JJ Hornblass, Royal Media CEO

Hi everyone I’m JJ Hornblass and welcome to FinTech Unfiltered from Bank Innovation, the leading digital news service on banking and FinTech. This is our weekly wrap on what’s happening in banking innovation for the week of June 22 2020. Before beginning I want to thank bank innovation advertisers, ABBYY, Infogroup, Mambu and Q2 for their support, so thank you very much to them. I am joined today by Bianca Chan and Rick Morgan from the Bank Innovation team. And as well we have a special guest Robert Kirk, the CEO and founder of InterGen Data, welcome Rob to the crew. We are happy to have you. It is Friday, June 26 2020. Before getting into the recap of the week Rob, why don’t you tell us a little bit about InterGen, which is a member of the current class of INV FinTech and maybe a little bit about yourself as well, Rob?

Robert Kirk, CEO of InterGen Data

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me here. InterGen Data is a company I started several years ago to really kind of overcome some of the big problems we have today. And that’s basically we don’t know what to actually save for. And we don’t know how much to save for. Inevitably, that points to the fact that we don’t plan for bad things to happen. But when life throws you that proverbial curveball, you either get hit or you hit it. So you have to deal with it. And what we what we did was develop some technology that allows firms and people and employees to really understand what types of life events are likely to happen to them. So what’s likely to happen to you when it’s likely to happen, and then most importantly, what type of expense that that could be in the future. And this comes from the perspective of what we would call health and wealth. So your, your health and your critical illnesses or your potential to get those critical illnesses and the wealth, the good things, maybe like the birth of children or getting married, but sometimes also the negative things like getting a divorce or whatnot. So we try to predict that we take in some data and we we allow people to use our data and return and see their answers.

JJ Hornblass

Great. So the first item that we’re going to talk about today, probably really, you know, does really fit into what InterGen is all about. Rick did a story this week about emotional intimacy, and financial services brands. And I don’t know if any of us should be shocked, but financial services brands did not rank highly in emotional connections to brands So, first of all, when they’re talking about this emotional branding, what exactly does that mean? And, you know, how poorly did financial services do in this

regard? 

Rick Morgan, news editor at Bank Innovation

Well, they could have done worse. So they did 11 out of 15 total industries. The top was media and entertainment, I believe. And I think travel and luxury came in either last or second last. So they did do better than some industries. And basically what they’re looking at is how emotionally connected to customers feel to the brands. they surveyed, like 6,200 consumers in the US, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates, to kind of find out, they asked them about a 20 minute survey, sort of surveying like, you know, how emotionally connected are you to your brands? Like what how do you feel about them and like a personal level. And they found that, you know, a lot of financial services while not doing very well could have been worse. And they the kind of the, I guess the alarming thing with financial services should be that the companies that do well, on these sort of emotional connection surveys generally outperformed S&P and the Fortune 500 companies quite significantly when it comes to both profit and revenue. So it’s not just like voodoo magic, like it actually has a very important impact on your bottom line.

JJ Hornblass

I would think, Rob, that there is a, you would have a perspective around data contributing, potentially to emotional, all brand connection. Is that Is that how you, you know, is there a connection between data and analytics, can you make that that jump to to create more connectivity on the brand side?

Robert Kirk

Absolutely. So, you know, it’s interesting. We as people, we tend not to plan for bad things to happen. I don’t plan to lose my job. I don’t plan to go back. Grow up on a plan to lose a loved one. But when it does happen, then you have to, like I said, deal with it. Now, the interesting part there is if you have let’s say something good to happen in life like you have a child, well, you now know you’re going to spend X amount of dollars X amount of time dealing with that bringing up that, you know, carefully and lovingly with that little that new little person. But 15 years from now, there’s a vehicle 18 years from now, there’s college, you know, another five years you have children, you have marriages, you have home. So you have all of these that happen in sequence. So when we think about understanding where we are at our stages in life, I can tell you from the perspective of dealing with me, that if you sent me emails or ads or special services to buy of products, and you’re talking to me about my first job or you’re talking to me about taxes, I’m 51 if I’m looking at my first job, I’ve got so many other problems. Right. So if you’re not dealing with me, and you’re not contextually relevant to me, then I kind of brush you aside. And on the negative events, when things that are bad that happened, you really kind of have to talk to me about what do I do next? And when you miss that, you’re and you’re just not on the mark. Yeah, that’s why financial services doesn’t do well. People don’t like to have those tough conversations. They don’t like to say, now that this has happened, you’re gonna have to spend more money, or how are you going to do that? I don’t know. But that’s why I employ you. You’re the advisor, you need to help me. And those are conversations that I think most people they’re just not taught how to do. And so they missed the mark.

JJ Hornblass

But yeah, having Oh, sorry,

Rick Morgan

No, I was just gonna say that’s interesting that you bring that up some of the financial services companies that were specifically named, they have like a sub report. This is a company that ran the study was called MBLM, and they focus on brand intimacy, and they actually have a sub report about financial services specifically. And they mentioned while you were talking about Rob, some of these banks are actually the ones that are doing well, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a lot of Americans are facing financial hardship are reaching out to customers and like asking them to explain their specific financial situation, delaying mortgage payments, delaying personal loan payments, whatever. And that’s how they can you can really resonate with consumers during during a tough time.

Robert Kirk

And, and to me if I can, that’s really key because COVID-19 is affecting minorities even more so. Right. And if you think about the the Schwab study of 2019, and the BLS study that recently came out, they’re basically say the same thing that 60% of America has problems to for $400 unexpected bill, and they have to go out and take loans, they don’t know how to pay for these things. So if you’re not helping me during that time, and you’re not relevant to me And you’re not using that data. So a you’re reacting. But imagine if you could flip that and use that data to become proactive and help people. Now you change the scenario to maybe help them overcome that. So data is key to that. And, Rick, I hopefully you can send me that link because I’d love to see some more about that data.

Rick Morgan

Yeah.

JJ Hornblass

We also saw this week, a transformation effort at Citizens Bank to update its core banking system, which is kind of like trying to do root canal on on 100 people at the same time. I don’t know trying to think of an analogy, but it’s not pleasant. But they’ve actually come up with some creative solutions for it. Bianca this whole concept of layering, what what is sort of be behind this. This citizens back effort. And, um, and and what’s kind of a key goal that they have over there?

Bianca Chan, news editor at Bank Innovation

An overarching kind of goal of Citizens to just digitally transform their core banking systems, which as we know, is extremely difficult to do since usually built on legacy tech stacks that don’t like to talk to other legacy tech stacks. And so the interesting work around that citizens has is if you think about it this way, they basically attached a new kind of layer, they call it a data intelligence platform that pulls all of this customer information and does the data analytics on it. Then they’ve taken the service layer that connects all of the data intelligence platforms, between all of the different siloed core banking systems. So it’s kind of like this patchwork solution workaround to instead of having to read platform, their core banking system, they’ve almost like attach these side roads that can talk to each other. And it it, like I said all about trying to get to this omni channel approach, which kind of fits into what, you know you guys were talking about earlier about being contextually relevant. I think that what citizens is really trying to do is make sure that their employees whether it’s like at the branch or call center or online, kind of like knows what the customer situation is and can provide relevant advice or information or personalized messaging, whether that’s like, depending on what product you have with the bank, or where you are geographically speaking. So I think it’s this overall push that we’re seeing and I think a lot of banks struggle to attain this omni channel view, because their, their systems are just built on these really old frameworks that make it very difficult.

JJ Hornblass

Rob you I mean, data that is necessary to create the kind of personalization that you sort of you that you envision or I mean, certainly through InterGen, but that even empirically kind of thinking about financial services or, you know, bank banking institutions, you know, what, how deep does it have to go and how, how nimble does the data application need to be to really provide the level of personalization that you You really think financial institutions should aspire to.

Robert Kirk

Wow.

JJ Hornblass

So we have exactly four minutes.

Robert Kirk

So I’ll try and break it down into some its most simplistic root pieces that I see. One I love what they’re doing right. So I also take that same approach that patchwork approach Bianca, I don’t take that negative. I think that’s a very positive thing. So we’re aggregating data from multiple places, the government, private resources, companies, all of it is anonymized. And we do not take in PII data. So when I look at how do you break down people, let’s, let’s take a simple a simple action, right? So before COVID happened, the moment that they said, we’re closing our doors, markets tanked. At that point in time we saw so certain groups of people call, we saw other groups of people go to the internet, we saw other groups of people look at emails, each one of us has the thing that we like to do our interaction. And that bias allows companies to say, hey, at this time, when the market drops, 1000 points, we get calls from everybody, okay? But who called versus who emailed versus who went to a chat bot versus, you know, You start to collect the data on those pieces. So then once you start to go back and correlate that to, hey, that’s happened in history multiple times, we can start to think about this. And why don’t we get ahead instead of having them call, or if they’re on the email channel, let’s email them in advance. Here’s the things you’re typically looking at, here’s the things that affect your account. Right. And so those types of things, we’re seeing some firms do some really innovative stuff around. I believe citizens is going to take this a little bit further, because now they’re going to go and hit the various platforms that I want to use. That’s great. And to your further question about how far down the rabbit hole Do you want to go of data? That’s up to you, I I tend to think that as people as an example we do things because something affects us there’s an event, then I react to that event, and then I do something. I laugh and I use this example all the time, but every one of us here, we have insurance, but none of have us bought it because it was on sale, right? We, we bought something, we broke something, we created something, then we act, right you bought your house need insurance, you do this, then you do that. And so you you kind of mingle that piece with the behavioral finance. So when the event happens now you kind of know how people will react that can help you in multiple ways. And lastly, if I can be real brief, you don’t put the the surfer Californian dude against the brash New Yorker who wants his information right now on the call together. So if you link the event, to some interaction, you don’t put the two together in a call center. Similarly, you want to make sure you talk to me in the manner that I want to listen and be talked and spoken to. So that’s where all that data kind of gets combined. And, and that’s where it gets exciting in my opinion.

JJ Hornblass

Cool. I’m looking ahead to next week. Rick and Bianca, what do you have coming up

Bianca Chan

I’ll be looking at how some financial institutions are looking to use blockchain, which I know is kind of like a controversial buzzword and in banking, whether it’s actually, you know, providing value or if it’s too early, and then also looking at some product launches that affirm, which is a direct to consumer point of sale lender has in the works.

Rick Morgan

Yeah, I’m looking at a couple of community banks and how they’re using tools from some technology vendors to create better financial wellness metrics to help consumers with their financial health. The one bank executive I spoke to said they ripped the top off of a banking solution. So we’ll learn a little bit more about what that actually means.

JJ Hornblass

And Rob what can we expect from InterGen over the next couple of months?

Robert Kirk

We’re working on quite a bit of data correlating COVID with how It affects people. Not only your likelihood to get sick, but also those expensive costs. We’re also building out a index that actually says if you have these types of comorbidities, or or co diseases, what does that really mean? Does that increase it more? Does it decrease it and how can you kind of use that to plan so we’re building that a lot on that right now.

JJ Hornblass

Very cool. Well, we wish you good luck and good luck in the INV FinTech accelerator

we have our next the next Bank Innovation event is Bank Innovation Build September 9 to 10. There are speakers from Citi, Stash, BlueVine, Ally, RBC, probably Rob will be there too. So please visit bankinnovationbuild.com we want to really hear from you. So please rate FinTech Unfiltered wherever you listen to your podcasts. And don’t forget to visit us online at finainews.com. Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you next time. And until next time,

keep it unfiltered everyone