Josh DeTar: [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of the Digital Banking Podcast. My guest today is Mac Thompson, the Founder and CEO for White Clay. I love my life. Do I love every day of it? No, but I love the pursuit. Those words stuck out at me when Mac was describing himself. One day I would love to have a giant bonfire to make s’mores and sing kumbaya around, and invite all my podcast guests to it.

You see, they all have one thing in common, a desire to make the world a better place. And  Mac might just be one of the people at the center of that bonfire. It’s been so evident in talking to him that at his core, he believes in taking on challenges with a singular focus of improving people’s lives as a punk rock surfer kid from Kentucky.

I know that sounds like an oxymoron. Don’t worry. There’s a story behind it. Mac was an introvert. In high school, he actually made a concerted effort to play the role of an extrovert though, and it helped shape much [00:01:00] of who he has become today in terms of his involvement in the arts and the community. As with many of us in the industry, Mac has a story about getting into banking that does not start with, I want to get into banking, but here we are after being told by a bank you’re not really that good of an accountant. What else can you do? He took his tech nerdy skills to work in process automation for that bank. And the deeper he dove into the banking world, the more he realized that solving problems in banking could have tremendous impact on people and ultimately would fill his soul and be able to have a meaningful impact.

Mac said, quote, I believe in the financial services industry. So, whether it’s being involved in community sports or arts, or staying up late at night, trying to solve problems for community FIs, Mac is always trying to answer the biggest question of the day, which is how can I help someone today? We’ve got lots to dive into today [00:02:00] from data and AI to the massive market opportunity of commercial banking services for SMBs via community FIs.

So like Mac says, let’s enjoy the pursuit and let’s get started. Mac, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me.

Mac Thompson: Thank you for having me. This should be, we’re going to have some fun.

Josh:  I love when we kind of started talking beforehand. You were, there’s going to be no shortage of words. I do love to talk. And when you get me rolling about banking, whoo. So for starters, we got to address the elephant in the room.  Yeah. How does this Kentucky punk rock kid also be a surfer?

I was joking with Mac and I was  when I was writing that up. I had to admit, I actually had to do a quick, like Google map search. I was  wait, there’s no water around Kentucky, right? Or am I crazy? So, tell me about that, man.

Mac: Growing up, we lived in Western Kentucky on land between the lakes area on Lake Barkley. So in the middle of [00:03:00] nowhere near Paducah. You can describe it as like an hour away. That was the nearest movie theater. But we had a house also in Vero Beach, Florida, which is, so I spent school years or school months, days or whatever, in rural Kentucky, and then we spent summers, vacations, and everything else in Florida. So, Sebastian Inlet, just north of Vero, is where the surfing took place. Some in Vero, but Sebastian Inlet was a lot better. But, yeah.

Josh: I don’t know what you did, like surf in the barley fields or what? How does Kentucky surfing line up?

Mac: You don’t surf in the Ohio River, that would not be good.

Josh:  But so I also think it’s, it was kind of an interesting story of just kind of how you got into banking. So tell me a little bit about that.

Mac: Well, early 90s, recession,  my family, my parents had moved full-time to Florida. I was leaving school. They gave me a little bit of time to try to get a job because my girlfriend, who’s now my wife [00:04:00] forever, she’s gonna be upset and remember the years. But she was still in school, so I wanted to stay in Kentucky and stay with her.

And so, I went to look for a job. Applied to a lot of places, Didn’t get, didn’t get any of the other places, ended up in an unemployment line, which is a transformational experience if you ever experience it. And one of the opportunities they presented me with was to be an accountant at one regional bank. No, it’s not around anymore. And after a while, that’s where I started. I had no intention of going into banking. I was an accounting English major. Banking was not on the top 10, but I needed a job and I wanted to stay. So. Got into banking.

Josh: Well, I think what’s interesting about that story is we were talking about it, right, is, know, one of the topics that I really want to talk to you about today is just kind of the transformation that has happened in this industry. And what’s interesting about banking is there has been a significant transformation in banking.

I would argue there’s even [00:05:00] been a bigger transformation outside of banking. And so how do those two things kind of reconcile? And really the big obvious one, right, is just kind of the pace of innovation of technology, versus the pace of innovation and banking. And for good reason, right?  there’s certain elements of banking that aren’t going to evolve or innovate and don’t need to or shouldn’t, right?

A checking account is a checking account. It’s a checking account kind of thing.  We don’t need to necessarily have a radical evolution of something like that. Although I’m totally open for debate on that. But,  you know what I mean? It’s not the evolution of a computer turning into an iPhone and access to the internet and those kinds of things.

But those two worlds are kind of colliding. And that was kind of your first introduction into banking, So you were, you’re telling me that, you started as this accountant doing very manual paper processes. And they politely told you, you kind of stink at [00:06:00] accounting, they’re  what else can you do?

And you’re  well, all this paper I’ve been dealing with, I think I can actually automate it. That’s kind of a cool story.

Mac: Yeah. So I started using computers when I was extremely so late seventies, right? So  I was six, seven, late. Well, probably eight, nine years. Well, in that range somewhere, I started doing computers around that. But when I showed up for work in 1992, they handed me a bunch of green ledger books, a bunch of pencils, a racer and one of those calculators, with a big roll in the end of it. No computer in my cubicle and that’s how I was supposed to do everything and I have no idea what these things are. And no, there was one computer on the floor in the building at the time and that’s where we were starting. They had an AS400 mini mainframe on one of the, in the data center in the building next door. Everything was basically green bar paper printed every morning. And that’s, [00:07:00] when I got into banking, that’s how, everything was manual. Everything was, some people were using Excel, excuse me, not Excel at the time, Lotus 1-2-3 at the time. And it was just a different way of thinking. It would be completely foreign to people walking in an office now. And if you thought that in just 10 years,  within just personally, within three to five years, we were using databases, integrating data, pulling out extracts, and starting to build things that would transform into warehouses. It just was a radical acceleration. And then the internet came and then all of a sudden acceleration even went further and faster in lots of different ways.  it, it was, it was really transformational. Within a year of me being there, we all had computers. Very few people knew how to use them. It was just, it was just amazing.  Yeah.

Josh: so,  so I think it’d be good talk about, so you’re, [00:08:00] you’re kind of  all right, so I’m not going to do accounting, but I’m going to automate 

Mac: Oh, yeah. 

Josh: So what does that process look like? And I just think it kind of a cool story of talking about

Mac: I will that right 

Josh: like map the whole thing out, right?

Mac: So,  about a year and a half in, I got the red and the black tickets because I used to do all the tickets, punch all the tickets in accounting because that’s what my job was, which was not a great job. And I got them backwards all the time. And I also did all the intercompany accounting entries, which are big entries.

I got those backwards. So the people in finance, the upper ups just. I drove them insane. So they were going to get rid of me. A year and a half, two years or something like that. And they said, we think you’re smart. Can you just tell us something that you can do a job that would more than pay for your salary and why you’d be here. And what I said was, well, you guys had, it turns out it was about 9 million pages a month of a green bar, print was coming out of the mainframe. And I was, I don’t think you need all that paper. [00:09:00] I don’t know how much it is, but. We’ll find out, but I think I can reduce that significantly, and it costs about ten and a half cents a page.

So, I didn’t know anything about banking, I didn’t have any, I didn’t even take any class in banking. So what I did was I showed up at three o’clock in the morning, where I filled the carts up, and distributed all this paper throughout the organization. They just put giant stacks of it. And I mapped it. And I went through it, I mapped out, these are all the reports, this is what was in them, this is what the size was. And mapped how that all went through the entire organization, out to the branches,  call centers, everywhere. And I went through and basically cut two thirds of that out. And in the process of doing that, I also figured out what was in and on all those reports. And began understanding how loans, deposits, wealth, all this, this data, well, it’s really data, was going throughout the bank. And because of a computer background, we began,  after we had reduced the paper, I actually began building data environments around these [00:10:00] things,  because I had the tech skills, but I also didn’t understand what all these data elements were going around the bank. And that’s how we got into it, and from there we just went from one problem to the other, finding opportunities,  using information to make the bank run better and take care of the customers.

Josh:  And the reason I like that story is I think it kind of leads into one of the big topics that you and I wanted to talk about, which is just almost the idea of, know, how innovation happens, right? And,  Mac and I were kind of talking about this before we started recording. Like if you just bury your head in the sand and then you poke it back up five years from now, you’re going to go, Oh my gosh this cataclysmic event has happened and so much has evolved, but in all reality, like it’s been evolving throughout and so,  we kind of use the, the, the blatant example [00:11:00] of, I talked to a lot of folks that are like ChatGPT kind of came out of nowhere. Not really. Actually, it’s been there for a long time and we’ve been using this stuff for a long time.

It just kind of hits your radar now. Right? And so especially in an industry like banking, where a lot of times we get hyper focused on what’s happening in our core business. If we’re not pulling our head out of the sand and looking around, you are going to wake up and go, Hey, I selected whatever it may be, a core, a digital banking, data approach and AI tool at this moment in time.

I signed a five year contract. And at the end of that five year contract, you’re coming up and you’re  Oh my gosh, the whole world has changed, but it needs to be an iterative process throughout. Right. And so that was kind of what you were a part of was looking at, mean, how do we look for problems to make sure that we’re not just waking up one day and there’s been a revolution and we weren’t a part of it.

Mac: And [00:12:00] lots of the things we were doing, people thought were magic. They just didn’t understand. And that’s one biggest advantage I had was I didn’t have a background in banking. I didn’t know you couldn’t do these things. It just seemed apparent to me that why wouldn’t you do these things? And so you need a mix of people in your groups and your teams of people that don’t know, because the people that know, know what we know up until now. They can’t see those incremental changes. That’s why,  diversities of perspectives, thoughts, backgrounds, are so important because they can bring an accounting English major you wouldn’t think would be able to redesign information flow in a bank, right? Doesn’t come up with something that would be a natural evolution.

Josh: That wasn’t on your resume.

Mac: That’s not what I was trying to do. I was just trying to be able to pay the bills. But that change, the possibility of those changes, is what is going to be so exciting about [00:13:00] now. Because we just have a confluence of so many things going on. That we, AI is, it’s early days, early innings in AI.

And let me rephrase that. The perception of the public and of the mass of people, it’s early innings. For people who have been working in this space, we’ve been doing all kinds of AI technologies for a while.

It’s just reaching a critical mass. And it’s getting to the point where it’s going to,  the internet, lots of people used the internet before the 90s, just no one knew that’s what it was going to turn into. But now we’re going to, so we have these, these things coming in. We also just have an explosion of how we’re going to use these things. We were talking about AI on a panel, and one of the things I said is we’ll first start trying to pave cow paths. Okay. These are the ways we used to do it. Never use AI to automate that.

That’s great. The real transformation is going to come when we completely redefine our business models and how we even, our paradigm [00:14:00] around what’s going on to create things that we can’t even understand exist now. The internet started, we had pets. com, right? Let me build an online thing that’s going to sell pet supplies online, right?

It’s not that transformational. We were essentially doing what we were doing before, but we’re going to do it online. Better one might be music. So you had Napster, right? Napster was really transformational because it took this product that you could only really pick and use. You either rip it off the radio, or you could go to a record store, CD store, music store, whatever you want to call it, and then sell all this stuff and buy things. Napster came along, obviously, and we started sharing stuff. Didn’t have a business model, but tech wise, it’s kind of interesting because music files are small. You could get away with it on a 26, 56K modem. Apple certs come along and they figure out a way to make that legal, essentially. That was the real transformation of iTunes was, it wasn’t technology wise.

I actually thought Napster was better, personally, but iTunes allowed you to [00:15:00] buy it legally and had a legal process for it. But then they missed the next step. The next step was, I don’t want to have to manage all a hundred thousand songs in my library. I need someone to go do that for me because it takes too much effort. Then you get into Spotify. And you get into this musical, so most people now are actually listening to music,  in a way that would be unimaginable to someone 20 years ago. And you can get any piece of music you want in the world pretty much instantaneously, and at the same time have the intelligence around that let you say, if you like this and this and this, you really might, you should really listen to this. In our way to experience and explore this world of music, would you ever want to go back? You wouldn’t. And I think in banking we’re getting close to one of those types of evolutions. I don’t know how fast it’s going to come. We’re a little, we sometimes are reluctant to move quickly in banking. But [00:16:00] we’re getting that, we’re getting the components of what that is. 

Josh: That’s a good analogy. One of the things we talk about a lot on the podcast is that banking is a very interesting industry in terms of innovation and disruption from the sense that,  I don’t know. I don’t know if music may be a good example to still use and just bear with my word vomit thought process here.

But right. If we transform the music industry and all of a sudden like kill somebody’s Spotify lists.

Mac: Hmm?

Josh: It sucks. They’re probably gonna be pretty pissed, but it’s not catastrophic, right? If we crash the banking infrastructure, it’s pretty catastrophic. So for good reason, we’re also cautious about the innovation leaps that we take and the things that we do and the risks that we take and then, Oh, by the way, let’s [00:17:00] layer that whole compliance conversation on top of this, right?

And so. I think there are some elements both inside and outside of our control in terms of how this evolves and innovates. But the reason I like that you use music is an example, right? I think one of the things that I’ve been really interested about and I’d love to get your take on is,  anytime the next buzzword comes around is like how do people latch onto it?

And I think you might agree with me like AI is the buzzword of the day. I keep making the joke that   if you want to sell more products, just change your name from,  name to name dot AI and you’re good to go.  And  everybody keeps asking,  what are you doing in AI?

And it’s  well, what’s the use case? Right. And so find a use case. And then to your point, like it’s, it almost seems revolutionary. A lot of times in the banking industry, but yeah, [00:18:00] you’ve actually been using this for a long time with just things like Spotify, helping curate your music list.

Mac: Oh, yeah.  Alexa, right? Alexa is using voice to basically text AI technologies. Now AI is almost like this whole suitcase filled with 20 to 30 different kinds of technology. Some of these have been around for a long time.  the fraud AI models, most banks have been using this for a while.

Now what’s interesting about this, Chat GPT is changing the way people experience it. So you’re changing, not the technology is changing, but what’s most felt is this seems completely different. I perceive it differently. It’s the non, it’s the non logical kind of experiential piece of the outputs of this that are radically changing people’s perception of what you can use this stuff for.

That part I think is exciting. I’m really excited when we figure out how to use [00:19:00] to solve problems that we haven’t thought of that solve problems we thought were unsolvable. And that’s going to be exciting. We’re not quite, we don’t even have the question. If you talk about AI today, it’s very different from what we talked about three months ago. That’s how quick this stuff’s moving.

 We are just moving at a pace.  We were talking to some banks and they were talking about their AI strategy and they’re going to put a team together and they’re going to work on it for about a year and they’re going to write their AI strategy. And I wouldn’t burn the time.

What you need is a framework, you need a group of people who are constantly in the know on this, constantly learning. And, especially in community banks, small regional spaces. One, just the other thing. For your bank, define what AI means. AI, one person’s talking about AI, they’re talking about large language models and Chat GPT and all that. Another one’s talking about AI, and they’re really talking about machine learning fraud identification models. [00:20:00] And they’re both AI, they’re just really different ways of using it, and technologies. But internally, define what you want your bank to use these terms, because they’re all over the place. People are using it, so that’s one of the Inside your bank, put together a two to three page document of how your bank thinks about AI, and the language you’re going to use.  I think it would help conversations, because I see people talking past each other constantly. And it’s frustrating, because  instead of a constructive conversation, people think that they’re in conflict and they’re really not in conflict. They’re just talking about different things but it’s exciting. 

Josh: That’s a good way to think about it, Mac. I always try to bring it back to like some simple analogy that my little pea brain can understand. And,  I’ve talked about in previous podcasts, like how AI is just a tool. If you’re a hammer, you need a nail, right? But,  as you were talking about it and it’s  [00:21:00]   one person could be saying AI and be talking about, yes, like Chat GPT, LLM models, the other side could be talking about more ML type of stuff.

It’s like saying we’re talking about transportation. Okay. Well, are we talking about bicycles, spaceships, boats, submarines?  What are we talking about? There’s a lot of use cases. And it just got me thinking, cause I’m looking at the picture of the beautiful blue water behind you and in your office.

And I’m, if somebody is saying, yeah, we’re talking about transportation, And what they’re really talking about is a bicycle like that. That’s only going to work so far in your picture, right? As soon as I get to the edge of that dock, it’s utterly useless to me. So how are you actually defining use cases and then building a strategy around that and then, to the same point, it’s like this stuff is evolving so insanely fast that,  like we were talking about earlier, it’s  If you look at even just [00:22:00] technology of the past, right?

And you buried your head in the sand for a year and you woke up and you were  Oh my goodness, so much changed. Nowadays it’s like you bury your head in the sand for a week and you come back up for air and you’re  Oh my goodness, so much has changed.

Mac: Yeah. The example on, Covid example with DocuSign. I don’t know if you remember all that, doc. I’m not pushing a product. It was just a great example because the PPP program and everything, all this hit DocuSign probably in their business. I don’t know if they did. I don’t know anyone at DocuSign.

They probably had a three year journey about their implementation rate of what they were trying to do. Because of PPP and COVID at the same time, they implemented most of the U. S. market within about a month. We went from being able to digitally, very few people digitally signing documents, to pretty much every business could do it because you had to do it to get the PPP program in place.

And that if you express that to [00:23:00] someone in January of 2020, that pretty much every business in the United States be able to digitally sign all the loan documents required for a federal program, they would have said that’s impossible. That’s just never ever going to happen. And yet we did. And we did it. Wasn’t exactly pretty all the time. And there’s lots of, but, and,  other technologies are out there. But it was one of those things where we can change that fast if we have to.

Josh: Mm hmm.

Mac: And if we have the desire, and I think that’s why there’s gonna be some,  if you were to describe someone in 1970, you can transact instantaneously around the world. Fraud-free, for the most part. Yeah, ACH card, pick your payment channel, right, there’s all kinds of ways to do this. But yeah, instantaneously is relative, so card transactions are pretty much, you can go pretty much around the world and use a credit card.

Josh: Yeah.

Mac: You can, in the United States, feel [00:24:00] very secure, other than some most recent, that your deposits at a federally, FDI insured bank are going to be safe.

That, just the whole current banking experience, the access to things, there’s lots of areas of improvement, I’m not saying we’re perfect. But if you compare that person in 1970 to now, they’d say you’re in a science fiction movie.

Josh: Mm hmm.

Mac: Because it didn’t exist.  you were writing checks. If you wanted to pay someone over there, you put it in the mail and you hoped it got there and it probably would just win. And if you want to pay someone in London, you had to go find, figure out some way to do international mail, which was probably going to your main postal. It’s just these things in the ability of our ability to interact with the information and transact with the information is incredible.

 And those rails, one of the things the bank industry, those underlying rails are so powerful. It’s really an inhibitor in compliance. They’re both awesome. [00:25:00] But they’re inhibitors to this change because they work so well. Our cost per transaction and some of this stuff is tiny.  But, there’s going to be a way that someone rethinks what transacting means.

I don’t know what that is. I wish I did. If I did, I would probably tell you to go build it and sell it. Sorry. But there’s, there’s, there’s the possibility,  it’s like redundancy. We are redundancy now because we’re using essentially mainframes and clouds. They’re not mainframes, but at the same time, very large, centralized, huge processing connected to the internet. And that’s what we’re doing. But some of the other technologies are more distributed and distributed meaning they can be redundant. And that means there’s more,  if you,  a hurricane takes out your data center. I’ll let it exist somewhere else, or it’s distributed, there’s no central, there’s going to be a, I think, we’ve been going through, you went mainframe, you went clients, and then we’re going to the centralized, decentralized of data. And I think at some point we’re going to some [00:26:00] radical different version of decentralized, that probably uses some variation or evolution of a blockchain, something. I don’t think it’s there yet, because blockchain is usually a bi-party. And,  I think what we’re going to do is at least triparty. Because you need, with a regulatory environment, those ledgers need to have a regulatory party, a part of it. So they can, but I don’t know what it is. But, point being is, I think,  20 years, I don’t know if it’s 20, maybe it’s 10. Someone pops their head up. We’ll be transacting in a really different way fundamentally than we are now. Because essentially, there’s other things we do. But we’re pushing zeros and ones.

Transcribed And that’s part of our value proposition, not all of it. But a lot of the infrastructure of what we do is zeros and ones.

 And I’m looking forward to how that’s, it’s going to be awesome. 

 Yeah. 

Josh: You think about how little the industry has changed over the last 50 years, [00:27:00] but also how much it has, has changed. And I think, a great example is money movement, right? And just the thought process of transferring funds to somebody internationally 50 years ago versus today and just the options, the speed, the cost, et cetera.

But I think the other thing that you made the comment on that I found pretty interesting was, is that like the DocuSign example, right? Like if you had told somebody in January that we could do this, they’d have said, you’re crazy. And I think a lot of times technology is actually a lot further ahead and more capable than we really realize.

And I think it moves a lot faster than we realize as well.  I actually had to pull up the data while you were talking cause I didn’t want to get it wrong. But our CEO Siva is a former Intel guy and he’s a total data junkie. And one of the things that he was talking about to me recently, and he sent me some of this data on, so I was pulling [00:28:00] up is just, you the speed at which innovation happens in technology is kind of governed by three major laws, Moore’s Law, Nielsen’s Law, and Huang’s Law.

So Moore’s Law is really talking about the computational power of computers and how it exponentially compounds, right? And he actually gave me a really good example of this just recently in that,  you kind of think about it like the compounding of money. So for a banker, it’s a really easy concept to understand how the compounding of technology increases its speed.

Just like the compounding of money increases your overall assets, right? And if you look at your bank account balance,  on day one versus 10 years from now, and you just kind of wake up and look at it 10 years from now, you’d be, Oh my gosh, how did it get here? And it’s that compounding effect.

But if you looked at it throughout the process, you’d see that compounding effect. So Moore’s law essentially states that over a 10 year period, [00:29:00] computing power is going to get 30 X faster, right? And then Huang’s law is talking about really the next generation of supercomputers. And in a 10 year period, now, a specialized kind of AI driven supercomputer will actually get a hundred times faster and then network speeds over that same period go up by about 60 X, right?

So we’re talking about massive increases to compute power and ability to process things and ability to transmit that data. Over that 10 year period. And so you think about just the implications of how,  those laws on the systems that we use to operate our industry, like that’s real impact.

Mac: That’s huge.  the, yeah, the other piece. And so we’re talking about how you can process zeros and ones and there’s interactivity. There’s also the power of the,  [00:30:00] the power of networks. 

Meaning how many people are in a network, and I’m using the network in a really high level way. So if you have a thousand people in a network, what you can learn from that is one thing.

If you have 10, 000, 100, 000, 10 billion, Things get, there’s a, there’s a logarithmic effect of knowledge and understanding that comes from it. And it’s being enabled by the things you just mentioned, but it’s how those things are interacting together and how we’re able to use them. That is just going to change our entire paradigm.

I use that word a decent amount, sorry, but how we’re thinking about what this stuff means. Because we’re going to understand,  And I’m a little, we’re going to understand behaviourally things we’re doing, because it will tell us. Because we’re creatures of habit, generally speaking. We do the same things and it is a, it’s going to be an interesting learning opportunity to [00:31:00] figure out how we leverage that to do, to make things better.

And  our ability to process information on a computer level is outpacing our level to understand it at a human level. And that is going to be probably one of the challenges. Someone’s going to help figure out,  how do you, how do you take all of this possibility and then make it something that’s useful every day.

And I actually think that’s one of the powers of ChatGPT was, it felt like something human, it wasn’t, but it felt like this could write a letter or write the, write a nine times story for my child, right? It was all of a sudden. This abstract mathematical craziness that turned into this crazy story you could spend five minutes with your kid with and that experiential piece of this I think is, I’ve got a bank, we were talking about that a little bit earlier. Actually, the more interesting question for community banks isn’t how you build your own AI [00:32:00] capabilities. It’s figuring out how you would want to use them to help your clients, help your shareholders. Because you’re not, as a community bank, you’re not going to have the capability, you can do some things and you might be the one in a million, whatever. But, more than likely, a vendor somewhere, a partner somewhere, is going to be creating these technologies. What the partner can’t tell you what to do, is how do you use that to take your bank to deliver to your community and take care of them and your shareholder. And spending more time on figuring that out is actually a much more interesting question. I think community banks are then trying to figure out how they’re going to build their own LL, large language model inside their firewalls. Please don’t do that.

Josh: There’s tools for that. There’s people with bigger budgets for that.

Mac: Yeah,  you know the army is that some of the large ones,  and that’s what they’re doing, but that will come down people will, those will be available and you know people get lost in the technology, [00:33:00] but it’s really how you use that technology to achieve what you want. This is actually the harder question. The ones that figure that out first are gonna, they’re gonna lead.  so that’s just my belief in that. I just, I think they should spend more time figuring out what they would want to do with some of these things than what these things could do for you.  

Josh:  You could have Gordon Ramsey’s kitchen, but if you don’t know what you’re going to cook, you’ve got all the tools, but how are you going to use them?

Mac: Yeah, I can still make pancakes. Pancakes are good.

Josh: Pancakes. I do love some pancakes. Now I want pancakes. Why’d you have to do that? 

Mac: I don’t like pancakes. I haven’t had

Josh: but that, that is, I think 

Mac:  But that’s actually the exciting part about some of this is you don’t have to be a super nerdy tech guy to begin thinking about how you might choose to use these tools.  and I think how they’re going to use them is [00:34:00] probably equally exciting to me as it is the technology piece of,  how  I remember how you originally built a hard drive, like how hard drives were built when they first started.

I have a hundred meg hard drive in this, or five meg hard drive. Isn’t this crazy?  there’s a physical spinning wheel and there’s a, you could actually understand it because it was simple enough at the time. And  you look at that and go, now you can put terabytes on a little drive.

It’s just crazy, but you can. But we also need to think about the efficiency of how we use it. It’s one of those things that just me personally, I’m used to write code to handle massive data sets on things that had very little computational power, very little memory and very little hard drive space. And now we’re talking about thousands of terabytes and just enormous power. And are we using this all super efficiently? I know I’m off on a tangent, but it’s a, it’s one of those interesting things

Josh: What do you mean by that? How, what do you [00:35:00] mean by are we using it 

Mac: How big was Excel in 1996, right? Probably 35 meg. The software program, 35 meg. The one now is gigs. Right? In terms of software size.

How functionally different is that really for what 95 percent of people use?

Josh: Yeah.

Mac: Yeah, we’re running around, I’m just looking at my, my desktop has 64 gig of RAM, probably some processor that would have been able to run  the entire world 40 years ago and terabytes and terabytes or whatever. And,  it’s just one of those things where I think about, this is me because I think about these things and I do,  energy consumption, what we’re using this stuff for. Could we run computers with, could we write software that’s much more efficient about how we use these things?

It’s just a different way. But right now we don’t, we just faster, faster, bigger, bigger, bigger. But at some [00:36:00] point, we have an opportunity to optimize. I’m off on a tangent on that.

Josh: No, it’s so funny, Mac. I,  I don’t even know why I’m, I don’t actually follow a lot of tech stuff,  like social media. But, for whatever reason, I saw this meme literally last night flying home and now I wish I had saved it cause it would have been so conversation. But it was,  it was   and I’m going to get the numbers wrong because I’m not a computer technical person.

So bear with me. But it was  five megabytes of RAM. What did you do with me in 1970? We landed on the moon. 300 terabytes of it today. And my computer is running slow. Why? Because Excel has an extra tab open.

Mac: Yeah. we’re doing a TikTok video.

Josh: Yeah. And you’re  wait, yeah, we are. We landed on the moon with less [00:37:00] and my computer’s over here like smoking out the side. Cause I opened Excel. Wait, what? Like we missed something.

Mac: And constantly learning and evolving. That’s the key to the whole thing. But, community banks are just,  they have, this comes up a lot around, think about how you would want to use this to drive, help your customers, help your shareholders.

And don’t, in fact, I’ve had board members, we have this problem, we’ll just get AI to solve that. You don’t even know how many clients you have, yet you’re going to use AI to solve this complicated problem. That’s not how that works. 

So, but, on a positive note, it will help, we just don’t know how yet. Yeah.

Josh: It does. I hate to be a broken record on this, but it always comes back down to use cases. And  yeah, you can have a rocket, but if you don’t have a use case to go to the moon, [00:38:00] it’s kind of useless. So,  one of the things you were talking about earlier, Mac was just how, even going back to your first job at the bank, you had a tremendous amount of data on your customers.

It was just an unusable format, right? And so you put it into usable formats and you start to learn, but like even in 2024, I think there’s a massive amount of data that we’re just not truly even scratching the surface of leveraging and understanding to kind of even look at simple things like transactional behavior.

Like you’re saying, we’re creatures of habit, right? And so how can we start to create some use cases and strategies around just better understanding our customers, our members, our users, their engagement, and how to create deeper, more meaningful engagement with them.

Mac: How to do it? Some people have been doing it for a while,  [00:39:00] usually on the bigger side of the equation. The first step is you actually, this is so funny, it’s not technology, it’s do you want to know? As a bank or credit union. Do you want to figure this out? Or do you just want to keep doing, you know, answering the phone, taking care of whoever walks in the door, taking care of whatever comes through the website or the technology. Because you can, today, if you were a bank, be able to understand, do a behavioral segmentation of your customers, figure out who they are, how they’re getting value from you, what they  what they don’t  what they’re interested in, and how you can optimize the experience for them.

And they’re not all the same. Some people like digital channels. Some people like this. Well, I will tell you one thing that’s interesting. I don’t know if anyone is all of one. It’s not a homogenous population, right? The people have liked varied things and  the ability [00:40:00] to understand the transaction. I’ll say this, if you have their operating account, you can really understand the client because you can take that data and do all kinds of powerful stuff with it. You, there’s a lot of tricks in doing that and I won’t get into all that because I’m not here to sell anything, but, it’s understanding them. I’ll give you an example. If you want to understand attrition, your client and your transaction data will tell you when they’re attriting, six to twelve months before they, your account is closed. There’s exceptions to that, usually event driven, like someone gets really angry at the bank for something, like an error, a perceived error, or something, But all that behavior is in that transaction data. It tells you whatever they tell you. If you have the operating account, who else they’re banking with. What kinds of interactions they do, the pace of how they’re using cash relative to their balance sheet. There’s just so much information in there, but the real problem with most banks is that they don’t even want to necessarily know. They’re [00:41:00] worried about their, they’re managing their bank off of the, I’m an ex finance, I was in finance for a long time. They’re running their bank off of their financial statements. And you have to do that. We’re publicly traded entities for the most part. It’s a little more private, it’s a little more credit union, right? But you still do it. You have your governance, everything you need to run off. It’s, it makes sense, but you also have to run your bank off of your, your customers and your members, and you have to understand them really well and make sure that you’re delivering what they’re wanting, not so what you want for them, but what they need to do to be successful in their life. And it’s a really different way of thinking about how you optimize those relationships. The data is there. It is hard, and it’s challenging at points. But there’s technologies out there from a number of vendors that help you go figure these things out. The first step in that, though, is wanting to be able to say, You know what? I want to run my financial statements, make my own financial statements, but I’m also going to seek to understand what my, who my customers are, why they’re [00:42:00] with us, how I can go help them do what they need to do,  how a super challenge, I just want to, one time I’m probably going to go on a slight tangent here. One of the things I’ve been trying to work, I’ve been trying this for about 15 years is, how do you help customers do a better job of financially managing themselves? How do you help them, financial literacy coupled by improved financial behavior?  The struggle I’ve always had is the data and technology, I’ve tried this in a bunch of different places. They don’t necessarily want our help the way that we’re trying to help them. There must be a better way to be able to help them in a way that they want to be helped. And I don’t know what that is. I wish it did.  because I can do things where I can lay out, Hey, you’re spending too much money, or you’re, you’re whatever.

But the problem is then they feel like we’re a banker type. And they all think very differently than banker types. That’s one of the funny things in a room full of bankers. Your customers do not think anything like you. You’re rational.  you’re whatever. But I [00:43:00] mean, if you got a focus group of people that spend 5, 000 a year in overdraft fees and they pay them, you get in that room, they don’t want to talk about overdraft.

They don’t care because they see that. I’m not saying, I’m not saying people on the low end of the economy, because if you’re on the economy, you can’t afford them. You’re in a different group and it’s a different problem. I’m talking about very affluent people who overdraft like mad because they have a lifestyle.

They want to live. And the cost of living that lifestyle is, I spend 5, 000 a year in overdraft fees. If you call me about it, you’re just going to piss me off. I don’t know if the language is good, it might be beeped. The,  if you’re, if you talk to them though, they’re  I, whenever the transaction goes through, pay it. I, this is my cost of how I choose to live my life. And by you trying to tell me that that’s wrong, you’re judging my life, how I choose to live it. And I’m, that’s a small group. But it’s an example of people acting in a rational way to most bankers, but to that person, it’s [00:44:00] perfectly, perfectly rational.

And in those cases, those folks can actually afford it. If you look at their incomes, it’s insane, but they’re just not financially as disciplined as a banker might think everyone is, and they’re not. But I would, I don’t want to completely tangent around this, but the ability to leverage all the information to help people better manage themselves, there’s something about how to deliver it and how they are experiencing it needs to be almost gamified or something. Some different way for them to consume and experience it that helps them. I don’t, I wish I knew what that was, cause the information’s there. 

Josh: you. I think it’s, it, money is so emotional and we’re all so different about it. I,  on a recent podcast, Mac, I was talking about, 

Mac: Nope. 

Josh: just prescribe one,

Mac: Yeah. 

Josh: approach to managing finances. To a large group of people, right? And, I used even my own example of you look in within my friend group, right?

I [00:45:00] can, within my own neighborhood of friends, I can give you, we have one couple who follows the, the fire system, the like financially independent retire early. Right. And the two of them will not spend a dime unless they absolutely have to. Right. Right. And so they are living at epic levels of frugality because their goal is to retire early.

And then I also have friends who just spend like it’s going out of style and they don’t care about the 5, 000 in overdraft fees. Right. And it is just, it is what it is. I’ll figure it out later. That’s tomorrow’s problem. And then,  you look at my wife and I, and I would like to say, we probably fall into an in between category.

We used to be a lot more conservative with our money and stuff. And then,  a few years ago, my wife battled breast cancer. And so that was a huge trigger for us, Hey, you know what? We could save every penny and get hit by a bus tomorrow. [00:46:00] And so, know, what’s the balance in there? And so, but if, if, if you were to go to even just those three groups and say, this is what I’m going to prescribe to all of you, it ain’t gonna work probably for any of us, but at the very least, it’s going to only work for one.

Right. And so how do you make it intelligent enough to understand, Hey, look, Mac’s just one of those guys, man. He just, he just really, really wants to party out on the ocean and he wants the latest surfboard and he’s cool with paying 5, 000 a year in overdraft fees. So let’s find a solution that helps him that he’s going to align to versus this other couple.

That is a challenge, I think. And I think that’s why,  again, kind of going back to where you started this whole podcast, like challenges are fun, right? Like they’re a challenge for a reason. And so you’re trying to identify, Hey, how can we actually leverage all of this data, all [00:47:00] of this technology to have more meaningful impacts, I think is the point.

Mac: Because people are trying to achieve whatever it is they choose to achieve. Right? Whatever it is. Their goals in life. They’re all very different. You’re just mine. We’re all different. And I think that’s awesome.  But how do we help them do that? Because that’s really what we’re trying to do, right?  and I think that is one of the things I think a lot about is people think that these solutions are easy, but you probably have built things.

Getting the wrong answers quickly is one of the best tricks you can figure out  because you’ll learn from each one of them. And, so it’s my team here. I drive them insane sometimes, because they see this idea I’ve got and they go, Oh, that’s an incredible idea I’ve got. That’s version 70. Because my first idea was wrong, and my second idea was even worse, and then I figured it out, and now it’s wrong. [00:48:00] But that, we need, we need to figure out, it’s okay. This is just one of the things I struggle with a lot. People have a fear of failure that just freaks me out. I fail every day on something.

I’m sure of it, but I don’t have, I don’t worry about it. I just keep going. And,  it’s one of these entrepreneurial spaces, probably my degree. I had it all along just because of what I did in banks. But when I became an entrepreneur, I got much more comfortable trying,  banks were a lot about risk management, right? And the probability of failure, all this stuff. But when you’re trying to build technologies and solutions and experiences and new ways of doing things, those failures are invaluable. You just need to know how to pull pull the, understand when it’s done and when it’s pivoted. Would it change going that direction and go this direction quickly?

Fail fast.  But I think that’s one of the, it’s probably one of the things I wish in the bank culturally they would kind of pick up on that. Because it’s,  it’s like when banks try to build their own fintech companies by bankers that have always been [00:49:00] bankers and they try, they wonder why it doesn’t work. And it’s because you guys are taking the very low risk approach. I’m taking an approach where I know a lot of these things I’m going to try to build are going to fail massively. But if I don’t try to fail massively, I’m never going to get something that’s going to be radically different.

And it’s just more of an approach.

And it’s not right, it depends on what you’re optimizing for, right? Yeah, 

Josh: It’s different. It’s different businesses, different approaches. I had Brian from TrueStage Ventures on the podcast a while ago and he was talking about a very real example of just, a lot of times when financial institutions as a part of the due diligence process, evaluate a FinTechs books and they’re  Oh my gosh, they burn a million dollars a month.

No, this is not a stable business. And it’s well, no, I just, our books are very different from your books. I’m burning a million dollars in cash in,  R and [00:50:00] D for innovation, because I’m going to create the next widget that’s going to sell for 2 billion. I’m gonna make all that money back. And then some.

But yeah, I’m going to burn a million bucks in cash a month until I get there,  and it’s, so it’s just, it’s very different business models and that Mac, you actually brought me back to something I wanted to go back to that you were talking about earlier of,  when you were talking about just financial institutions,  deciding if they want to build their own large language model, for example, or something, and it is really important to look at what your strengths are, right?

And it kind of, this goes back to the use case example. Okay. And if you are a financial institution trying to build the tool, versus having somebody that’s really good at building tools and then you being really good at understanding. And this is where I think there is a lot of opportunity that has not been seized if you’re the experts in banking.

So yeah, you should know, like what is [00:51:00] important to my financial institution, my customers. Well, something. Hey, this account is about to churn or this account is about to default or  this small business, through very cyclical cycles, right? Maybe they’re a pumpkin patch. And so they make a ton of money in October and the rest of the year, they’re just trying to figure it out, man.

And so,  how can we help them in maybe influxing cash during the planting season so they can plant more pumpkin seeds and more pumpkins in October. But we recognize their business, right? You know that better than I do as a technologist, but I’m supposed to know technology better than you.

So I’m going to give you really great tools, but you have to know what are the questions that I need to ask so that I can identify the right use cases so that I make sure I have the right tool and that I’m using the tool in the right way. Does that make sense?

Mac: Oh, it does. It does. It’s actually, one of the things about FinTech, so I’m just going to [00:52:00] use it broadly, and technology providers for the financial services industry, is If those two groups, them and the bank, credit unions, savings banks, everybody, can get in a constructive conflict about what should the questions really be.

The banks are asking questions from their paradigm of understanding the world. Fintechs have these possibilities. And so they’re trying to figure, they don’t understand banking, so they’re, but together, you might, the bankers might learn from the technology people. You’re asking the wrong questions.

You really could be asking this question, which is really the root. And that, that synergy of thought and,  It’s just such an opportunity. I teach data analytics. So when we look at data analytics,  one of the things I tell them is, usually the problem, the number one problem with data analytics is the question you’re answering is a bad question.

Josh: Hmm.

Mac:  Someone has come up with a question in 30 seconds. That’s [00:53:00] And you’re going to spend, you, your team, the bank’s going to spend 100 man hours figuring out the answer to that question. In your process of getting the question, you’re still going to probably answer because it probably came from an executive. Is it a good question? Or is there a better question that really gets to what this thing’s talking about? And you really, it’s hard because that’s not how we flow in this way, but if you have data analysts that understand the business really well, you were,  a simple example is credit union.

Credit union was talking about their department, this is going to sound technical,  point of sale debit card activation rate.  Only 50 percent of our members have an active point of sale debit card. We need to go after this. Okay, one step back. It happens to be that if you have, if you have the operating relationship for that member,  99 percent of your members have an active point of sale debit card.

Your real problem isn’t the point of sale active debit [00:54:00] card, it’s the fact that 50 percent of your members don’t have an active operating account. So if you try to solve the one, you can’t, you won’t have an active debit card without an active operating account, because they’re doing their checking somewhere else.

And so, but they had built out and were chasing down this path, this strategy, because there’s a lot of revenue associated with it. And the customer experience, all kinds of good things. But the real problem was actually something different.  Yeah.

Josh: That’s a good point. I always,  I love the concept of the five wise, right? Like when somebody says, maybe I can make one up on the spot. We’ll find out how fast my brain works. But  if somebody says,  I need 100 bucks and you ask why, and they tell you, right, well, because,  I need to,   Buy some food and you’re  okay, [00:55:00] well, but  why, why do you need to buy some food?

Like you have a stable job, you go down all of this. You may discover that the root of the problem is,  they have a sick family member or something and actually just helping to step in and help support the sick family member or something may actually have a bigger impact than just giving them a hundred bucks.

I don’t know. It’s probably a ridiculous example, but like a lot of times you start with. Sometimes we get so latched onto the thing that’s right in front of us. We don’t drill down deep enough to understand why. And so I love that really simple concept of,  we try to even use that in just product management, right?

When a customer asks for a feature, you say, well, why?  why? I need a feature that does this. I’m well, why? And they’re  well, because of this. And. You’re, I love your example, right? It’s  well, if we had drilled down and been  we need a feature to push debit cards to everybody, [00:56:00] we build this feature, they get the debit card, but they don’t use it.

Why? Well, because they don’t actually have, you know, a strong relationship with you. So we solved the wrong problem.

Mac: Yep. 

Josh: So how do you identify, like how deep do you need to go to identify what’s the actual problem to solve? I think that’s a part of that whole. When you talk about having an AI strategy, what’s, what problem are you trying to solve?

And then have you dug deep enough to actually identify if you are solving the right problem? Or are you just looking at AI as the bandaid to everything? Because it’s the thing that’s the talk of the town.

Mac: Yeah. And how are people going to interact with all of this? The people aspect of technology is usually one of the laggards. It’s unfortunate.

 

Josh: Why do that?

Mac: So many examples of that. It’s probably a different podcast.

Josh: Yeah, well, no, no, I like that. What, so why do you think that is? And 

Mac: I’ll give you an example. So I worked at a very large, this is an old, old example, but it was during the mortgage boom of the early 2000s. They [00:57:00] built, spent a fortune building a piece of software that would, this is going to sound funny now, but at the time it was pretty miraculous, was going to be able to originate, was going to be able to underwrite and approve a mortgage loan in the time it took someone to go get a cup of coffee and come back. You call it a cup of coffee.  They rolled it out to a very big bank, rolled it out to lots of, lots of banks, lots of, lots of, all their branches. And it was for work in the branches. Technology wise it was pretty awesome. No one asked if the people in the branches understood mortgages. Turns out most of the people who worked in the branches, not the branch man, but the personal bankers or whatever you call them,  they didn’t understand mortgages, they didn’t know what points were, they didn’t understand, they didn’t own houses.

They had no understanding of the power mortgage process, yet they were going to be put on point to do and do all of this through this new software. It wasn’t even considered, and they, so they roll it out, they’re in pilot mode, they’re trying to figure out what’s going on, not going [00:58:00] well. Get on a plane, fly to the pilot market, go to the branch, sit there for the morning, ironically, and they understand it instantaneously.

They had no training. The people trying to use this had no understanding of what a mortgage was. The folks back at Central Headquarters couldn’t understand that someone that works in a bank would understand a mortgage.

But the reality of it was most, and this is, most people that were personal bankers didn’t own their own homes, never been through a mortgage process, didn’t have any experience with it whatsoever.

Josh: Okay. I love that. I, I’m going to like take a crazy bunny trail, but this segues to one of the things that we wanted to talk about too, of I think that, so coming back to something and then we’ll go to my bunny trail,  is, is again, it’s if you sit in around a room of bankers and then sit around a room of just non banker people, don’t think the same about finances, right?

Like [00:59:00] maybe we do about baseball and hot dogs. I don’t know, but not about banking and finance. We think very differently and you see some very, very stark, obvious examples of that. And then there’s some really,  minuscule ones that can have a big impact, but they don’t necessarily bubble to the surface.

And one of the, I think, really big examples of that. And just one of the reasons why you and I wanted to talk about it is this, this is definitely coming up more in the smaller community financial institution space is servicing commercial business, right? And the small to medium business market.

And I was telling Mac that this has started to come up a lot more for us in conversations over the last handful of years of even smaller credit unions,   community banks, it’s less because that’s usually been more of their focus, but even in the credit union space, like smaller credit unions are saying, Hey, we want to have a strategy around commercial.

We want to offer commercial digital banking and all of this. [01:00:00] And  even sometimes within the institution, we have very little understanding of what the expectations of services and digital services for an SMB may be in banking. But I tell you what, like you start to look at the real world examples of that and,    one of my colleagues and really good friends gave me a great example of this.

And he was talking about a personal friend of his and he was. I have a personal friend who’s a remodeling contractor so he’s a small business. He has a handful of employees. And so he has banking needs. He has to input money from his customers. He has to do disbursements to vendors, to contractors that he hires out to.

He has to pay employees, right? So he has a reasonably complex business banking relationship. And, and so Jimmy was talking to me about him. He’s  look, [01:01:00] dude, doesn’t even have an office. Like he’s in his F three 50 with his laptop up on the center console, plugged into the power outlet and  that’s his office while he’s on a job site.

And so he’s trying to do his banking and he’s  and then all of a sudden you’re presenting to him and you’re  Hey,  we’re going to do a money movement for you. And here’s all the different transfer codes.

Mac: Yeah.

Josh: And like you even talked to some staff at a bank and they have no idea what all these are different,  Oh, is it CTX?

Is it  they’re,  I don’t know. But I tell you what, that contractor has no clue and he couldn’t care less. Right. He’s,  man, I’m just trying to remodel this kitchen and get paid.

Mac: Right. Of the things they think about in a given day, as long as everything is working, banking is not in the top hundred.

Josh: Yeah. That’s probably true. Huh?

Mac: Yeah. As long as everything is working. If it works. 

Josh: Yep.

Mac: different story. Because they don’t think of [01:02:00] payroll as banking or paying their vendors as banking. It’s just paying their vendors. Banking just happens to be the tool they’re using to do it.

It is, I would say this, for people getting into commercial, not just small business, but larger small business, SM, larger small businesses, business banking kind of things, commercial,  established businesses. I would start learning and talking to customers about understanding from their perspective what it is.

Because if you show up in front of a customer and you don’t understand their business, you’re not going to get their business. And it’s a human capital investment you’re going to need to make. A lot of the credit unions are getting into it by hiring bankers, commercial bankers from banks is what they’re doing, but the rest of the organization really needs to understand that they have different needs, they think differently. Consumer relationships, we can understand that on some level because we’re all consumers on some level, but if you’ve never had your own business, it is a [01:03:00] wildly different experience than,  yeah, this is someone that never worked for themselves and then decided to start a company. That was a wild learning experience for a while because I like those things that are deposited every two weeks.

Those were awesome. And if you’re in your own business, you gotta figure out how to bring in everything you just described, bring in the money, pay all the vendors, do whatever you need to do, and then disperse out to your, you’re in the middle of all that. It’s just a different, definitely a different way of thinking about it.

Josh: Well, yeah. That’s funny. Even just using you as the example, ’cause you, I, we weren’t even talking about this, but you made the comment when we were talking earlier about you were  yeah,  I went from working in a bank to all of a sudden, like founding a company and like we’re in a month without even having a business plan.

And then all of a sudden we’re like having to do this. We’ve got employees. And now all of a sudden I know more about insurance benefits than anyone needs to know. But  you’re, you,  and [01:04:00] keep me honest here, Mac, but you’re going into it. You’re  I’m just a technologist. I’m trying to solve technology problems. And so I’m really good at that. So I got that. And then you’re 

Mac: what I didn’t know.

Josh: Oh, I also now have to be an expert in payroll and in benefits and HR and in policies about time off. And,  

Mac: Yeah. What do you mean there’s a match to FICO?  Right? Because you pay, I was used to paying FICO. I never really, I kind of did accounting. But,  the employer pays a match to that. And then you’re  holy crap. So, anywho, it was exciting. But if you’re going to get into commercial, start understanding how commercial people think, or business, business clients think. It’s different. It’s not right or wrong. It’s just a different experience. And they will really appreciate it if you seek to understand them. And people love talking about their business is the other thing. I’m just, if people are [01:05:00] getting into,  if you’re a credit union getting into this, ask your, your new clients about them.

They love talking about their business. It’s their life. So probably on a final note on that, but,  yeah, yeah, yeah.

Josh: On a whirlwind travel tour this week,  through a bunch of different cities and just kind of sitting in my Uber, like going from meeting to airport and things like that. And you look around at just the number of small businesses in little strip malls and just all these things.

I don’t know why, but it just, it literally, this trip kind of just struck me and I’m looking at these and there’s so many of these niche little businesses. And I’m,  man who shops at these, like who, who patrons these and keeps these places afloat. It’s the community, right? the people around and that business popped up because there was a need [01:06:00] for that good service, product, whatever in that community.

And so it’s important to that community. But again,  I’ve tried to think there was one literally last night. It was like so late in my poor brain. Just can’t recall it. I can’t remember what it was, but I was,  wait, there’s really a store for that. I never would have guessed. I was, that’s crazy.

But you have to imagine the person that started that is just an expert in that or knows that really well or did that and like had a community of people enough around them that they saw the opportunity to start a business around that. It’s probably their life. I don’t remember. I wish I could remember what it was, but it was just, it was such an off the wall thing that I was. I would be absolutely mind blown if this place is like bankrolling, like they’re probably just barely keeping the lights on every day.

This is a family that’s there 24 seven just to keep the lights on and keep food on the table for the family. Right? And so to your point, [01:07:00] like banking and understanding that that is the absolute last thing on their mind. They just want to get paid and make the payments they need to make and keep their business afloat and keep cash flow managed.

Mac: Yep, that’s it.

Josh: Right. So there’s just, I think there’s a really big opportunity for the community FI space to support them a little bit better with tools that are thought about like what you were saying, like them, not like us, not like bankers, not like technologists, right? But just real people. If Jimmy is sitting in his truck, trying to do a quote for a bathroom remodel and he needs to do some banking.Like we got to think like him in that moment. Not like bankers.

So we need to think more like people. And I think,  again, this is why I really love having folks like you as guests on the podcast, Mac, because you started this whole thing with  I want to solve problems for real people and to solve problems for real people. You need to think like real people. So I think that’s a cool opportunity for this industry.  

Well, Hey, look, before I let you go, I have two final questions for you, sir. So where do you go to stay up to date on what’s happening in our industry?

Mac:  I use a lot of the association materials. So we’re members of various, and I use a lot of that.  I like Banking Dive. There’s a couple, I read a lot of publications. I know that’s not very exciting, but I do.  [01:09:00]  I just read constantly, most everything that’s published, and I, it’s just a large variety.

I don’t have a particular one in mind. I  I also like looking at European Writing in the U. S. banking.

They write about the U. S. banking in a really different way than we do ourselves.  It’s kind of interesting, they point out things I never would think about. The Economist is particularly good.

Josh: Why? Do you have any resources you go to for that?

Mac:  The Economist is probably one I use a decent amount.  I also do a lot of stuff with the Federal Reserve, FRED, at St. Louis Fed. Data wise, I get into a lot of the data. I don’t know if anyone does that, but I do.

I’m kind of a quant person that likes that.  I just talk, I also talk to people constantly.

Josh: Yeah.

Mac: I learn from everybody. Some things to do, some things not to do. But everybody’s got things to learn from. 

Josh: Well, if people want to talk to you and learn more from you or share with you, how can they connect with you and how can they [01:10:00] learn more 

Mac: You can reach out to Mac at White Clay if you’d like. We don’t do initial hard sales. I like starting with conversations because we build relationships with our customers. I like having that. I just think that’s just a better approach. So some people think it might be a better, different way, but I just like it.

So if anybody wants to talk about the topic or talk to us about how, how something works or just talk to me about, I love banking, love talking about it. So just email me, macmacy@whiteclay. com. You can reach out to our website to go through that to get a hold of us as well.

Josh: Awesome. Well, thank you, sir. Thank you for just your energy and enthusiasm and thanks for coming and being a guest on the podcast today.

Mac: Well, thank you, Josh. It’s been awesome. I think we had a great free- ranging conversation.