JJ Hornblass, Royal Media CEO 

Hi everyone. I’m JJ Hornblass, host of Fintech Unfiltered. Welcome to this edition of our podcasts from Bank Innovation, the nation’s leading digital news source on FinTech and banking technology. This is our Weekly Wrap for what’s happening in banking innovation during the week of November 9 2020. Our thanks go out before we begin to Blend, Cardlinks, Mambu and Q2ebanking. Our advertisers for their support and sponsorship, so thank you to them. And I am so pleased to welcome Bianca Chan and Rick Morgan. From the Bank Innovation team. It is Friday, November 13 2020. This week, President-elect Biden made progress on preparing for the transition of power, naming key members of his transition team. While President Trump continued to think that election day never happened. Trump administration officials continue to test positive for COVID-19 the latest of whom was Corey Lewandowski, a Trump campaign adviser who was learned today has the virus. Overall, more cases are being recorded. More cases of COVID-19 are being recorded in the United States than ever before. The 142,000 cases reported on Wednesday set yet another record. Fintech company Affirm is said to be planning an IPO for later this year. And finally, a British Columbia woman is now a Guinness world record holder after being confirmed as the world’s oldest living curling player. At age 102 and 37 days. Lola Holmes has been playing curling, since she was 24. Or before curling was actually invented. This week also marked our banking autumn. Thank you, Bianca, I know you appreciate that. This week marked our Banking Automation Summit, which we were very excited about and thought it was really I thought it was fantastic. We wanted to touch on some of the high points from the conference. And let’s start with some of the key sort of takeaways that each of you had. Bianca, you want to start with some of the key takeaways from the conference?

Bianca Chan, deputy editor at Bank Innovation 

I’d love to. So I’m happy to report that the financial services industry is starting to make movements away from paper based processes. I mean, it’s really interesting. It was like we heard across the board from financial institutions regardless of size. But there’s a couple of it seems like there’s three different maybe approaches or three different phases that we’re in. So you see, institutions like Provident Bank, BNY Mellon, they’re still getting mail in deposits, they’re still getting clients to fax in documents. I mean, and it’s kind of crazy with the backdrop of, you know, automation, AI, all these different emerging technologies, quantum cloud computing, how are we still struggling with paper, so that’s one side of the coin. Next phase, you see banks like Citi and TD Bank, using OCR, optical character recognition, which is a type of AI to sort of pull information from documents and working to digitize that. And what I think is very interesting is you have other institutions like Wells Fargo, and now what they’re trying to do and Amala Duggirala of Regions also kind of spoke about this is they’re trying to move away from not just automating inefficient tasks, not just doing those tasks faster, but they’re trying to just eliminate docs altogether. So especially in Treasury, Allysun Fleming at Wells Fargo was saying that customers really struggled with the document uploading and exchanging that was required during the pandemic these past few months. And so instead of making their customers kind of go through that process, they’re tightening up existing data management, using data that they already have. figuring out which public sources of data can be used. Instead of getting, you know their customers to upload these documents and exchange back and forth and then in cases when they don’t have that information. internally or when they aren’t public sources to have that information, they’re actually standing up digital forms for their customers to just input that data really simply online. And then that data is digitized, and they can move on from there. So it’s really interesting. We’re seeing these sort of different evolutions of these banks of various sizes, kind of moving away from paper based products, which, you know, I’m very happy to report.

JJ Hornblass

I think one thing that I, you know, I actually heard this related to the health care industry. There’s some thought that, you know, the, for example, some of the vaccines that we’re talking about for COVID-19, you know, this speed of development is like, unheard of, historically. And there is this notion that, that the pandemic has just sped development times in a lot of different ways that the positive from the pandemic has been, you know, forcing development. My question is like, to what degree do we have this feeling that these developments in automation, if necessary, or, you know, getting away from paper, as you’re talking about? What degree is it kind of endemic to or hypercharged by the pandemic, or was just sort of happening on its own or is on a constant trajectory?

Bianca Chan 

I think it was really prompted by the pandemic, I mean, the fact that we still had these paper processes, and that, you know, the banks hadn’t dropped them yet was very surprising. And just the sheer fact that you have, like, 80, 90% of these banks workforces working from home, John Kamin the CIO, Provident Bank was saying they were struggling with really, really simple tasks as like, Who’s there to pick up the mail? I don’t think they would have even come to realize that up, you know, that archaic process if they hadn’t had to shift everyone to work from home, and then come to the issue of who’s going to pick up the mail? Who’s gonna deposit these mail in these mailing checks? 

JJ Hornblass

Rick, what were some of your takeaways from the conference?

Rick Morgan, news editor at Bank Innovation

Yeah, I think one of the most interesting things that I heard, we’re talking about John Kamin a lot. So but I will talk about it again, is when he was talking about how robotic process automation, while it can be very helpful, is something of a band aid solution, because I believe the term that he is, meaning that, you know, it fixes the sort of one off problems and automates them, but it’s not a full end to end solution that really overhauled the core technology. And, in our conference, or our session with Joanne Wyper, from Citizens, in the last panel, she stopped short of calling it a band aid, because she thought that had some sort of negative implications. But she did sort of agree that you know, it is not, and then solution is more of just a temporary fix for sort of these one off processes. So that stood out to me. I mean, you know, to be honest, I didn’t know a ton about RPA, before this conference, and to learn that it’s not synonymous with automation as a whole, I thought it was an interesting takeaway. I also thought that a lot of the banks talked about pulling employees from all areas of the bank to be involved in automation efforts, and how low code technology can sort of put this engineering pack in the hands of people who aren’t necessarily engineers, and get them involved in an automated assumption in the bank. So that was another takeaway for me, just how prevalent that was. 

JJ Hornblass  

I mean, my sense is, is that I would say that, of the functions that are currently undertaken in the banking industry today, I think 70% of them will be, um, I would say 70% of them will be automated within five years.

You know, taking away these mundane processes, really allows, it really has a multiplying effect on productivity. So I think that banking industry from this step from the automation component is, is really, it is really going to transform the industry over the next, you know, five, six years. I’m not sure we’ll recognize the industry to a large degree in the sense that some, you know, this kind of like stereotype of, like, oh, could you believe they still use paper? I think that that will be, you know, gone. They have no choice they have to. So, Rick, what are we working on for next week?

Rick Morgan

We’re still going to be covering some things from Banking Automation Summit. There’s a lot of stories that came out of that. We’re also going to be looking at some technologies that were developed inside of banks that are being sort of broadcast out to the wider ether of other banks. And I know Bianca is working on some things as well. 

Bianca Chan 

Yeah some more industry events, we’ve got the Future of Fintech conference, Citi innovation week. So taking a look at what’s going on at organizations like Citi, Goldman Sachs and N26. So keep your eyes peeled for that.

JJ Hornblass 

Good. Already there’s a lot of coverage from the Banking Automation Summit already on finainews.com. So you should check that out. And of course, visit with us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks so much for joining us. We’ll catch you next time.