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We see the effects of that with things like distributed ledger blockchain.

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So what is the role of a bank in a world where maybe the store of value isn't a checking account or a savings account, it's distributed ledger.

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So I think the biggest threat is how do you, as an incumbent organisation, stay relevant in that world?

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By not having enough work.

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Climate change funded by a shortage.

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Energy transition. Large scale social disorder.

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Antibiotic resistant diseases. Education. Employment.

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Quantum computing. How many of us remember having a personal banker or can afford to have a personal banker?

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The traditional model of banks as a store of value and source of liquidity and of

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bankers as trusted personal financial advisors is under threat like never before.

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We discussed the range of these threats with McClaren, an MBA student,

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and then look at how one bank in America is finding opportunities amongst the threats with Steve Goss,

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former CEO and co-founder of Pivot is the innovation arm of Oncor Bank.

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If you were to lay out the fintech landscape to someone who wasn't an expert,

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just hypothetically speaking, how would you how would you characterise it now?

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What does it look like? Yeah, it's difficult to say because it is very broad and fintech as a topic or as an industry is extremely broad.

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If you think about any financial product that you have, such as a loan, simple bank account,

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transferring money to someone across borders, there's a technology or a system or a platform behind that.

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Right? So fintech is basically looking at applying technologies, specifically new technologies, to improve those processes.

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Right. So it can be on the front end getting a better experience from your bank.

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What challenger banks are doing like Monzo.

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It can be on the back end, looking at the way payments are structured and transfers looking out using blockchain technology.

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Behind that, there's a whole different range of applications because technology's always been kind of behind banks.

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That kind of system behind how banks work.

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But it's never been that good in terms of banking, has never been technology focussed.

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Right. And that's kind of that's kind of is that because because as you were just talking,

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I was thinking, well, if you characterise it like that actually all banking is fintech.

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I mean there's right there's no pretty much there's no banking that can happen without.

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Yeah. So on somebody like technology. But then, you know,

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what is it about new technologies that are doing something different now that

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wasn't possible before rather than just making something faster or better? Yeah, I think it's there's a few things.

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One is the advent of certain types of technologies are really proving to be revolutionary and applicable to banking demand around data science,

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around platforms, around mobile apps and technology that immediately can give a service to a consumer.

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Blockchain technology technologies.

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Well, I think there's kind of core components of tech that have enabled fintech and financial services to be provided by different players than banks.

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On the flipside, banks have looked at their models, and especially after the crisis,

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they've looked at that the way they operate and and understood that is not sustainable.

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So the banking side has looked at that and also the regulatory side has really

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looked at how banks work and looked at this and are where we are even today,

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where most banks dominate the retail banking.

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You know, there's five or six banks in the UK dominate the retail banking landscape.

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Is that competitive? Is that that's to consumer regulators have looked to actually actively change.

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So it's got a few moving parts but it's largely been driven I think personally I think by the

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strength of technologies that have come through and shown a real applicability to financial products.

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FinTech is often talked about in relation to retail banking and can you providing better consumer products?

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Monzo, for example, TransferWise, on the other side of banking, you know,

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providing liquidity credits to businesses is that any moves on that side where Fenty fintech is making a difference?

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I think on that side it's almost more interesting because the path to profitability is a lot easier.

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Okay. I have to a big issue with the retail side and challenger banks like Monzo said that they're well funded.

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They can do a marketing, they can build up their customer base, but that's expensive, right?

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Building up a huge customer base from scratch is very expensive.

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The cost of customer acquisition is is upwards of £250.

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So how do you match that with a product that's not immediately making more money?

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That business model is to gradually, you know, develop that product suite and to start to make money from it.

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It's, you know, that cost the profit. The business is long. Mm hmm.

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Whilst if you develop a B2B solution around a specific product, you can immediately start in contracts or build up a customer base quite quickly.

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So in the in the part of banking I used to work in, one of the products was all around trade finance.

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Mm hmm. And you're seeing a lot of applications of blockchain technology around that because the is still used today.

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But the system of lesser credits are just guaranteeing a payment from someone who wants to ship a product abroad.

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Used to be done and still is in some parts of the world with fax machines.

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Right. Right. So people would fax a document saying this kid or product has arrived at a port on the sun.

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Your letter to verify that same goods in the next step and that supply chain with that process.

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And that's been the kind of default way the product works.

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So blockchain is a great use case for that. Yeah. In the means of, you know, just providing a smart contract around the steps of that supply chain.

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Because I applied for a TransferWise account the other day,

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I think it took up a grand total of about 5 minutes of my time to get a debit card or an account number in like four or five different currencies.

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It's incredible, right? From a customer point of view, it's incredible.

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But from a kind of does anyone understand the models they're using to be able to produce that enough to regulate them?

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Yeah, I think so.

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I think the FCA and regulators in the UK and other markets are being a bit more sophisticated in terms of how they approach innovation.

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You can't just start us out of this and then start selling financial products,

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but they're doing it in a way that one is looking to protect the individual investor or consumer,

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which is that, you know, one the upmost concerns and to not stifling a growing industry that's going to be more and more important for the UK.

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Following my conversation with Alec, I caught up with Steve Gotts,

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entrepreneur and occasional residents and ASPs alumnus, to hear about how he futureproof to one West Coast Bank.

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You have to stay, hopefully to cover some of the future finance topics, which is great.

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And I'd love to start by asking you just for our audience to describe your background of what you've been doing most recently with Pivot US.

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Sure. So 20 year career,

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I think the common theme or steel thread across that career is it's been spent working with big companies that are in industries at inflection points,

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trying to figure out new ways to be relevant to their customers.

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So everything from the music industry, financial services, oil and gas, healthcare, aviation.

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I've been lucky enough to get to spend time in a lot of verticals and observe the repeating patterns in those in those verticals.

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Two years or two and a half years ago now, I was the co-founder of Pivot Adventures Ventures,

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which was set up as a subsidiary of a bank with a fairly broad mandate to think about the future of financial services.

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And how does a regional community bank fit within that future, and how do they remain relevant to their to their customers?

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So we had to be able to dive into to what you did.

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And it's a really exciting sort of solution that you've been talking to us here for a couple of days now, which has been great.

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But just to kind of go macro to begin with, what is the threat that banks are facing and kind of in you know,

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we always like to try and take like a layperson's explanation to this.

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So how would you for those of those not familiar with banking, how would you characterise them?

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I think the biggest existential threat and uh, um, my colleagues at Umpqua talked about this a lot is, is the idea of relevance.

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And so banks used to be very relevant to their customers, right?

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They had a product that was absolutely necessary. But in a lot of ways the product has become transactional wise, it's become commoditized.

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And we see the effects of that with things like distributed ledger blockchain.

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So what is the role of a bank in a world where maybe the store of value isn't a checking account or a savings account, it's distributed ledger.

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So I think the biggest threat is how do you, as an incumbent organisation, stay relevant in that world?

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What services or experiences do you need to deliver to the consumer to maintain that relationship and if anything,

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expand that relationship into the 21st century? I think that's the the biggest question that lots of smart people are thinking about.

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And one of the things that has struck me listening to you talk about this story

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is it's really interesting that that insight came from which you might expect.

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And I wasn't familiar with them before because I'm from the UK, but they seem to have had a really strong relationship already with their customers.

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So you might have thought they might be, I guess, complacent around that, but they seem not to have been, which is interesting.

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And I think, you know, that's that's a pattern that I see over and over again.

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So transformation kind of recognition of that existential threat seems to be something that needs to happen from the top down.

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I think you need to have an enlightened executive team.

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I think you need to have an enlightened board of directors who recognises that it's not business as usual.

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Sometimes it is, but in certain cases it's not. And that's more art than science.

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Figuring out if you're facing an existential threat, and when you do figure out that you're facing one, the question is, what do you do?

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How do you respond? Right. I think Mark Francesca talks a little bit about this.

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I think sometimes when you when you pursue an average strategy, you get a below average result.

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If if you're facing an existential threat, doing what everybody else is doing, Nina delivered you the lifeboat that you need.

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And what we saw at Umpqua Bank was an executive team led by Ray Davis at that point, who recognised that the nature of banking was changing.

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There was a board of directors behind him who recognised the nature of banking was changing and they were willing to,

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to put the organisation out there, allocate resources, allocate data and create a team which was essentially a moonshot team.

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The mandate was go figure out how to pivot the bank. Great need us.

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Right. So the the idea was, you know, I need you to pivot us, right.

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Because that's where it comes. Yeah. So. So that's very cool. I got an amazing individual and he likes to name things what they do.

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Right. So it's not it's not I.T. It's the Technology Advancement Group, right?

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It's not it's not the Umpqua Digital Ventures Lab.

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It's Pivot. It Ventures. Right. Because he needed us to pivot, pivot the bank.

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And that big, bold, decisive mandate really kind of fundamentally altered our way of how we looked at the opportunity and how we thought about,

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all right, what does it mean to truly pivot a regional community bank, a $25 billion bank?

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How do we protect. How do we prepare them for the next 100 years of growth in the financial services sector?

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So there's some really interesting strategy questions which you've kind of raised that,

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but I'd like to sort of take it's through quickly kind of what you did with practice and some of the solutions you came up with.

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Sure. So, you know, I think one of the one of the fascinating parts of business for me is the one that was set

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up that that was an accomplishment there in credit to raise the board for doing that.

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I think the next credit goes to Ray and the board for.

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So this organisation was set up in September 2015. And what they did at that point was Ray left us alone.

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He gave us the headspace of 4 to 5 months to go figure out what is the future of banking look like when when we were brought in,

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myself and my partner, Arne Goldschmidt. We were told, you need to go this, you need to go do that, or this is what the future is, go build that.

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We were given the flexibility to build our own investment thesis and that's what we did.

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And to build that thesis, we went in, we spoke to employees in the bank, we spoke to other start-ups, we spoke to consumers.

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And in that period of time where we had the freedom to explore the opportunity space, we started to develop this really interesting thesis.

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So Umpqua has always been an organisation that prioritised customer experience and the community.

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The challenge for us was that community and customer experience was tied to the physical store of the branch network.

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When you go into the store, it was it was fantastic. They give you coffee, you could go work at the store.

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It was a very pleasant experience. But we all know that footfall traffic is down across the industry.

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People don't go into stores anymore. And that's an existential threat if you're a regional community bank.

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Because what we saw was there's no way, there was no way to deliver that same kind of personalised experience through a digital channel,

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that connection with the customer, to let the customer know that they're special.

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We know who they are and we're here to have their back. So we started to build out a thesis that says, Let's think about how we go backwards.

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To go forwards, let's think about can we use technology to engineer the human back into the customer relationship?

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Can we do that at scale? Can we use the human for what the human is good at, which is empathy, disambiguation, connection with the consumer,

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and use technology and data and analytics for what it's good at, which is putting patterns, tracking, understanding, context.

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And if you put those two together, we came up with this really idea of human digital banking that's banking with a human touch.

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And if you can get back to that right, if you can get back to that relationship with the customer,

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that unlocks new ways to be relevant for the customer.

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And that's what we've we've been focussed on for the last two and a half years and it's resulted in us.

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Yeah. So it's resulted in a product called the Pivot Engage platform.

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You didn't come up with the best financial firm. This financial friend was a was a joke.

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Rates like we're sitting around the table thinking about what we name this like really it's it's your boyfriend.

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It's somebody who has your back. It's somebody who can turn to you and ask any question at all in a non-judgmental way.

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And this person's here to help you. And it was one of those things where I was tossed out by my partner as a joke,

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and and it just stuck because there is no better way to explain what it was.

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So to the customer, they seem to be at that, that which is your best financial friends.

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The platform behind that is called the Engage platform.

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And the idea with the Engage platform is really about delivering customer intimacy at scale.

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It's about catalysing 1 to 1 connections between the customer and somebody who works for the bank, who's there to have that consumers back,

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who's there to help them through good times and bad, which is what a banker used to be 20 years ago.

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We're just using technology to deliver that through the channel. Today it's a digital channel,

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and this is a proposition that's uniquely tailored for regional community banks because that's how they've always, always competed.

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It may not be the right solution for the top five, top ten banks, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank.

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This might not fit within their customer engagement portfolio,

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but it certainly fits within the portfolio of a bank that prioritises customer engagement at a very deep level,

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and that tends to be community banks that do that. So and you've had a really interesting reaction from other people in other locations.

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So nationwide I saw that Credit Union of Australia.

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Yeah, and I think a couple of others. So clearly this is this is not something that's just quiet.

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It's having a wider resonance. Yeah. So and how we got to that point was really interesting.

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So we got started here, Ray. Ray gave us this amazingly broad, powerful mandate to figure out how to pivot the bank.

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Right? So that was the first thing he said. And then the second thing he said was, I want you to cooperate.

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I want you to go out there and I want you to. Find like minded organisations who we're going to work with to figure out the future.

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And. And at first we kind of looked at them with this confused face because we're like, Why?

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Like, why? Why would they work with us? Why? Why would they give us capital to create new technologies?

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And. And what Ray understood and we did at that time was that if you're a bank, regardless of where you are, whether you're here in the U.S.,

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you're in the U.K., you're in the Netherlands or you're Australia, you have the exact same problems for traffic is down.

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Your ability to be relevant through digital channels is waning,

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and there's an opportunity for banks to come together to solve shared problems in a non-competitive way.

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So very quickly, we were able to connect up with their friends from Nationwide Building Society DevOps Bank,

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which is the Netherlands, fourth largest bank, Credit Union Australia, which is Australia's largest credit union.

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And what we found is these are like minded institutions, institutions that care about the customers,

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who care about adding value to the customer's lives and not about just cross-sell and upsell.

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Right? It's about new ways to be relevant.

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And very quickly these organisations came together and for us as a, as a Start-Up with a mandate to think about pivoting the industry,

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to have four organisations across four geographies who are all helping you think through what does it need to do?

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What, what should the strategy be to engage with customers in new ways that that was that was magic for us, right?

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Because all of a sudden, you know, if you're a Start-Up, oftentimes you're off by yourself in Silicon Valley trying to solve really hard problems.

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But when you can get really close to a small number of incumbents, understand how they think about the world,

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how they think about the opportunity, and you start sharing ideas and learnings, that's when really exciting and magical things start to happen.

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And presumably that that closeness is a function of a slightly different Start-Up journey, right?

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Being funded from an incumbent rather than kind of out of grad school or, you know, some of the other stories that we had.

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And I think this is something so there's this emerging zeitgeist in Silicon Valley, which is we're entering the age of the big company.

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Right. So this idea that if you're a Start-Up, what do you need?

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You need data, you need distribution, you need customers, you need capital.

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Guess who has all of those things being companies, right?

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Banks have all of those things in spades. What they have challenges with is how do we move quickly?

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How do we validate ideas quickly? So there's an opportunity to think about how do you co-create new capabilities if you're a Start-Up?

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I'd much rather work with a company if if we can get around all the friction,

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all the transaction costs of working with a big company, like they're slow.

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Sometimes it takes a while to get contracts. If you can remove that.

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It's a really powerful combination because as the entrepreneur, you're allowed to create, right?

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What we had with Red iPhone was he gave us the mandate, give it the bank and don't worry about money.

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Go create. Go figure out what we need and do this.

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Uh, that's a very liberating mandate.

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Not having a venture capitalist behind the scenes on a quarterly basis, asking for updates,

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asking for what is product market fit look like, asking what's your monetisation strategy,

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having the leeway to explore the art of what's possible,

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and then an organisation and multiple organisations who will allow you to go explore that with their customers.

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That's valuable and I think the opportunity is to think about how do you formalise that?

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How do you put in place new governance structures,

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how do you remove the traditional transaction costs of working with big companies for a whole new generation of entrepreneurs?

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And if you can do that, there's this really interesting symbiotic relationship that develops between the corporation and the Start-Up Entrepreneur.

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I'd love to come back to that because I think that's a really interesting area to explore.

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But I just want to ask a couple of questions about the iPhone.

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And the first one was about kind of quality of relationships and what you maybe learn about human relationships online versus offline,

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because there is potentially what we think about social media,

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there is increasing kind of calls that the quality of relationships we have online are certainly nowhere near as good as the ones we have offline.

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And yeah, but it also aligned with that sort of research that shows that regardless of whether what you see on Facebook is positive or negative,

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it makes you feel equally bad. Yeah, I guess I was.

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Even if I feel superior or inferior, I ultimately filter.

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So what did you learn and the thing around what things people are happy to

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discuss with their BFFs online versus where they still want to go in the store?

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Yeah. So I think there was a. So early on.

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So Facebook released a white paper about millennials and money.

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They did a really interesting research on how millennials think about money.

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And one of the and we came across this paper, I think 2015, early 2016.

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And one of their observations is that 5050 1% of millennials don't have anybody to talk to about money.

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It's not their friends. It's not their family, and it's not their banker.

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And as a result, what would happen is people would make irrational decisions.

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Right. Rather than going into a branch and talk to somebody about money, which is uncomfortable, they may feel judged.

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They wouldn't do anything right. They wouldn't save for retirement. They wouldn't think about putting a budget in place.

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So we're like, that's a really interesting statistic, right?

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Money is this loaded topic. It's this taboo topic. Yet people need to talk to somebody about money, right?

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In America, most consumers are financially illiterate and that's a systems failure, right?

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Organisations like banks have failed their consumers. So like, how do we fix that?

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And we had this hypothesis that what if we could connect to a customer through a digital channel?

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What if we could? A consumer can connect with the same person over and over again?

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Wouldn't they develop a relationship? Wouldn't they develop a level of trust with that person?

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And if and if we can get to a trust based relationship, which is what banking was 20 years ago, 20 years ago, the banker knew your name.

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They were your neighbour. They knew your kids. They gave them a lollipop when they walked into the store.

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Right. And they were there for you in good times and bad.

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So we said, if we can get back to that kind of experience through a digital channel,

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if we can use technology to deliver that kind of experience at scale, that could be transformative.

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So we started down this path, and the first thing we did was we we recruited customers and we used WhatsApp and we said,

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look, we just want to talk to you for, for a couple of weeks. We want to talk to you about money.

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We want to talk about how you think about managing your finances. And we tried to help them in different ways.

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Some ways, we we help customers review their CVS.

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We help them think about how they should be planning their career.

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We help them think about, well, when was the last time you you got a raise and what are you currently earning?

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And let's benchmark against that. So we did really interesting things.

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And what we found is that consumers needed needed a friend.

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They needed somebody who, in a nudge judgemental way would be there to help them.

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So we did an experiment on WhatsApp. The results were from nominal.

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We went back to to Ray Davis on the board and we said, this is really interesting.

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We think there's an opportunity for you as a community bank to start taking that experience,

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which today is tied to your physical store and bring it into a digital channel.

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So, so we, we put the opportunity on the table and he said, yes.

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And he said, Great, let's, let's run some experiments. Let's, let's create a facility in our Portland market.

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Let's find our best associates in Portland and bring them in one place.

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Then say your job now is to engage with customers, to chat with customers through through this application.

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And let's see what happened. And what happened was consumers loved it, right?

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Consumers like I don't have anybody to help me and talking to the same person over and over again, they started to trust us.

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And and this really interesting thing happened. They started to proactively reach out without us pushing notifications to them.

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They open up the app and say, Hey, I'm thinking about this, or I'm having some issues with that.

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Can you help me with that? And that was the magic moment, right?

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We're like, this is what banking was 20 years ago and this is what it's going to be 20 years from now.

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That bank is going to help the consumers and that's going to weather a lot of technology shifts that we're starting to see.

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So, I mean, I think maybe that that last thing is just giving me a bit more of an insight,

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which is that the fundamental shift between an app, because, I mean, all banks have apps, right?

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I mean, everyone asks for that, that they're organised around the banking services,

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they're not organised around where my money concerns are or you know, the fact I'm a student and I'm like, that's going to be horrendous.

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And yeah, sure, but, but consumers don't think about the world and products, right?

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Consumer. Nobody wants a home mortgage. They want a home.

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Nobody wants an auto loan. They want a car. Right.

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So the way bankers, banks have traditionally thought about products is not the way consumers think about it.

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And and the journey that a consumer takes to get to a mortgage, to get to an auto loan.

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It turns out that's really important. Right. So right now, that journey involves going to Google and searching for things on Google.

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Not sure what you're reading is is the best advice for you.

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Right? So there's lots of uncertainty with that because everybody is trying to sell something to consumers nowadays.

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Right. Google has an ad driven model. Facebook has an ad driven model.

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What pops to the top of that? That list isn't necessarily what's right for the consumer.

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That's what whoever paid the most money gets to the top of that list.

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So what we seen is consumers are looking for somebody, an organisation who has their back,

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somebody who isn't constantly trying to cross up some new products, but saying but asking, where are you?

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What can we help you with? And and authentically trying to do the right thing for them.

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There were examples for us where consumers were coming in and asking for loans of specific order, size, sizes of lot of loans.

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And we sat down with them.

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We're like, Look, we can get you approved, but the amount of money you're asking for, I'm not sure that's the smartest thing for you.

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So let's, let's, let's map out our trajectory here. This is a really nice car, but what's where should we start?

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And let's talk about how you should be responsibly managing your money and and

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growing and growing in proportion to your roles and how your career develops.

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And quite honestly, consumers don't hear that very often. Consumers don't hear that.

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Oh, well, they told me maybe I should do something. And that was refreshing.

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And for us, it allows us to stand out and it got consumers attention.

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Yeah. So it feels like banking is not the only industry where this kind of approach might work.

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I mean, the one that springs instantly to mind is insurance. Yeah,

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but where you have the kind of power differential between a big organisation where there's

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a lot of kind of computer says no activity and then kind of mass groups of consumers.

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I mean, are you excited by looking at any other kind of industries at this point?

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Yeah, so insurance is fascinating, right?

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So if you look at the insurance industry, they're probably not what I see here.

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But I like industries in transformation and strategy.

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Strategy, if you look at insurance, are probably 5 to 7 years behind the banking industry at this point.

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The there's an opportunity for industry incumbents to look at what happened in financial services,

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to look at what happened in other industries like the music industry.

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Did it, quite frankly, do a good job of responding to technology disruption and say, what's our path forward?

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Let's let's think of a more considered and responsible strategy to think about how we discover the new with the new.

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Because, quite frankly, existing innovation labs, a lot of our existing initiatives don't deliver the kind of strategic uplift we need.

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So I like insurance. I like oil and gas, I like aviation, I like transportation, I like health care.

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Right? These are all industries where you have lots of entrenched incumbents and you have shifting consumer expectations.

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And anywhere you have kind of the these kinds of forces at play, there's the need to think about reinvention.

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And I think that's where interesting things are going to happen in the future.

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I think we're going to see much more progressive policies around partnerships, Start-Up engagement,

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moving beyond kind of the tools we have today, which are things like corporate venture capital accelerators like Y Combinator and Techstars.

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These have been great tools for the last ten years, but I think they need to evolve for the next 10 to 20 years.

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Great. So I just want to kind of maybe do a little bit of future gazing building on that.

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So specifically around finance and where we started, it's you know, one could imagine that you talked about how the biggest banks,

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the Jp morgan's, the Lloyds, HSBC, etc., couldn't take the kind of BFR properties approach.

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And that's kind of understandable. Why not? But how are those biggest players going to transform and kind of meet the threats to the future?

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Are they going to be able to because just kind of finish the thought,

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it feels like actually the levels of choice switching kind of some of the power that as consumers we might be able to take back.

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Those don't none of those feel like bad things that is coming from from from where I'm sitting.

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So how do we kind of find it, find a way forward in the future where both banks and consumers can kind of meet happily in the middle?

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So I think it's I think it's interesting what's happening in the market, especially in Europe.

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Right. Because I think European regulators have been very progressive about using regulation to nudge the industry in new directions.

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So things like PSG to the Payment Services Directive, too, which is forcing banks to open up APIs.

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But these are fundamentally these these regulations are reconfiguring the way industries and companies work.

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Right. They're forcing them to open up. And now banks need to think about how do we compete based on based on exchange.

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So how does this play out? Right.

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I think you have a small number of very large organisations who evolve into a model which is a balance sheet on demand.

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If you're RBC, if you're Jp morgan, you have a massive balance sheet that needs to get deployed,

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that needs to get deployed and new consumer experiences.

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Some of those consumer experiences will be created by you. Some of them will be created by Start-ups.

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So I think this idea of this balance sheet on demand is something that works really well for large, large institutions like Jp morgan Chase and RBC.

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At the same time,

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I think you see continued innovation around customer experience in the mid-market sector with fintech start-ups like neo challenger bank.

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So I think those entities continue to exist.

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I think they create new customer experiences that resonate and you just have a reconfiguration of the ecosystem.

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So there's, there's lots of concern of what this means for the industry, what this means for Start-ups.

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Quite frankly, I'm not that worried about it because if you look at other industries,

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say like the pharmaceutical industry, what you have there is you have an oligopoly structure.

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You have a small number of really large pharmaceutical companies that excel at taking drugs all the

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way through phase three trials into human testing and bringing them to market underneath them.

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You have this really rich ecosystem of companies that specialise in getting treatment to phase one,

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phase two trials, and a certain point they end up selling to those large, large incumbents.

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So I think we're entering this really interesting period where the financial services

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industry is going to develop in this really rich way that is good for consumers.

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We're going to see new experiences that are created. Some of them will get acquired by big banks.

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Some of them will stay independent. And I think that's okay.

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I think this is how you push an industry or nudge an industry forward in a way that is right and good for consumers.

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So if you were a you've spoken a bit in previous conversations around how the big banks have increasingly transactional ised services.

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And every time one hears about a kind of a new application or need to sort of put in the back of one's mind,

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you kind of think that's going to get rid of stuff like that's going to get rid of people.

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And I think the interesting approach about this is not necessarily automatically just getting rid of people,

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but I guess the question is it here is if I was a bank cashier right now,

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how would you be advising me to kind of hold onto my job in the next 20 years?

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Because that doesn't automatically look like a comfortable place to be.

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This is a conversation that I'm having.

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This is a conversation that DevOps banks you have nationwide, pretty much every bank is having this conversation.

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And I think what you see is the the the transactional services that can be automated will be depositing checks,

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you know, checking balances like those are things that can and probably should be done by a machine.

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And that's okay, great.

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Because what that does is it frees up to the human to focus on what they're good at, which is empathy, connection with the customer disambiguation.

364
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Right. Those are things that computers can't do today, right?

365
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A computer can't hold a fully conversant conversation with a customer.

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A computer can't express empathy in a way that human can express empathy.

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So I think the future is the fusion of these two. The human is is has a seat at the table and they deliver what they're good at,

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which is those qualities, the consumer, the computer tracks trends, right?

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It understands it patterns. And it's the fusion of these two, which I think is the future of the industry.

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So if I'm a teller and this is what we we speak about it, I'm quite right.

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The future of your job is really getting back to basics.

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It's helping our customers in ways that computers cannot help them today.

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And if you do that, there's a really interesting, impactful and purpose driven career that you're going to have.

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So one thing that really struck me looking at the BSF platform was the the employees are called bankers on it.

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And I can't remember the last time I went into a bank and saw someone with a name tag as a banker that was like customer assistant or kind of,

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you know, some like meaningless job title that means nothing but kind of indicates they have no power.

377
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Whereas Banker sounds very powerful. So technically in the stores they're called associates.

378
00:36:36,280 --> 00:36:40,780
Okay, so and on the platform, this could be attached to best financial friends.

379
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And you know, one interesting thing that the Umpqua has done for a long time now is created this idea of the universal associate,

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the idea of the generalist in the store. So a universal associate in the store should be able to help any customer with any query that comes in.

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So in a lot of ways,

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I'm quite has kind of fought that push to specialisation by saying everybody that works into this in the stores needs to be able to serve customers.

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Turns out that's really convenient for us to be able to take that that universal associate who was already already a generalist.

384
00:37:16,180 --> 00:37:22,389
And when you give them a new channel to engage with customers, they can do everything that the that the customer customer needs.

385
00:37:22,390 --> 00:37:30,730
So I think there is a role for those those generalists and those generalists really become a gateway into the organisation.

386
00:37:30,730 --> 00:37:37,270
So if you need a mortgage rate, those generally speaking become your, your, your guide.

387
00:37:37,790 --> 00:37:40,919
You need to talk to Suzy, who's a mortgage loan officer,

388
00:37:40,920 --> 00:37:48,770
because she specialises in in mortgages for entrepreneurs where there's not this regular revenue, this regular income stream, and you have it.

389
00:37:48,810 --> 00:37:54,300
And in some ways it might be a non-conforming loan. Like all of a sudden, you could do interesting things and,

390
00:37:54,540 --> 00:37:58,440
and your beef is still at the centre of that and making sure you're getting the service you need.

391
00:37:58,740 --> 00:38:07,020
And you can now start adding specialists into that. And, and the beef issue when you're window into that, which is how it's always been from.

392
00:38:07,620 --> 00:38:09,480
We're just doing it digitally now.

393
00:38:10,140 --> 00:38:18,060
So I want to switch tacks and just with your kind of alumnus and I guess entrepreneur and temporary semi permanent resident.

394
00:38:18,570 --> 00:38:24,430
I don't I think just reflecting back on your journey from seed and now coming back to see that.

395
00:38:24,690 --> 00:38:26,069
I'd love to get, I guess, your thoughts.

396
00:38:26,070 --> 00:38:32,350
You spent a few days here now and sort of how you finding it and kind of how does it feel different similarly.

397
00:38:32,930 --> 00:38:43,140
So so when I was here in 0708 and if you were graduating in 2008, that was probably about the worst time to be graduating with an MBA.

398
00:38:45,000 --> 00:38:49,970
So I was always interested in new technologies, new companies.

399
00:38:49,980 --> 00:38:53,940
So when I was here, I was really interested in a career in venture capital.

400
00:38:53,940 --> 00:38:59,880
And obviously, as the financial crisis hit, those those opportunities largely dried up.

401
00:39:00,510 --> 00:39:06,989
So I made a strategic decision. I want it to go deep in an area that was going to be important to to the future.

402
00:39:06,990 --> 00:39:12,240
So I ended up in Ireland working for a large government funded research centre.

403
00:39:13,260 --> 00:39:19,229
We had about 120 researchers, Ph.D. level researchers, doing foundational work on data and analytics.

404
00:39:19,230 --> 00:39:26,670
And I spent six years there and my job was to be the bridge between our brilliant academics and large companies Microsoft,

405
00:39:26,670 --> 00:39:30,060
IBM, Symantec, who had really hard problems they needed to solve.

406
00:39:30,750 --> 00:39:36,840
And my team sat at the centre and helped translate between those two constituent constituencies.

407
00:39:37,230 --> 00:39:48,950
And for me, that was a six year Ph.D. in data and analytics, and it was a fantastic foundation for me and how I thought about building my career,

408
00:39:48,960 --> 00:39:55,950
because out of that, out of Ireland, I ended up at an early stage fund in the U.S. and that led me to to pivot.

409
00:39:56,050 --> 00:40:03,720
So you may have this this ideal trajectory that you have at a business school, but but like me,

410
00:40:04,110 --> 00:40:13,530
I think it's important to be able to adapt to emerging market conditions and continually think about what role gives

411
00:40:13,530 --> 00:40:19,829
me a unique perspective or unique capability that I'm going to be able to deploy over an extended period of time.

412
00:40:19,830 --> 00:40:25,500
And that's what I got into in Ireland. So thankfully I think we're in slightly better market conditions today.

413
00:40:25,500 --> 00:40:31,620
So I think graduates have work more opportunities, but that's the way I've always, always thought about my career.

414
00:40:32,490 --> 00:40:37,670
One thing I think that's different today among the students here is, you know,

415
00:40:37,710 --> 00:40:48,630
I think Oxford as a university is this amazing place that has so much into intellectual capital, locked up in in the walls of all of our colleges.

416
00:40:49,110 --> 00:40:58,230
And and if I'm a student today, that's a rich hunting ground for me to go out there and engage with the broader the broader university,

417
00:40:58,680 --> 00:41:03,930
not only just to go out and find a start-up to to launch out of the university,

418
00:41:04,650 --> 00:41:16,320
but to but to understand the deep breadth of experiences and ideas in a university like this and think about maybe applying them in new ways, right?

419
00:41:16,320 --> 00:41:24,870
So earlier this week, I was up at the mathematics department meeting with the professor up there who previously has done a Start-Up that

420
00:41:24,870 --> 00:41:32,880
was using algorithms to assess the credit worthiness of UN and underbanked populations in Africa and South America.

421
00:41:33,780 --> 00:41:37,379
Fascinating conversation with this mathematics professor,

422
00:41:37,380 --> 00:41:45,080
because we have a new set of problems that we have problems around fake news and propagation of fake news through networks.

423
00:41:45,090 --> 00:41:50,549
So I had this wide ranging conversations about can you potentially take some of those core

424
00:41:50,550 --> 00:41:56,280
ideas around measuring trust and credit worthiness that you applied in the banking context?

425
00:41:56,280 --> 00:42:00,200
And can we then apply them within the context of fake news?

426
00:42:00,210 --> 00:42:07,140
Can we use those algorithms to think about can you track propagation of fake news and and think about trust in that in that network?

427
00:42:08,100 --> 00:42:18,210
Oxford is one of the few places where you can have that kind of conversation with one of the world's leading experts on trust and and identity.

428
00:42:19,470 --> 00:42:26,130
And if there's anything I would leave the students with, it's to take take advantage of that, because when you leave,

429
00:42:26,850 --> 00:42:36,450
you all of a sudden certain of life's practicalities kick in and your opportunity to diverge, to explore starts to be limited in some ways.

430
00:42:36,600 --> 00:42:42,010
Yeah. I think that's amazing. And thank you so much for joining us for the conversation today.

431
00:42:42,070 --> 00:42:46,630
I really enjoyed it. Appreciate it. And when I say thanks.

432
00:42:58,990 --> 00:43:01,990
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Feature Business Podcast.

433
00:43:02,530 --> 00:43:07,420
Next time we dig into both sides of the cryptocurrency debate with two MBA students,

434
00:43:07,870 --> 00:43:11,890
are there dangers, fad or a quick way to make $1,000,000,000,000 or both?

435
00:43:12,220 --> 00:43:16,510
The Future Business Podcast is brought to you by Patrick, Michael and Brady, Paris and Emily.

436
00:43:16,690 --> 00:43:19,900
Please subscribe in iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

437
00:43:20,140 --> 00:43:27,480
Thank you for listening and goodbye. All.