Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting dozens of our peers in the community banking and fintech spaces in San Diego for Fall Innovators Retreat. Across two days at the historic La Valencia Hotel in La Jolla, attendees were able to participate in conversations on the cutting edge of banking and technology – all while absorbing the scenic ocean views just outside their window.
We kicked Innovators Retreat off speaking to a true innovator: Corelation CEO Theresa Benavidez. Theresa provided an account of her decades-long journey as a professional in the credit union space, culminating in her involvement with leading one of the most progressive and open cores on the market in Corelation.
Among a host of valuable insights, Theresa provided singular advice on what she learned in standing up core and the company behind it:
“Never take shortcuts. Sometimes the long way is painful, and it can be costly. But in the business we’re in, where we’re handling people’s money and working with regulators, it always catches up to you.”
What followed was a series of on-the-ground and future-forward sessions touching on all corners of the nexus between banking and technology, including open banking, fraud trends and prevention, the future of payments, AI, and more.
Evergreen Bank Group Chief Digital Officer Dan Inendino joined Narmi SVP of Operation Angela Gentry Yue for a conversation around launching its digital-only brands, Performance Finance and Freedom Road Financial, geared towards lending to the powersports enthusiast looking to finance equipment. The conversations around targeting the segment came around the same time that Evergreen found a strategic opportunity arising from an influx in deposits, including a strategy on converting loan customers into robust deposit accounts: “You’ve got the customer – but how do you differentiate going forward? That’s where analytics, segmentation, and personalization come in.”
With Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act coming into full force later this year, the topic of open banking has been top-of-mind for many. To speak to the complexities of the new ruling – which allows consumers more structured access to their data and could create more opportunities for bank primacy among community financial institutions – Narmi co-founder Chris Griffin was joined by leaders from the data aggregation space, which has been key in the development of the policy.
Nicole Klein of MX began the conversation with an overview of open banking, which can be a widely misunderstood topic among the general public. She explained that the 1033 provisions essentially codify processes that have been going on in the background at banks for years in the form of workarounds like screen scraping: “Open banking has existed since banking has been on the internet. Now, it’s about taking that next step.”
Plaid’s Shiv Bhatt touched on the implications for community banks and credit unions, which could stand to benefit from an easier flow of information and data between financial institutions: “With 1033 coming in, the intention is to democratize access so banks of every size can compete on a level playing field.”
Griffin then sat with Narmi Senior Product Marketing Manager Sarabeth Perry for a discussion on the future of instant payments, including the FedNow service, describing them as “the first payment rail that is inextricably linked with the end-user experience.” In discussing the state of payments, he offered an alternative to the commonly held notion that the future of instant payments lie purely in the realm of third-party fintechs: “There are regulatory shifts that could possibly return payments primacy to the traditional banking segment.”
We then hosted UFCU Senior Business Systems Analyst Russell Shugart and Jason Ioannides, Senior Director of Global Solutions Engineering at Alloy, to discuss UFCU’s journey in successfully combating account opening fraud, even as it scaled deposits. Ioannides, who spoke to UFCU’s relationship with Alloy (an identity risk solution that helps financial entities automate their process towards detecting fraud in account opening, among other functions) described the state of fraud that financial institutions face today:
“It sounds overly simplistic, but figuring out someone is who they say they are is significantly more difficult than it has ever been.”
Over the course of the session, Shugart provided an on-the-ground perspective on how fraud is evolving over time, and how UFCU has taken steps to stay ahead of fraud through a robust partnership model within its account opening product: “Fraud has always been seasonal and cyclical. And what we’ve seen is that those seasons have gotten shorter, and those cycles have gotten longer.”
Next, a pair of sessions looking squarely forward: Future Proofing Your Financial Institutions, where leaders from Greater Alliance Federal Credit Union and Las Colinas Federal Credit Union spoke on finding strategic partners and investing in innovation for the new year; and The AI-Driven Bank with Matt Phipps of AgentIQ, which featured a Q&A session where attendees inquired about future applications of AI, and the role of the actual human in what could be a revolutionized banking industry: “The best use of AI is when it’s paired to help humans be better at what they’re trying to accomplish.”
We rounded out Fall Innovators Retreat with an inside look at some of Narmi’s most cutting-edge features. Taylor Hatch, SVP and Director of Banking Operations at Northeast Bank sat with Narmi Forward Deployed Engineer Ryan Siebecker for a conversation about how the Narmi platform’s extensibility has improved efficiency for the bank’s back office and frontline employees – all while significantly raising core deposits.
Perry and Narmi Product Manager Ayesha Imran presented the latest development and applications to the Narmi Admin Platform, which acts as “the connective tissue between all of Narmi’s products.” The two covered the role of staff as the banking industry evolves, and the importance of technology like the Admin Platform that allows a financial institution’s people the bandwidth to think strategically and creatively – a hallmark of Narmi’s approach to both its product, and the community of FIs that we’re privileged to call our peers.
“We want to make sure that every single feature that we’re adding is a feature that brings value to you.”
