We see the effects of that with things like distributed ledger blockchain.
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.
So I think the biggest threat is how do you, as an incumbent organisation, stay relevant in that world?
By not having enough work.
Climate change funded by a shortage.
Energy transition. Large scale social disorder.
Antibiotic resistant diseases. Education. Employment.
Quantum computing. How many of us remember having a personal banker or can afford to have a personal banker?
The traditional model of banks as a store of value and source of liquidity and of
bankers as trusted personal financial advisors is under threat like never before.
We discussed the range of these threats with McClaren, an MBA student,
and then look at how one bank in America is finding opportunities amongst the threats with Steve Goss,
former CEO and co-founder of Pivot is the innovation arm of Oncor Bank.
If you were to lay out the fintech landscape to someone who wasn't an expert,
just hypothetically speaking, how would you how would you characterise it now?
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.
If you think about any financial product that you have, such as a loan, simple bank account,
transferring money to someone across borders, there's a technology or a system or a platform behind that.
Right? So fintech is basically looking at applying technologies, specifically new technologies, to improve those processes.
Right. So it can be on the front end getting a better experience from your bank.
What challenger banks are doing like Monzo.
It can be on the back end, looking at the way payments are structured and transfers looking out using blockchain technology.
Behind that, there's a whole different range of applications because technology's always been kind of behind banks.
That kind of system behind how banks work.
But it's never been that good in terms of banking, has never been technology focussed.
Right. And that's kind of that's kind of is that because because as you were just talking,
I was thinking, well, if you characterise it like that actually all banking is fintech.
I mean there's right there's no pretty much there's no banking that can happen without.
Yeah. So on somebody like technology. But then, you know,
what is it about new technologies that are doing something different now that
wasn't possible before rather than just making something faster or better? Yeah, I think it's there's a few things.
One is the advent of certain types of technologies are really proving to be revolutionary and applicable to banking demand around data science,
around platforms, around mobile apps and technology that immediately can give a service to a consumer.
Blockchain technology technologies.
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.
On the flipside, banks have looked at their models, and especially after the crisis,
they've looked at that the way they operate and and understood that is not sustainable.
So the banking side has looked at that and also the regulatory side has really
looked at how banks work and looked at this and are where we are even today,
where most banks dominate the retail banking.
You know, there's five or six banks in the UK dominate the retail banking landscape.
Is that competitive? Is that that's to consumer regulators have looked to actually actively change.
So it's got a few moving parts but it's largely been driven I think personally I think by the
strength of technologies that have come through and shown a real applicability to financial products.
FinTech is often talked about in relation to retail banking and can you providing better consumer products?
Monzo, for example, TransferWise, on the other side of banking, you know,
providing liquidity credits to businesses is that any moves on that side where Fenty fintech is making a difference?
I think on that side it's almost more interesting because the path to profitability is a lot easier.
Okay. I have to a big issue with the retail side and challenger banks like Monzo said that they're well funded.
They can do a marketing, they can build up their customer base, but that's expensive, right?
Building up a huge customer base from scratch is very expensive.
The cost of customer acquisition is is upwards of £250.
So how do you match that with a product that's not immediately making more money?
That business model is to gradually, you know, develop that product suite and to start to make money from it.
It's, you know, that cost the profit. The business is long. Mm hmm.
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.
So in the in the part of banking I used to work in, one of the products was all around trade finance.
Mm hmm. And you're seeing a lot of applications of blockchain technology around that because the is still used today.
But the system of lesser credits are just guaranteeing a payment from someone who wants to ship a product abroad.
Used to be done and still is in some parts of the world with fax machines.
Right. Right. So people would fax a document saying this kid or product has arrived at a port on the sun.
Your letter to verify that same goods in the next step and that supply chain with that process.
And that's been the kind of default way the product works.
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.
Because I applied for a TransferWise account the other day,
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.
It's incredible, right? From a customer point of view, it's incredible.
But from a kind of does anyone understand the models they're using to be able to produce that enough to regulate them?
Yeah, I think so.
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.
You can't just start us out of this and then start selling financial products,
but they're doing it in a way that one is looking to protect the individual investor or consumer,
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.
Following my conversation with Alec, I caught up with Steve Gotts,
entrepreneur and occasional residents and ASPs alumnus, to hear about how he futureproof to one West Coast Bank.
You have to stay, hopefully to cover some of the future finance topics, which is great.
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.
Sure. So 20 year career,
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,
trying to figure out new ways to be relevant to their customers.
So everything from the music industry, financial services, oil and gas, healthcare, aviation.
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.
Two years or two and a half years ago now, I was the co-founder of Pivot Adventures Ventures,
which was set up as a subsidiary of a bank with a fairly broad mandate to think about the future of financial services.
And how does a regional community bank fit within that future, and how do they remain relevant to their to their customers?
So we had to be able to dive into to what you did.
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.
But just to kind of go macro to begin with, what is the threat that banks are facing and kind of in you know,
we always like to try and take like a layperson's explanation to this.
So how would you for those of those not familiar with banking, how would you characterise them?
I think the biggest existential threat and uh, um, my colleagues at Umpqua talked about this a lot is, is the idea of relevance.
And so banks used to be very relevant to their customers, right?
They had a product that was absolutely necessary. But in a lot of ways the product has become transactional wise, it's become commoditized.
And we see the effects of that with things like distributed ledger blockchain.
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.
So I think the biggest threat is how do you, as an incumbent organisation, stay relevant in that world?
What services or experiences do you need to deliver to the consumer to maintain that relationship and if anything,
expand that relationship into the 21st century? I think that's the the biggest question that lots of smart people are thinking about.
And one of the things that has struck me listening to you talk about this story
is it's really interesting that that insight came from which you might expect.
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.
So you might have thought they might be, I guess, complacent around that, but they seem not to have been, which is interesting.
And I think, you know, that's that's a pattern that I see over and over again.
So transformation kind of recognition of that existential threat seems to be something that needs to happen from the top down.
I think you need to have an enlightened executive team.
I think you need to have an enlightened board of directors who recognises that it's not business as usual.
Sometimes it is, but in certain cases it's not. And that's more art than science.
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?
How do you respond? Right. I think Mark Francesca talks a little bit about this.
I think sometimes when you when you pursue an average strategy, you get a below average result.
If if you're facing an existential threat, doing what everybody else is doing, Nina delivered you the lifeboat that you need.
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.
There was a board of directors behind him who recognised the nature of banking was changing and they were willing to,
to put the organisation out there, allocate resources, allocate data and create a team which was essentially a moonshot team.
The mandate was go figure out how to pivot the bank. Great need us.
Right. So the the idea was, you know, I need you to pivot us, right.
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.
Right. So it's not it's not I.T. It's the Technology Advancement Group, right?
It's not it's not the Umpqua Digital Ventures Lab.
It's Pivot. It Ventures. Right. Because he needed us to pivot, pivot the bank.
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,
all right, what does it mean to truly pivot a regional community bank, a $25 billion bank?
How do we protect. How do we prepare them for the next 100 years of growth in the financial services sector?
So there's some really interesting strategy questions which you've kind of raised that,
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.
Sure. So, you know, I think one of the one of the fascinating parts of business for me is the one that was set
up that that was an accomplishment there in credit to raise the board for doing that.
I think the next credit goes to Ray and the board for.
So this organisation was set up in September 2015. And what they did at that point was Ray left us alone.
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,
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.
We were given the flexibility to build our own investment thesis and that's what we did.
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.
And in that period of time where we had the freedom to explore the opportunity space, we started to develop this really interesting thesis.
So Umpqua has always been an organisation that prioritised customer experience and the community.
The challenge for us was that community and customer experience was tied to the physical store of the branch network.
When you go into the store, it was it was fantastic. They give you coffee, you could go work at the store.
It was a very pleasant experience. But we all know that footfall traffic is down across the industry.
People don't go into stores anymore. And that's an existential threat if you're a regional community bank.
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,
that connection with the customer, to let the customer know that they're special.
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.
To go forwards, let's think about can we use technology to engineer the human back into the customer relationship?
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,
and use technology and data and analytics for what it's good at, which is putting patterns, tracking, understanding, context.
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.
And if you can get back to that right, if you can get back to that relationship with the customer,
that unlocks new ways to be relevant for the customer.
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.
Yeah. So it's resulted in a product called the Pivot Engage platform.
You didn't come up with the best financial firm. This financial friend was a was a joke.
Rates like we're sitting around the table thinking about what we name this like really it's it's your boyfriend.
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.
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,
and and it just stuck because there is no better way to explain what it was.
So to the customer, they seem to be at that, that which is your best financial friends.
The platform behind that is called the Engage platform.
And the idea with the Engage platform is really about delivering customer intimacy at scale.
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,
who's there to help them through good times and bad, which is what a banker used to be 20 years ago.
We're just using technology to deliver that through the channel. Today it's a digital channel,
and this is a proposition that's uniquely tailored for regional community banks because that's how they've always, always competed.
It may not be the right solution for the top five, top ten banks, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank.
This might not fit within their customer engagement portfolio,
but it certainly fits within the portfolio of a bank that prioritises customer engagement at a very deep level,
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.
So nationwide I saw that Credit Union of Australia.
Yeah, and I think a couple of others. So clearly this is this is not something that's just quiet.
It's having a wider resonance. Yeah. So and how we got to that point was really interesting.
So we got started here, Ray. Ray gave us this amazingly broad, powerful mandate to figure out how to pivot the bank.
Right? So that was the first thing he said. And then the second thing he said was, I want you to cooperate.
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.
And. And at first we kind of looked at them with this confused face because we're like, Why?
Like, why? Why would they work with us? Why? Why would they give us capital to create new technologies?
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.,
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.
Your ability to be relevant through digital channels is waning,
and there's an opportunity for banks to come together to solve shared problems in a non-competitive way.
So very quickly, we were able to connect up with their friends from Nationwide Building Society DevOps Bank,
which is the Netherlands, fourth largest bank, Credit Union Australia, which is Australia's largest credit union.
And what we found is these are like minded institutions, institutions that care about the customers,
who care about adding value to the customer's lives and not about just cross-sell and upsell.
Right? It's about new ways to be relevant.
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,
to have four organisations across four geographies who are all helping you think through what does it need to do?
What, what should the strategy be to engage with customers in new ways that that was that was magic for us, right?
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.
But when you can get really close to a small number of incumbents, understand how they think about the world,
how they think about the opportunity, and you start sharing ideas and learnings, that's when really exciting and magical things start to happen.
And presumably that that closeness is a function of a slightly different Start-Up journey, right?
Being funded from an incumbent rather than kind of out of grad school or, you know, some of the other stories that we had.
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.
Right. So this idea that if you're a Start-Up, what do you need?
You need data, you need distribution, you need customers, you need capital.
Guess who has all of those things being companies, right?
Banks have all of those things in spades. What they have challenges with is how do we move quickly?
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?
I'd much rather work with a company if if we can get around all the friction,
all the transaction costs of working with a big company, like they're slow.
Sometimes it takes a while to get contracts. If you can remove that.
It's a really powerful combination because as the entrepreneur, you're allowed to create, right?
What we had with Red iPhone was he gave us the mandate, give it the bank and don't worry about money.
Go create. Go figure out what we need and do this.
Uh, that's a very liberating mandate.
Not having a venture capitalist behind the scenes on a quarterly basis, asking for updates,
asking for what is product market fit look like, asking what's your monetisation strategy,
having the leeway to explore the art of what's possible,
and then an organisation and multiple organisations who will allow you to go explore that with their customers.
That's valuable and I think the opportunity is to think about how do you formalise that?
How do you put in place new governance structures,
how do you remove the traditional transaction costs of working with big companies for a whole new generation of entrepreneurs?
And if you can do that, there's this really interesting symbiotic relationship that develops between the corporation and the Start-Up Entrepreneur.
I'd love to come back to that because I think that's a really interesting area to explore.
But I just want to ask a couple of questions about the iPhone.
And the first one was about kind of quality of relationships and what you maybe learn about human relationships online versus offline,
because there is potentially what we think about social media,
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.
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,
it makes you feel equally bad. Yeah, I guess I was.
Even if I feel superior or inferior, I ultimately filter.
So what did you learn and the thing around what things people are happy to
discuss with their BFFs online versus where they still want to go in the store?
Yeah. So I think there was a. So early on.
So Facebook released a white paper about millennials and money.
They did a really interesting research on how millennials think about money.
And one of the and we came across this paper, I think 2015, early 2016.
And one of their observations is that 5050 1% of millennials don't have anybody to talk to about money.
It's not their friends. It's not their family, and it's not their banker.
And as a result, what would happen is people would make irrational decisions.
Right. Rather than going into a branch and talk to somebody about money, which is uncomfortable, they may feel judged.
They wouldn't do anything right. They wouldn't save for retirement. They wouldn't think about putting a budget in place.
So we're like, that's a really interesting statistic, right?
Money is this loaded topic. It's this taboo topic. Yet people need to talk to somebody about money, right?
In America, most consumers are financially illiterate and that's a systems failure, right?
Organisations like banks have failed their consumers. So like, how do we fix that?
And we had this hypothesis that what if we could connect to a customer through a digital channel?
What if we could? A consumer can connect with the same person over and over again?
Wouldn't they develop a relationship? Wouldn't they develop a level of trust with that person?
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.
They were your neighbour. They knew your kids. They gave them a lollipop when they walked into the store.
Right. And they were there for you in good times and bad.
So we said, if we can get back to that kind of experience through a digital channel,
if we can use technology to deliver that kind of experience at scale, that could be transformative.
So we started down this path, and the first thing we did was we we recruited customers and we used WhatsApp and we said,
look, we just want to talk to you for, for a couple of weeks. We want to talk to you about money.
We want to talk about how you think about managing your finances. And we tried to help them in different ways.
Some ways, we we help customers review their CVS.
We help them think about how they should be planning their career.
We help them think about, well, when was the last time you you got a raise and what are you currently earning?
And let's benchmark against that. So we did really interesting things.
And what we found is that consumers needed needed a friend.
They needed somebody who, in a nudge judgemental way would be there to help them.
So we did an experiment on WhatsApp. The results were from nominal.
We went back to to Ray Davis on the board and we said, this is really interesting.
We think there's an opportunity for you as a community bank to start taking that experience,
which today is tied to your physical store and bring it into a digital channel.
So, so we, we put the opportunity on the table and he said, yes.
And he said, Great, let's, let's run some experiments. Let's, let's create a facility in our Portland market.
Let's find our best associates in Portland and bring them in one place.
Then say your job now is to engage with customers, to chat with customers through through this application.
And let's see what happened. And what happened was consumers loved it, right?
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.
And and this really interesting thing happened. They started to proactively reach out without us pushing notifications to them.
They open up the app and say, Hey, I'm thinking about this, or I'm having some issues with that.
Can you help me with that? And that was the magic moment, right?
We're like, this is what banking was 20 years ago and this is what it's going to be 20 years from now.
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.
So, I mean, I think maybe that that last thing is just giving me a bit more of an insight,
which is that the fundamental shift between an app, because, I mean, all banks have apps, right?
I mean, everyone asks for that, that they're organised around the banking services,
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.
And yeah, sure, but, but consumers don't think about the world and products, right?
Consumer. Nobody wants a home mortgage. They want a home.
Nobody wants an auto loan. They want a car. Right.
So the way bankers, banks have traditionally thought about products is not the way consumers think about it.
And and the journey that a consumer takes to get to a mortgage, to get to an auto loan.
It turns out that's really important. Right. So right now, that journey involves going to Google and searching for things on Google.
Not sure what you're reading is is the best advice for you.
Right? So there's lots of uncertainty with that because everybody is trying to sell something to consumers nowadays.
Right. Google has an ad driven model. Facebook has an ad driven model.
What pops to the top of that? That list isn't necessarily what's right for the consumer.
That's what whoever paid the most money gets to the top of that list.
So what we seen is consumers are looking for somebody, an organisation who has their back,
somebody who isn't constantly trying to cross up some new products, but saying but asking, where are you?
What can we help you with? And and authentically trying to do the right thing for them.
There were examples for us where consumers were coming in and asking for loans of specific order, size, sizes of lot of loans.
And we sat down with them.
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.
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?
And let's talk about how you should be responsibly managing your money and and
growing and growing in proportion to your roles and how your career develops.
And quite honestly, consumers don't hear that very often. Consumers don't hear that.
Oh, well, they told me maybe I should do something. And that was refreshing.
And for us, it allows us to stand out and it got consumers attention.
Yeah. So it feels like banking is not the only industry where this kind of approach might work.
I mean, the one that springs instantly to mind is insurance. Yeah,
but where you have the kind of power differential between a big organisation where there's
a lot of kind of computer says no activity and then kind of mass groups of consumers.
I mean, are you excited by looking at any other kind of industries at this point?
Yeah, so insurance is fascinating, right?
So if you look at the insurance industry, they're probably not what I see here.
But I like industries in transformation and strategy.
Strategy, if you look at insurance, are probably 5 to 7 years behind the banking industry at this point.
The there's an opportunity for industry incumbents to look at what happened in financial services,
to look at what happened in other industries like the music industry.
Did it, quite frankly, do a good job of responding to technology disruption and say, what's our path forward?
Let's let's think of a more considered and responsible strategy to think about how we discover the new with the new.
Because, quite frankly, existing innovation labs, a lot of our existing initiatives don't deliver the kind of strategic uplift we need.
So I like insurance. I like oil and gas, I like aviation, I like transportation, I like health care.
Right? These are all industries where you have lots of entrenched incumbents and you have shifting consumer expectations.
And anywhere you have kind of the these kinds of forces at play, there's the need to think about reinvention.
And I think that's where interesting things are going to happen in the future.
I think we're going to see much more progressive policies around partnerships, Start-Up engagement,
moving beyond kind of the tools we have today, which are things like corporate venture capital accelerators like Y Combinator and Techstars.
These have been great tools for the last ten years, but I think they need to evolve for the next 10 to 20 years.
Great. So I just want to kind of maybe do a little bit of future gazing building on that.
So specifically around finance and where we started, it's you know, one could imagine that you talked about how the biggest banks,
the Jp morgan's, the Lloyds, HSBC, etc., couldn't take the kind of BFR properties approach.
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?
Are they going to be able to because just kind of finish the thought,
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.
Those don't none of those feel like bad things that is coming from from from where I'm sitting.
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?
So I think it's I think it's interesting what's happening in the market, especially in Europe.
Right. Because I think European regulators have been very progressive about using regulation to nudge the industry in new directions.
So things like PSG to the Payment Services Directive, too, which is forcing banks to open up APIs.
But these are fundamentally these these regulations are reconfiguring the way industries and companies work.
Right. They're forcing them to open up. And now banks need to think about how do we compete based on based on exchange.
So how does this play out? Right.
I think you have a small number of very large organisations who evolve into a model which is a balance sheet on demand.
If you're RBC, if you're Jp morgan, you have a massive balance sheet that needs to get deployed,
that needs to get deployed and new consumer experiences.
Some of those consumer experiences will be created by you. Some of them will be created by Start-ups.
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.
At the same time,
I think you see continued innovation around customer experience in the mid-market sector with fintech start-ups like neo challenger bank.
So I think those entities continue to exist.
I think they create new customer experiences that resonate and you just have a reconfiguration of the ecosystem.
So there's, there's lots of concern of what this means for the industry, what this means for Start-ups.
Quite frankly, I'm not that worried about it because if you look at other industries,
say like the pharmaceutical industry, what you have there is you have an oligopoly structure.
You have a small number of really large pharmaceutical companies that excel at taking drugs all the
way through phase three trials into human testing and bringing them to market underneath them.
You have this really rich ecosystem of companies that specialise in getting treatment to phase one,
phase two trials, and a certain point they end up selling to those large, large incumbents.
So I think we're entering this really interesting period where the financial services
industry is going to develop in this really rich way that is good for consumers.
We're going to see new experiences that are created. Some of them will get acquired by big banks.
Some of them will stay independent. And I think that's okay.
I think this is how you push an industry or nudge an industry forward in a way that is right and good for consumers.
So if you were a you've spoken a bit in previous conversations around how the big banks have increasingly transactional ised services.
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,
you kind of think that's going to get rid of stuff like that's going to get rid of people.
And I think the interesting approach about this is not necessarily automatically just getting rid of people,
but I guess the question is it here is if I was a bank cashier right now,
how would you be advising me to kind of hold onto my job in the next 20 years?
Because that doesn't automatically look like a comfortable place to be.
This is a conversation that I'm having.
This is a conversation that DevOps banks you have nationwide, pretty much every bank is having this conversation.
And I think what you see is the the the transactional services that can be automated will be depositing checks,
you know, checking balances like those are things that can and probably should be done by a machine.
And that's okay, great.
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.
Right. Those are things that computers can't do today, right?
A computer can't hold a fully conversant conversation with a customer.
A computer can't express empathy in a way that human can express empathy.
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,
which is those qualities, the consumer, the computer tracks trends, right?
It understands it patterns. And it's the fusion of these two, which I think is the future of the industry.
So if I'm a teller and this is what we we speak about it, I'm quite right.
The future of your job is really getting back to basics.
It's helping our customers in ways that computers cannot help them today.
And if you do that, there's a really interesting, impactful and purpose driven career that you're going to have.
So one thing that really struck me looking at the BSF platform was the the employees are called bankers on it.
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,
you know, some like meaningless job title that means nothing but kind of indicates they have no power.
Whereas Banker sounds very powerful. So technically in the stores they're called associates.
Okay, so and on the platform, this could be attached to best financial friends.
And you know, one interesting thing that the Umpqua has done for a long time now is created this idea of the universal associate,
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.
So in a lot of ways,
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.
Turns out that's really convenient for us to be able to take that that universal associate who was already already a generalist.
And when you give them a new channel to engage with customers, they can do everything that the that the customer customer needs.
So I think there is a role for those those generalists and those generalists really become a gateway into the organisation.
So if you need a mortgage rate, those generally speaking become your, your, your guide.
You need to talk to Suzy, who's a mortgage loan officer,
because she specialises in in mortgages for entrepreneurs where there's not this regular revenue, this regular income stream, and you have it.
And in some ways it might be a non-conforming loan. Like all of a sudden, you could do interesting things and,
and your beef is still at the centre of that and making sure you're getting the service you need.
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.
We're just doing it digitally now.
So I want to switch tacks and just with your kind of alumnus and I guess entrepreneur and temporary semi permanent resident.
I don't I think just reflecting back on your journey from seed and now coming back to see that.
I'd love to get, I guess, your thoughts.
You spent a few days here now and sort of how you finding it and kind of how does it feel different similarly.
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.
So I was always interested in new technologies, new companies.
So when I was here, I was really interested in a career in venture capital.
And obviously, as the financial crisis hit, those those opportunities largely dried up.
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.
So I ended up in Ireland working for a large government funded research centre.
We had about 120 researchers, Ph.D. level researchers, doing foundational work on data and analytics.
And I spent six years there and my job was to be the bridge between our brilliant academics and large companies Microsoft,
IBM, Symantec, who had really hard problems they needed to solve.
And my team sat at the centre and helped translate between those two constituent constituencies.
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,
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.
So you may have this this ideal trajectory that you have at a business school, but but like me,
I think it's important to be able to adapt to emerging market conditions and continually think about what role gives
me a unique perspective or unique capability that I'm going to be able to deploy over an extended period of time.
And that's what I got into in Ireland. So thankfully I think we're in slightly better market conditions today.
So I think graduates have work more opportunities, but that's the way I've always, always thought about my career.
One thing I think that's different today among the students here is, you know,
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.
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,
not only just to go out and find a start-up to to launch out of the university,
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?
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
was using algorithms to assess the credit worthiness of UN and underbanked populations in Africa and South America.
Fascinating conversation with this mathematics professor,
because we have a new set of problems that we have problems around fake news and propagation of fake news through networks.
So I had this wide ranging conversations about can you potentially take some of those core
ideas around measuring trust and credit worthiness that you applied in the banking context?
And can we then apply them within the context of fake news?
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?
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.
And if there's anything I would leave the students with, it's to take take advantage of that, because when you leave,
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.
Yeah. I think that's amazing. And thank you so much for joining us for the conversation today.
I really enjoyed it. Appreciate it. And when I say thanks.
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Feature Business Podcast.
Next time we dig into both sides of the cryptocurrency debate with two MBA students,
are there dangers, fad or a quick way to make $1,000,000,000,000 or both?
The Future Business Podcast is brought to you by Patrick, Michael and Brady, Paris and Emily.
Please subscribe in iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
Thank you for listening and goodbye. All.