21 Jul, 2026
Commercial banking is changing fast, and the institutions winning aren't waiting for things to settle. In this episode, recorded live at Q2's CONNECT 26 customer conference, treasury and payments leaders from Associated Bank, Columbia Bank, First Citizens Bank, and Atlantic Union Bank talk through client expectations, payments modernization, embedded banking, AI, fraud, and what a best-in-class treasury sales team looks like.
Listen
Subscribe
.png?width=255&height=116&name=Spotify_white_bg%20(1).png)
Related Links
[Blog] One Platform, No Ceiling: Q2's Approach to Commercial and SMB Banking
[Blog] The End of Double Entry in Commercial Banking
Transcript
Cheryl Brown
Hello, and welcome to The Purposeful Banker, the podcast brought to you by Q2, where we discuss the big topics on the minds of today's best bankers. I'm Cheryl Brown. Welcome to the show.
Today's episode is a little different from our usual format. What you're about to hear is a recorded panel session from Q2's CONNECT 26 customer conference that we held in June, and it's one worth sharing beyond the room it happened in.
The session is called Thriving Through Disruption: Digital Strategies for a Changing Market, and it covers a lot of ground in small business and commercial banking, including topics like customer expectations, payments modernization, embedded banking, AI, and fraud prevention.
Q2’s Dean Jenkins moderates the conversation with Eric Lien of Associated Bank, Kathryn Albright of Columbia Bank, Matt Ribbens of First Citizens Bank, and Rob Noon of Atlantic Union Bank.
I think you'll find a lot to take back to your own institution. Let's get into it.
Dean Jenkins
Good morning. Welcome to the first session in the small business and commercial track.
Before I kick it off and meet the panelists, just a couple of things of what's going on in the market. Seventy nine percent. Seventy nine percent of small businesses said that they expect their financial institution to bring personal experiences to their business based on a recent data insights survey.
In a recent Visa survey, 33% of businesses that had revenue between $100 million and $1 billion, so the upper end of the middle market, said that they expect their financial institution to bring them tailored solutions that align with their needs.
This is a significant change in customer expectations. There's just a lot of change going on and a lot … if you were in the in the keynote this morning, you heard Kirk in the and the product team talking about all the change that's going on within the market including client expectations, changes from technology, changes where AI is going to have an impact, changes in payment capability. All that makes for a wild wild west market right now, especially in commercial banking.
So, we're going to talk about all that. We're going talk about the change in the customer expectations, the impact that technology has on that, and we have an amazing panel of leaders from some of the largest banks in the U.S. I'm really excited to have them tell their story and opine on some of the things that are going on in the market.
And with that, welcome panel. Glad you guys are here. Before we jump in, why don't you guys all tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your role at your financial institution.
Sure. You want to start off?
Eric Lien
Yeah. Good morning, everyone. Eric Lien. I'm responsible for the treasury management business and commercial client experience at Associated Bank. We're a $50 billion asset bank in the upper Midwest, but we just actually opened our first commercial office in the great state of Texas in Dallas about a month ago, which is really exciting.
I'm actually really excited to share the stage with my fellow colleagues over here who I've known or collaborated with for the past year or in some cases 20 years almost. So yeah. Thank you for having us.
Dean Jenkins
Yeah. Great.
Kathryn Albright
Thanks, Dean. Thanks, Eric. I’m Kathryn Albright. I'm with Columbia Bank. I lead our global payments and deposits group, which is really treasury and all payments across the franchise, sales, onboarding implementation, and experience, as well as some specialty deposits teams.
So like Eric, I'm very excited to be here. We're a $70 billion bank on the West Coast, headquartered in the Pacific Northwest.
Matt Ribbens
Hey. Good morning, everyone. I'm Matt Ribbons with First Citizens Bank. I joined the bank in 2019 where we're about $50 billion. And since then, we've been fairly acquisitive. We're up to $220 billion, and we've rode the way with Q2. So it's been great.
But I have responsibility for all of our treasury payment products and services. So all of the payables, receivables. Formerly commercial card was under my group, and we realigned some of that with some of the acquisitions and organizational changes. But been with the bank for just coming up on seven years now.
Rob Noon
And I'm Rob Noon. I'm with Atlantic Union Bank out of Richmond. We are a $38 billion bank, and my primary responsibilities are treasury management. I lead all the functions within treasury management, the enterprise payment strategy, and the commercial deposit strategy.
Dean Jenkins
Awesome. Well, welcome everyone. Rob, I'm going to start with you and, you know, I was talking a little bit about the changes in customer expectations and where it's not just, hey, let me use the traditional banking functions. It's more about how do the financial institutions bring the right solutions back to the market to meet those expectations. But let's jump in and talk about what are the newer expectations of your customers that you're hearing in the market.
Rob Noon
So for the benefit of the audience, our sweet spot are those business clients anywhere from $50 million to $100 million in revenue across most C&I verticals.
Well, hearing really three things. One is embedded banking, you know, meet me where I do business. I've invested in these platforms. I want to maximize these platforms. I don't want to log into yours unless I have to.
We are a Q2 bank, both consumer and digital and enterprise bank. When they do log into the digital experience, they expect it to be simple and easy like their consumer experience. So we hear that regularly.
Then third, you heard a lot about in the opening session, and when we're doing it, protect us from fraud. Those are the three things we hear on a regular basis.
Dean Jenkins
Yeah. And definitely fraud is a hot topic for everyone, and that one has really emerged over the last couple of years. Kathryn, I know you have heard different client expectations coming in as well around payment services and other things. If you look at the last three years, what are some of the things that you're hearing in the market?
Kathryn Albright
Yeah. Thanks, Dean. The change has been significant. Just like your opening comments, just the amount of change over the last three years, I think we can all agree, has been monumental.
At Columbia, we really focus though on the client. Right? So, taking those changes and ensuring the customer experience is optimized. Much like Matt said in his opening comments, just really focusing on that client experience.
Three areas and similar to Rob, our first thing that the thing that I've seen a lot of change around is just the embedded banking, open finance capabilities.
So often, over the over the last several years, you know, banks have really dictated, come to our channel, come to our portal, bank in this manner. That is still certainly alive and well as we know. But we're seeing corporate and commercial clients’ businesses really migrate to using their ERP, banking inside their ERP, and expecting banks to deliver API connectivity in real time. Think zero latency type of type of banking.
So a good example of that is, and the convenience that offers is, you know, positive pay. One of the more painful experiences, but certainly necessary to combat fraud and being able to, instead of uploading a file to the bank in SFTP format or what have you in the bank's format, customers can just initiate checks. Check issues automatically go via API to the bank. Decisions are made inside the ERP. A much different, much more seamless experience.
The second area is really payments modernization. And, Dean, I think you hit on this. Just you know, it's not really enough anymore to just provide a drop-down menu of all of the solutions, ACH wires, card, RTP, FedNow, you know, all of the different payment types. We really need to be thinking about payments orchestration. We've seen a migration toward intelligent payments routing and being able to help customers with the data we have about them, initiate payments in the smartest way, taking advantage of discounts, 2/10 net 30 with ACH, you know, commercial card extending that payments window to optimize days payable outstanding. So those types of things, we've seen a lot of change around in having that experience.
And then finally, data. We have so much data about our clients and using AI to optimize that data and understand where our clients are banking, what they're doing, how they're banking, and help them with their cash flow forecasting and working capital management. So those are the three areas that we've seen, I think, a lot of change in the last three years.
Dean Jenkins
Yeah. That's a lot. So you got fraud, covered payments, cover the data piece, which I totally agree. I mean data is one thing we all have to figure out because we kind of have scattered approach right now of data. So how do we leverage that data? How do we use that data to really understand the need? So that is a huge issue. But I'm going to come back to the payments first.
And Matt, I know you've been working in a leadership position around what FCB is doing around payments and payment modernization. So, how are some of the payment options like FedNow and stablecoin and all the different payment options that are happening? How is that affecting what you guys are doing from payment modernization perspective?
Matt Ribbens
Yeah. Thanks for the question. I think, you know, to Kathryn's point about modernization, I think there are different things we should be looking at from an orchestration layer. But one of the things if you go from $50 billion to $220 billion in a couple of years, you've acquired a lot of systems and you've acquired a lot of different legacy technology. So part of our challenge has been really just kind of modernizing to get to common infrastructure.
So part of that is just looking at where are the opportunities to streamline not only on the ACH side, but wires and looking at real-time payments as well. Both First Citizens and Silicon Valley had launched real-time payments about the same time. So we've actually been able to combine instances and work toward sort of a common experience.
And a big part of that, too, is also because with faster payments, you have the potential for high-velocity fraud, I suppose. And so the other thing you need to do is make sure you monitor not just from a bank level, but an enterprise level what you're doing to manage payment fraud. So that's been a big focus area.
So if you layer on all those sort of, I would say, evolutionary payment systems that we've gotten to the next one up might be stablecoins, and there does seem to be a lot of interest in that right now. Again, I've seen … we've all seen some hype around things that, you know, doesn't always pan out the way we expect it to. But clearly, there's a lot of energy right now in the government and some of the legislation that's coming through on stablecoins whether it's the GENIUS Act or if it's looking at tokenized deposits as well.
Because one of the things that concerns me, I'm sure others in the room as well, is if you're moving money out into these treasury bills and not keeping them on balance sheet anymore, it has the potential to reduce lending. And critically, we all play a big role in the economy in terms of making loans and taking in deposits. So if some of that starts to be, you know, taken out of the ecosystem, it could have a negative impact.
But I think that's where innovation is going to thrive for the next couple of years is really looking at what we can do with that, how that actually makes moving money easier and simpler for our clients, and that's really what we're trying to understand, what's the underlying demand.
So things like RTP and FedNow are very well-organized, centralized systems, but, you know, you've got a lot of decentralized solutions out there as well. So I think there'll be a rationalization what that will look like over time, you know, still remains to be seen.
But, you know, my crystal ball is I think we've got a lot of … we've got a lot of great momentum with real-time payments. A lot of the volume today you see with instant goes through that rail. FedNow is growing, but we'll see. There's a lot of new networks spinning up as well. So we'll see how that evolves to do interbank settlement or even domestic payments.
Dean Jenkins
Yeah. Dating myself a bit, you know, we go back in the early 2000s or mid-2000s, you know, 2005, 2006, we're all talking about payments hubs. Right? But we really didn't have a real good business case for that. You know, it's like, hey, it's ACH, it's wires, it's card, it's not that interesting. Right? But now, with all the other options, it's going to be interesting to see the payment hubs are really a requirement sometimes to fix some of these different payment types coming in.
Eric, take us home on customer expectations. Is there anything that we didn't, you know, that Kathryn or Rob or Matt didn't cover that you've seen in the market?
Eric Lien
A couple of things, but I'll play off largely what they've kind of said already. But I think that one of the biggest things we see is just what we all experience in our individual personal consumer lives. These expectations are going over into how companies operate from a B2B standpoint. So they're expecting real-time everything, not just from a payment standpoint but from information, visibility, and alerts. They want us to be able to get ahead of anything that's out there and show them where they are at a particular moment in time.
And for banks that are built off of, as you heard Matt talk about, like legacy, some would say archaic core systems, that can be really challenging. And so how do you think about more digital cores or systems that can lay over the top so we are in a position where we can deliver that real-time information to what they expect.
And playing off what Kathryn said, too, is about actionable insights and data. It's one thing to have data. It's another thing to provide an insight, but we also see clients really starting like, give us a recommendation. Give us optionality or targets. What should we do with this data and insights? Because I think before we've just pushed them data and expect that they're just going to run their business. Now that's bleeding into they expect us to help them and make some of those decisions for them or tell us like, don't want to do this versus that, but not have put that in their system overall.
And that really bleeds too into just, you know, helping them operate on a day-to-day standpoint. It's almost like they're taking some of the finance function out of their business and wanting to push that to the bank. So from either cash flow forecasting and helping them understand for example, yes, you typically do have seasonalities or cyclicalities in your business, but if you are going into a lower point, is that lower point based on cash flow going to be even lower from a cash position than it was maybe a year ago? And what does that mean for them? How do we automatically set up a working capital line of credit and help them draw down from that? Deliver different working capital solutions.
And with that then, too, is also the fraud aspect of things and how things go is, historically banks have always operated with products that we stop fraud after it's actually already occurred. You know, the positive pay catches the fraudulent check. The ACH fraud filter catches and stops the fraud coming in. Client expectations now, they want us to stop the fraud before it even occurs. And that's why I'm really excited coming up to general session, some of the things that Q2 is doing overall that can really help that like, you know, from a geolocation or anomaly standpoint. Yeah. Stop that before it even gets into the system.
Dean Jenkins
Yeah. That hit a lot of great points and that, you know, it's interesting because it's probably going to start changing the way you think about your treasury management officers and how they're communicating to their customers and what knowledge they have to have, which is really growing and all this stuff going on.
So Kathryn, I know you have had, you know, a perspective on the evolution of your treasury sales team. So, I'd love to hear what does a best-in-class treasury management sales team actually look like?
Kathryn Albright
Yeah. Great. Great question, Dean. So, and kind of similar, Eric, to what you were saying, you know, really coming to the client with speaking their language. What they want to know about is how do I unlock liquidity? How do I unlock the capital within my systems?
We run a couple of client advisory boards that we listen to our clients and we ask them, you know, how can we help you do your business more efficiently, better, really unlock that working capital and help you manage your cash conversion cycle?
And so a lot of the things we talk about, fraud prevention, faster payments, embedded banking. And one thing we hear over and over is, I want a bank that meets me where I am. And a lot of different customers are in different paths along this journey of digitization.
Many of our client advisory board members still work inside the portal every day. They're in that portal. They maybe have multiple bank portals. They're having to log in and then they log it into a spreadsheet. They have a very very step-by-step process they follow every day.
Then there's another cohort that is in their ERP, which as we talked about earlier, doing everything in their ERP throughout the day and expecting banks to serve them all of the data, all of the information, and they make their payments from the ERP.
There's still this now emerging cohort that's really interesting. They're creating their own ERP with Anthropic and Claude. They're actually coding their own prompts to create an ERP and just completely bypassing QuickBooks, Sage Intact, MS Dynamics. So we, as bankers, and Q2, we all need to work to meet those clients where they are, investing in all three of those experiences, right, continue to keep our digital platform very with all the capabilities.
So, in that platform, because we have so many clients that use that and depend on it every day. And then, looking at open banking, we've got to be thinking about how do we serve those APIs up and allow that open banking experience for our clients.
And then finally, you know, Anthropic and Claude. I'm not sure where we're headed with that. We need to stay abreast of that as well.
Dean Jenkins
Yeah. There, I mean, it just goes back to where I started, right, with this, hey, client expectations have changed. Now we've got all this complexity that's coming on and it's going to affect the way you go to market. And so now you also have to figure out, OK, all this is coming really fast. Going back to your comment about archaic systems, you know. ACH was like the latest payment rail back in 1974 and now we have all of this going on at the same time.
So Kathryn, how do you sort through that? What are you thinking about as like where you're placing your bets over the next two or three years on different capabilities?
Kathryn Albright
Yeah. Absolutely. Continuing the payments modernization, you know, really we offer RTP origination, receive, FedNow receive, and then looking at what's down the road and continue to have that intelligent payment orchestration. So that's one area.
And we've talked a lot, or I have talked a lot about embedded banking, so that's another area we're going to continue to really focus on.
AI and banking, you know, how do we optimize and work with our clients to optimize their working capital using AI and the data that we know about them?
And then finally, Matt mentioned it, stablecoin, tokenized deposits via the blockchain, you know. Will banks be disintermediated through deposit safekeeping? That's what we do. So we're going to have to really stay abreast of that.
Dean Jenkins
Yeah. Awesome.
Eric Lien
Yeah. I'll add to that too. I think one of the challenges, or one of our opportunities I should say, that we're working on internally though is how do we ensure all of our frontline facing colleagues are up to speed with all of these changes as well too. And I think with the pace of change that's something I don't want to say we've struggled with, but it's a bigger opportunity for us. How do we create the right learning forums for all of our colleagues, salespeople, implementation, customer service to be well versed in all of these topics we've discussed too, but then, too, be able to give the insights to clients?
And so if anyone has any great recommendations, I'd love to chat with you after the stage, but that is the biggest thing I think we need to do because I think we all know where we're, you know, where the beachhead is, where we need to go. But how do we make sure everybody in our organization comes along with us too?
Dean Jenkins
Yeah. I've heard a lot like in the market recently about some new roles that are being created in the treasury management groups because things are becoming much more technical, and so how do I get somebody out there that can have that technical conversation versus a treasury management sales officer or that is looking at the traditional capabilities. Right? And so as some of this stuff starts evolving, you're going to see a bigger need for, you know, more detailed understanding of some of this technology.
Speaking of technology, Matt, let's go back to, OK, there's a lot of these things going on. New capabilities. How does that affect, like, you're going through a payment modernization? Because everybody's kind of looking at that, hear that a lot in the market. Like, everything about modernizing all of our payments. What does that look like? How are you choosing which pieces would go where and when?
Matt Ribbens
Yeah. I think it's interesting because we do talk about payment modernization like it's modernizing just one part of things. I think it's this combination. Kathryn hit on it. The way the clients want to interact with us, how they want to send us a payment, how they interact in the future—that's changing. We have sort of legacy systems that we need to upgrade. We need the capabilities as I mentioned too also, fraud screens these things.
So there's things like ACH where maybe we didn't always necessarily do that because it just wasn't a requirement. But now it's sort of like, this is how fraudsters are going to operate. They're going to move from one rail to another and they're going to have success. And so continuing to battle them on that front is important and including sort of whatever new AI tools that they're going to be using to perpetrate fraud.
Some of you may have read about Mythos and some of the things Anthropic is looking at essentially finding holes in code much faster than humans have been and finding issues. So again, that's going to be a big focus area too of just how do you close the door on some of these AI agents that may be trying to … We used to have sort of the DDoS attacks and some other types of things that would try to shut you down. I think AI is going to introduce a whole new layer of concern and expertise there that we need to be able to manage against.
But as it relates to modernization, it's kind of it's not just payments. I think it's kind of aligning to what our clients need. It's really investing in what are the … back to the business case question you brought up of hubs. What is the value that we're going to get from bringing things together not only from like a fraud perspective, but also a data perspective.
And in addition to that, I think it's also just looking at sort of total cost of ownership and managing the relationship model you have. One of our transformation efforts, we're actually moving multiple ACH PEP+ systems to a common system and it's actually moving from a couple that were in the cloud, some that were on-premise into a cloud-hosted environment.
So as you look at things as they scale, as you look at where you think the future may be going with payments as well. What are the things you want to own the infrastructure? What are the things you want to outsource that infrastructure? Where do you want to partner to get where you're going? I think, Eric, you brought up a card issuing platform. I mean, do you want to be in that space? Do you want to work with a partner? These are all really important questions to think about because they have technical cost and impact down the road.
So I think payments modernization might just be a generalization for a lot of the digital transformation that's going on across the industry.
Dean Jenkins
Yeah. It is a big event for sure. It's funny about fraud. I think we think about it like there's somebody in a dark room that one person is trying to commit fraud. It's actually bigger than the bank. It's an industry on its own. So you have to be ahead of that, right?
Katherine, just wrap this back into the go-to-market. How do you … With all of this going on, how do you differentiate or plan to differentiate in the market with your sales teams?
Kathryn Albright
Yeah. I think it gets back a little bit to what you were alluding to earlier and sort of aligning a team around your treasury management consultant or officer, creating this ecosystem for the customer that starts with the treasury management consultant.
I know a lot of times we talk about how banking relationships start with the credit, the lending. I'm envisioning a future where it starts with the treasury management and payments conversation. With AI, you know, credit now is going to potentially become more of a commodity sort of feature. And treasury management and payments, that's where I think we can really have a meaningful impact on corporations, on businesses to save money, do things more efficiently, make payments more timely.
So what does that look like? You'd have the working capital consultant. We have a working capital consultant that coaches treasury management consultants on how to talk to clients about working capital, days sales outstanding, cash conversion cycle, days payables outstanding, days inventory outstanding. How to have conversations in the customer's language as opposed to, hey, let me share 50 pages of slides with you about all of our products. Just really consulting with the customer.
So having a working capital coach and then a technical solutions consultant. Dean, as you mentioned, our solutions are becoming so technical that really helps to have those specialists alongside them.
So I think being more competitive, differentiating ourselves, we need to have that client at the center and the ability to talk in their language around working capital.
Dean Jenkins
Awesome. I'd love the name change, by the way, the working capital consultant. I mean, it does represent like, hey, we're changing the way we're thinking about this, right? As you go to market.
Eric, you guys are in the process of going live on the Q2 platform. What are some of the capabilities? What are some of the things that you've seen that you think you're going to be able take advantage of, going to give you a competitive advantage in the market against non-Q2?
Eric Lien
Yeah. Absolutely. And it's been a great experience working with Q2 thus far. And I think one of the biggest things is—and I'm comparing this to where we were—where we are now before we complete our waves and that'll be mainly, so we can talk afterwards if you guys want, but I think the biggest thing is just going to be the actual user experience and moving to a more modern platform that can help meet our clients from Day 1 from onboarding to the day-to-day transactions reporting, but then the servicing after that.
Right now, it's more of a fragmented model that we have internally that we try really hard to tighten and pull together, but there are cracks in that. And with that ,too, you know, we serve clients from small business banking that are, call it $800,000 revenue up to companies that have multibillion-dollar revenue, annual revenue cycles. And so, with that too, it allows us to really segment the client experience based on where those clients want to be met.
Because right now, if we give an $800,000 client the same experience that we do for a $1 billion client, it's too complicated. It's too complex. We need to meet our clients with simplistic needs with simplistic solutions, and our larger ones, you know, meet them more with more complex needs. And so the modularity and the ability for the platform to do that for us to segment and drive those different client experiences on one platform is really critical in my opinion because we have responsibility for all those clients.
I think the other aspect, too, is we talked about it earlier at the broader forum but it's just the security behind that. You know, we are a highly regulated organization just like everyone else in the room is. But so how do you also move forward to make sure that we're protecting the bank's back door, protecting our clients, but we're also meeting the speed that the market requires today. But then also too making sure we're meeting our regulatory concerns and so the platform is … I'm really excited because that's what it’s going to give us in that regard.
And I think the other aspect too, and this is how I've described it internally to a lot of stakeholders that maybe aren't as familiar with transactional banking or commercial banking, but it's kind of like we're moving from a house that was built in the 1920s to a very modern house that allows us modularity. We can build things off of it. It's already technology enabled, API ready. And instead of having to build and add modules to things, you're building layers across that touch all aspects of the platform so we can deliver that single unified experience overall.
And I think the biggest thing for us, Dean, is historically we think about, oh, we need to do upgrades. We need to do an upgrade of this system. This is not an upgrade for us. It's a foundational shift.
Dean Jenkins
Yeah. That's awesome. I mean, we talk about meeting the customers where they're at. We started probably five or six years ago, we said, hey, we need to end one size fits all in commercial, because that's pretty much what we have had for a couple of decades.
And so the ability for us to say based on the size of the business is one aspect, and I think we all have like, hey, it's $1 million to $10 million is small business, and middle market starts at $10 million and goes to $50 million, and then you get upper middle market or whatever general classification based on the annual revenue. That's not always the right answer. Right? So thinking about it, which vertical are these businesses in and what do they need? And it could be significantly different based on that vertical.
You know, a property management company versus a dentist office versus a veterinarian's office may have totally different needs and different aspects. And historically, we've not been able to deal with that. Right? We said, here it is. You figure out how to bank. Right? And I think that's all changing.
You guys have all used the same terminology of meet the customer where they're at. We are very conscious of that as well. You probably will hear that throughout the conference this week because we really believe in that. That you have to, in order to compete and win this competitive market, you have to show that you understand what these businesses need.
Eric Lien
Dean I'll add to that the customer itself is fundamentally changing. So quick audience poll. Who here has a loved one or son, daughter that has just recently graduated college or in the workforce? Show of hands. OK.
Ray, do you communicate with them differently than you do Rob?
Audience Member
Very much.
Eric Lien
But at the same point, that individual is going to be the buying influence at the customers we serve in very short order. They don't want to talk to us. They want to text, and so we need to adapt our approach with working with them to meet this new age of buying influencers that we're going to be working with within these companies.
Dean Jenkins
There's no doubt that the new business owners of tomorrow are not like the ones of today for sure, right, that we've come accustomed to. So great point.
Rob, take us home. I know I put you on the bookend seriously. We're bring you all the way back and talk just talk a little bit about how all these new capabilities are changing the way you're thinking about going to market.
Rob Noon
Sure. So when I introduced myself, I mentioned the marketplace that we serve. It's from basically Maryland down to North Carolina, and we've always had a traditional lens of C&I. We didn't really have a … we had one vertical: government contracting. Sitting outside of DC it makes a lot of sense, but as we put together our three-year plan, we took a very different approach.
We didn't put in a lot of product specificity. We looked at verticals—dealer finance, health care—how do the products and the solutions, all this technology that's around us, solve their business problems? I'll give you an example: dealer finance. We want to get into floorplan lending. Well, the pain points of a dealer to buy a car at auction, they used to write a cashier's check. Well that helped our business case for instant payments. Well what if they could just settle now and have the car on the lot at the end of the day? It turns their inventory quicker.
We're starting to think about payments and really where this came to light for me is RTP and FedNow started emerging. I started thinking about and listening to how there's, it's always grassroots in these new rails. We don't really know how to sell into these, so if we just pick a vertical, be really good at it, one problem in the morning for one client is the same problem for the next client in the afternoon.
So we're packaging all these and delivering them in a way that solves a business challenge. They don't really care the rail it goes. If I'm talking to a controller and that car can be on the dealership and being refurbished ready to resell, that's a turn of inventory. That's just one example.
So as part of our three-year plan, we've got payments in there, you know, just to modernize everything, but how do we customize them to the verticals industries where we think we can lend and make money and bring in deposits.
Dean Jenkins
Yeah. That's great points in there. I'll steal a quote, and I've said this a couple times so anybody in the room has heard me say this quote, I apologize for the repeat, but I think it's so appropriate. You mentioned rails. Right? There was a … I was at a conference and somebody said, hey, banks sell rails and fintechs sell use cases.
Rob Noon
We need to convert to use cases, right?
Dean Jenkins
We need to change and say, hey, we need to start thinking of what is the problem I'm trying to solve and go that way versus here's our products, you figure out how to use them, right? So it's a big switch on that. Awesome.
Cheryl Brown
And that’s it for another episode of The Purposeful Banker. As a reminder, you can subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, including YouTube, Apple, and Spotify, and you can find an archive of our episodes at q2.com/thepurposefulbanker. Until next time, this has been Cheryl Brown. Thanks for listening.