Google, Oh, actually fun. I’ll give you a fun one that happened

Tyler: take a fun fact.

Josh: Yeah. So my, um, we’ll go, we’ll go down a little side rabbit hole, uh, on this one. So my last name is Datar and it’s D E T A R with a capital T. And, um, my dad. Has it D E [00:46:00] space capital T A R and then I’m the firstborn male in the family. And as I got older, Tyler, like I kinda, you know, was using my last name at the time when computers were starting to become a lot more prevalent for records and things. And so I got so sick and tired of being called like first name Duh, last name Tar. Um, but I smashed it all together and I’ve just run with it ever since. So

Tyler: Legally, or you just did

Josh: I never like formally legally changed my name, right? Um, so my birth certificate has D. E. Space T. A. R. But my passport, my driver’s license, all of my documentation since I started signing documentation all has it as one word.

It’s never come up, it’s never been an issue. Watch tomorrow, now I’m going to get totally screwed on something and they’re going to ask me to pull up my birth certificate and my passport and they’re going to show they don’t match and I’m going to get thrown in jail. But,

Tyler: going to stay at the DMV for two hours

Josh: yeah, [00:47:00] exactly.

Tyler: form’s not good.

Josh: But it’s never caused a problem for me.

Smash it all together. My little brother is four years younger than I am. And what started this whole conversation is my little brother and his family are here in town visiting from Tennessee and we were all over at our house yesterday. My dad, my brother and I and our families and all the kids are playing.

And somehow we got on this, um, like conversation of how my dad and my brother have it with the space. I don’t. And then we were talking about, like, where does our name even come from? And my dad goes, yeah, it’s French. And my little brother and I both without skipping a beat, Tyler are like, what? No, you used to tell us it was like Danish or Belgian or something like that.

Like we’ve been telling everybody it’s that. And my dad’s like, Oh no, no, it’s definitely French. And my brother and I, I don’t feel like both of us would remember. We like one of us would agree with you. One of us would disagree. Like why all of a sudden is it French? And

Tyler: can see where you’re going with [00:48:00] this.

Josh: I went to Google and And I Googled like, what is my last name?

And it just gives me a bunch of useless results. And so I was like, no, no, I’m gonna go to chat. GPT, you know, went to chat GPT and I said, Hey, where is this last name from? Right. Immediately. The funny side of it is, it’s like you’re French, um, , my little

Tyler: But do you believe

Josh: Um, but so what’s interesting was the, I gave it a very simple prompt of just where do you believe the surname guitar originates from? And it says, Hey, based on all of these things that I’m pulling, this sounds and feels like a French last name for these reasons. And here’s some examples of that. And I was like, Oh, you know that, that checks out. That’s pretty valid. But then we kind of went down a rabbit hole of feeding it. And it literally ended the prompt with, or its response with, but if you feed me more information because surnames can be so wildly like changed and all of these different [00:49:00] factors can go into it.

Like if you feed me more information about your surname, I can help you. Refine this. And so we did, we ended up having this whole long conversation with chat GPT to try and figure out like where our surname was from. And yeah, my dad’s probably right. It was probably French, right? At least as we went through that, but it was just interesting to see how, because you know, technically Google and chat GPT have the same data.

But it was just how it was looking at it and aggregating it. It gave us a far better response to the question of just where does my last name come from? So if you think about that in terms of, um, that’s a really long example of getting to, like, if you think about it as a financial institution, if you’re Googling your internal data, like what are my members, you know, what are my products and my members, uh, you know, not using that they should.

Versus if you’re chat GPTing it, you’re probably going to get significantly more useful insights. So yeah, [00:50:00] feeding it with data and then saying, okay, we have, you know, an AI strategy. to help us understand and analyze larger subsets of complex data where I don’t have to try and pour through this and apply my human logic to it.

I can apply, you know, machine logic to this to help me distill down a lot of complex information into something that we actually can start to put into, you know, our strategic roadmap and say, Oh, actually, you know, we fed All of our data, and we believe we have good, clean and holistic data into a model where we’ve been able to run, um, you know, AI level analytics on, and we’ve identified that there’s, you know, a product that we offer that would provide super value to this subset of customers.

Therefore, we’re going to have a strategic initiative to get this product into these customers hands. Right. I mean, that’s a little bit different conversation or a different statement than just saying like, we as an industry need to use AI more.[00:51:00] 

Tyler: And that’s a long story, a long path, going from data to being able to observe it and understand it and use it, especially within an FI’s tech stack. But there’s so much good data in there, and it’s just a tragedy that so much of it is locked up in different pieces.

Josh: Hmm. Yeah. Well, and that goes back to what you’re talking about with them. Just kind of even some of the like core and underlying system modernization. Right?

Tyler: There’s the core and underlying system, but there’s also the, I would say the silos within the bank, too, that are associated with the technological systems. And so you have departments which are associated with technology, and you combine those two together within the bank, and there’s less of a push to have this holistic view of the data when only one group of people is using it.

Josh: do you have an example of that?[00:52:00] 

Tyler: So let’s say that you have a consumer lending team. That’s just working with a piece of consumer lending technology, a consumer lending module. All of the analytics off of that, assuming it was installed a long time ago independently, are going to feed into the use of that team. The team that is selling, um, managing, administering the product, because they’re the ones who use it day to day.

And for them, um, There’s real no organizational reason on a regular basis to say we want to make sure our system is available to other parts of the institution because we know somehow it’s going to be useful for them. But when it comes to the strategy level, as you were talking about, if you have a way to bring this data together, then there’s this high level analysis of the customer that may go across different products, which are associated with different pieces of the bank.[00:53:00] 

But for now, in a lot of cases, you can’t get otherwise.

Josh: Well, that kind of comes all the way back to, um, one of the conversations you brought up with the buzzword of open banking too, right? And even then, let’s say we’ve got a good holistic 360 view of, uh, how many buzzwords can we cram into this episode? I don’t know. Should we do, somebody should have like

Tyler: Somebody should have a clicker accounted while we’re at it,

Josh: like if there’s a drinking game that comes out of this podcast, I apologize for anybody who blacks out on their couch.

Um,

Tyler: There is one, I’m sure. There is one being invented as we speak.

Josh: right. Um, but you know, um, with, uh, with having a good view of your data, what’s my relationship like with Chase or with Chime or Venmo? You don’t have that data, right?

Tyler: You certainly don’t.

Josh: Or maybe you do, or are you piecing it together? But how, like when we start to [00:54:00] say, I have a holistic picture of all the data for this person, just how far does that sphere really go out?

Right? Um, and that’s where we start to have the conversations about things like open banking and having access to more information could also change that. And then are you even prepared to deal with that? What’s going to come out of that?

Tyler: Well,

Josh: now you’re talking the regulation, the trust,

Tyler: mm hmm.

Josh: this is a pretty complex topic.

Tyler: Well, and then you have to think about the consumer versus the FI side, too. When you think about the bank the data has on the consumer, Well, in theory, there’s a lot of information, and with financial information, something that oftentimes nobody else, unless it’s another financial institution, is going to have.

But there’s also the read portion of that data. Um, you connect a fintech or an app through open banking, and one of the big fears is that, For FIS has been well, can we actually get this [00:55:00] information out of our tech stack out of our ledger in a way? That is going to be secure and stable. It’s not just a matter of whether they can get it out and use it themselves There’s a whole other layer of being able to push it out to some third party.

Josh: Um, what are some of the, like, I don’t want to call them successes and failures, but you know, what are some of maybe the different things that you’ve seen on the positive and negative side of, of the open banking, um, kind of initiatives here in the States?

Tyler: I Think a big positive for open banking has been what I actually call quasi open banking because It is not truly open in the sense that there is a policy around it. But it’s the development of data sharing APIs over the course of the last decade evolving from screen scraping, which is having a FinTech use an aggregator to log into a bank account and just pull [00:56:00] information, whatever it can see, to two sided APIs in which financial institutions have some sort of control over the data that they pass along to apps, and then consumers have this more stable, robust connection that allows them to And then they can pull their, pull their financial data into the app that they’re using.

I can see how from a technical perspective though, that is a challenge. With the CFPB’s rule coming up, there’s this trepidation that over the compliance deadline of the next couple of years, what are they actually going to need to be able to do and actually what are they going to be able to do. When they’re creating or buying the solutions to meet this compliance.

There is a success in a certain sense when you have some of these [00:57:00] larger financial institutions that are building their own APIs or maybe in partnership with some of the aggregators. You have vendors or other financial institutions who are saying, yeah, we really want to be on board with this. But I would say it’s still very much in process.

Josh: Yeah, I mean, as a non techie, this is one of the things I feel like kind of comes up in my head a lot is, you know, when we talk about open banking, one of the things that needs to really, you know, happen for this to be implemented properly, as you say, is, you know, for making connections from one institution to all these different things and all these different things to all these different institutions.

is having some standards, right? And it’s all well and good if Josh has his standard, and Tyler has his standard. Susan has her standard. We really don’t have a standard. And so it makes, you know, the complexity of that spiderweb [00:58:00] grow pretty exponentially pretty quickly. You’re saying, well, I have to, you know, when I want to accomplish open banking as I’m supposed to with Tyler, I have to work with Tyler’s standard.

And then when I want to accomplish it with Susan, I have to work with Susan’s standard

Tyler: Well, have you seen the comic from a long time ago now, where there’s this guy talking to another guy, and one of them says, Well, you know, there are six standards for this, and we should create the one standard to rule them all. They come in with this lofty goal, and guess what? There are seven standards now.

And

Josh: That’s very funny. Mm-Hmm?

Tyler: I think a big part of the growth of the aggregators, PLAD, MX, Finicity, has been the network effects. Just by increasing the size and the number of their connections, whether it’s on the FinTech side or whether it’s on the [00:59:00] bank side, has meant that, uh, There is, to a certain extent, these private standards that exist.

And then there’s the industry body, FDX, which at least has a template for the API standard, which ideally creates this push for standardization. I know the CFPB has said something like, we want to have this recognized standard setting body so that they can at least nudge the industry in a direction which I would argue it already really has gone.

In which, if you say, I’m going to plug into an open banking API, there is a technical openness as well as a kind of policy openness.

Josh: Yeah, well, and I think there’s even a third piece to that too that I’d be curious to get your thoughts on. And, you know, this is probably, hate to say it, but a shot at some of the larger, older incumbents, right? Is there’s probably a revenue effect to this too. Um, so thinking about how we [01:00:00] do this or just how open we are or, um, you know, who and how we play with, you That can have big impacts on revenue as well.

Tyler: That’s part of the fear.

Josh: yeah, when you’re in, you know, a private capitalist environment like the U. S. versus, you know, you look at how open banking has been enabled in other countries, right? There’s lots of big factors into why and how it’s been implemented. Everything from, you know, government regulation to just what the economy is like, to kind of the culture and philosophy of working together is like.

And, you know, America is such a melting pot. I think, in my humble opinion, that’s what’s creating some of the, slowdown of just, Here’s the standard. Everybody’s doing it. Go. You’re

Tyler: A melting pot with thousands of financial institutions.

Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Versus just a handful. I don’t know this data. I should know this data, but I only care about the U. S. I guess in a lot of [01:01:00] regards, but like, I wonder why like, do you know where we would rank in number of FIs per capita? Um, like to other countries, I have to imagine we’d be really high if not first on that list.

Tyler: I imagine so, when you have how many thousands? You said seven, I think it may even be a little bit higher in the United States for three hundred and fifty million people.

Josh: Yeah.

Tyler: But then in Canada you have what, maybe five really big ones and two smaller big ones for a population of several hundred million, I imagine.

Josh: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how many you think Europe, I mean, China, not many. Um,

Tyler: It’s a pluralistic banking market.

Josh: Yeah. So that in and of itself is going to create a challenge for that for us [01:02:00] versus, hey, the five of you need to get together and pull off open banking between the five of you.

Tyler: Which, in the UK, the government could just say, and kind of it happened.

Josh: Yeah.

Tyler: You say the CMA9, I think it is, the biggest financial institution, you say you have to adopt these standards, and well, that’s it.

Josh: Yeah. So I know you said, um, I don’t think you said this actually on recording, but you were talking about how, um, like 1033 is just a part of it and maybe not the biggest thing to talk about, but I do, I do think it’s worth, would you mind just, you know, for folks listening, what is 1033 and what do you think it means?

And

Tyler: is a little section in the Dodd Frank Act, which says, in short, consumers have a right to access their financial data. And it has been interpreted, interpreted [01:03:00] from that little section of text to a several hundred page document from the CFPB, which defines exactly what data What should be made available, how it should be accessed, and then what the parameters are for compliance in short.

When it comes to this right to data access, as they’ve referred to it. And as we’ve been talking about earlier, it has this whole downstream impact on these FIs who have not, not necessarily embraced open banking, but have accepted it as, part of what the industry is doing and have decided that they’re going to create these developer resources to at least have these basic connections between fintechs, third parties, and then the financial institution.

Josh: you were talking about, um, some timelines. So why is this significant now? And what do you [01:04:00] think are going to be some of the milestones are going to be important?

Tyler: The CFPB actually published proposed deadlines near the bottom of its, um, near the bottom of its notice of proposed rulemaking, and it’s pretty early after the final rules published in the Federal Register for the larger banks, coming up within, within six months, I think, and then expanding out to over several years, depending on the asset size of the institution.

So, for the community FIs, there’s a much longer on ramp for open banking, but when you look at some of the Modernization arcs, the amount of time it takes to even make small changes to the technology, you wonder, is even a couple of years going to be enough to comply with open banking? Or is open banking compliance going to set off a domino effect of something else that’s going to need change at these FIs that then is a whole other [01:05:00] project?

Josh: Yeah. I mean, if I’m, you know, venture a guess, I think it’s going to be the latter. Um, kind of to what you were talking about earlier, right? I mean, just being able to connect all of these different systems and, you know, right, wrong, or indifferent, it is what it is, but sometimes, you know, smaller community financial institutions just don’t have, um, The, you know, the budget, the staff and resources, whatever it may be.

And, you know, maybe they are using a smaller provider or an older provider or product for something that they’re fully reliant on. And maybe that provider can’t even move within the timelines for open banking. And maybe that’s only one piece of a very complicated puzzle for that FI. Um, you know, what does it look like if, you know, Today’s your day.

You’ve got to comply with open banking and you’re a community financial institution. You’re just still not there yet. You’re just not able to do that. Um,

Tyler: saying about open banking [01:06:00] compliance? And what they said to me was, they are asking us for help. Now, granted, it’s a bit of a colored opinion because it’s coming from a vendor that’s involved in the implementation of open banking technology.

But, But it did bring home a little bit for me because you have all of these smaller institutions who do not have the technical chops, do not necessarily have the tech stack or even the up to date vendor resources that they need to comply. And on top of that, they don’t have the strategic component to be able to adapt to it and they’re saying, well, we don’t know what to do.

So what next? Who even asks? What happens? A

Josh: I think there’s a lot more unanswered questions than there are answered for small community FIs in navigating that. Um, I think this is going to be, what’s that?[01:07:00] 

Tyler: A lot of questions that’ll be answered, for better or for worse.

Josh: Yeah, totally. But I think this is going to be one of those buzzwords that’s going to last a while, right? Because we’re going to have to keep talking about it.

It’s going to have to keep refining. And this kind of brings us back to, like we’re kind of at a place where community financial institutions, you kind of don’t really get a choice anymore. Like you have to pick vendors that have, you know, the ability to, you know, Evolve and innovate. And then, you know, there’s another good buzzword, like innovate means a lot of things, but have got to be able to, um, adapt as the changes to the ecosystem come into play.

And, you know, if you don’t have all the answers and your vendor doesn’t have all the answers for open banking today, they’ve got to at least be architected in a way. that’s not just on the product side, even just the type of people that run the organization

Tyler: All the things we’ve been talking about.

Josh: what’s up.

Tyler: All the things we’ve been talking

Josh: Yeah, that say like, Hey, I’m, I’m able to [01:08:00] make the course corrections as needed to make sure that if we are your vendor today and we are your vendor when you’re required to comply with something like open banking, that we’ll be able to get there.

We’ll be able to navigate that. We don’t have the answer today, but as answers come out and things get refined, we’ll be able to get there with you. Is that a fair assessment?

Tyler: I hope that’s a fair assessment. I hope everybody gets to the finish line on time and intact, whether they are a vendor or an FI.

Josh: Yeah. Um, any, uh. Any guesses on what next year’s budget for it will be?

Tyler: Oh, man. The thing about buzzwords is they just seem to pop out of nowhere, and suddenly everybody’s using it.

Josh: Yeah.

Tyler: Before they know what it means, sometimes.

Check in with me next year.

Josh: Okay. Follow the, uh, follow the, um, the newsletter. Um, you know, uh, that, that brings me to, uh, an important question. Um, as we kind [01:09:00] of wrap up here, where did you, you go to get information, um, about what’s happening in the industry? Like what, what kind of informs a lot of your research?

Tyler: Keeping an eye on the news generally through a news aggregator. It’s a lot to read through every single newspaper and every single article. I don’t. To get an idea of what objectively is happening within the industry. And another piece of it is to keep an eye on social media, uh, Thought leaders, newsletters who are distilling all of this information that’s in the news and creating an opinion about it, oftentimes in a shorter format, which may or may not be right.

I may or may not agree with it, but it’s about bringing together both information and opinion that’s out there in order to assess and create my own idea of what I think is going on.

Josh: Um, and if people want to connect with you and talk to you about what is going [01:10:00] on or if they want, uh, to learn more about CCG Catalyst and what work you guys are doing there, how can they do that?

Tyler: You can find me on LinkedIn. You can subscribe to ccgcatalystinsights at ccgcatalyst. com slash insights.

Josh: And I would highly recommend you do, just throwing it out there. Like, Tyler and his newsletter is one of my, one of my go tos. I get a lot of things that sometimes just, you know, I mark as read and move on. And then, uh, I definitely make sure I set aside the 60 seconds to. to run through what you send me.

So no, I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to actually bring you on the podcast to Tyler and just kind of like talk through this stuff in long form, um, as opposed to, like you said, just sometimes digesting the bite size bits, but actually getting to like talk through the concepts and what’s happening and what kinds of things you’re looking at.

Tyler: Yeah, had a great time.

Josh: time and yeah, coming and being a guest on the digital banking podcast.

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