New Path to Corporate Banking Loyalty

Jim Marous (00:12):

Welcome to Banking Transformed, the top podcast in retail banking. I'm your host, Jim Marous.

Jim Marous (00:17):

Today, we're exploring one of banking's most vital, but yet often overlooked functions: corporate banking account and analysis. This goes back to my days when I was a banker back at National City Bank way back in the dark ages. But it's interesting how little that space has changed despite the revenue and loyalty potential, so it might not seem glamorous.

Jim Marous (00:41):

This is where billions of dollars in revenue are gained or lost, and where the gap between a loyal corporate client and a frustrated one is often decided. The challenge is most corporations and most financial institutions aren't optimizing that relationship, and as a result, everybody walks away frustrated.

Jim Marous (01:02):

Joining us on the Banking Transformed Podcast today is Dan Gill, industry analyst for Zafin, an AI powered banking platform that's really revolutionizing how banks handle pricing, billing, data, and customer relationships in a time when corporate clients demand more transparency and certainly want to know how is their account being evaluated from a loyalty, and obviously, from a cost perspective. Legacy systems and scattered data just don't support the functionality that we need today.

Jim Marous (01:37):

We're going to explore how AI and unified data platforms are addressing longstanding issues, including revenue loss, manual fee calculations, and unclear reporting that frustrates CFOs. So, whether you're in banking, fintech, or simply interested in how corporate finance operates behind the scenes, this conversation will really reveal significant transformation that's underway in this area.

Jim Marous (02:03):

So, Dan, long introduction, but can you tell us a little bit about yourself, and also a little bit about what Zafin is doing today?

Dan Gill (02:11):

Sure. Thanks, Jim, I'm glad to be here. My name's Dan Gill. I have spent the past almost 30 years in a very interesting niche of banking, the corporate fee billing space. And I've worked with both large corporates, mid-size corporates, even some small corporates in how they interact with their banks. And really that's allowed me to become a specialist in this thing in America that we call account analysis, which many people ask, "What is that?" And it is really two things.

Dan Gill (02:46):

It is how a bank bills a corporate client for the transaction services that it uses, but also a way to help give them some value for their balances. And there's a whole bunch of history behind that and why we invented this thing called earnings credit, and when I couldn't pay interest and now, I can pay interest, and a lot of regulatory stuff that has changed over the years.

Dan Gill (03:15):

But really, it gets down to the fact that if you have a conversation with a bank today, you're going to have almost exactly the same conversation that you would've had with them 30 years ago. Not only are the statements identical — sure, some of the pricing is obviously gone up and yeah, things like ACHs are faster now, and we have fewer checks, and we've seen some shifts in the transaction nature of things — but it's the same; it lacks any imagination.

Dan Gill (03:50):

And so, here at Zafin, at least for the part that I mostly deal with, what we're trying to do is say what happens if we take that ancient, age-old process of account analysis in a bank and marry it up with modern software and technology capabilities to transform and reimagine the whole thing?

Jim Marous (04:10):

Well, it's interesting Dan, because we talk a lot about retail banking on this podcast, we even talk about small business, but we don't spend nearly enough time on the corporate basis. And what's interesting is you mentioned, unlike the retail side, where a lot of retail customers wish there was account analysis now on their account, really the corporate world is one where every transaction, every balance, everything else is measured as to what is your value to the bank.

Jim Marous (04:37):

But as you said, you worked on the other side, on the corporate side, and what you're trying to say is, "Geez, is the bank giving me enough value for my relationship?" The duration, the size, the activity that takes place and the accounts and services that I have, because be it payroll services or corporate funding, all these things have a balancing act that goes on.

Jim Marous (04:59):

In the research I did for this podcast, it's interesting because it's mentioned that really, we've been held tightly from on the banking side because our data is so hard to get to. So, why is it so critical for account analysis and the entire functionality to really be reviewed now before your corporate client reviews it for you?

Dan Gill (05:24):

And they will. They have systems in place to review it for you. And I like to describe it kind of as this; we talk a lot about the tech stack within the bank — in corporate banking, it's really more of a tech sprawl, there isn't a logical stack to what's going on.

Jim Marous (05:45):

There's many stacks.

Dan Gill (05:47):

Exactly. And so, we're asking the core to do things it was never intended to do. We have dozens, in many cases, hundreds of transaction systems. So, I've got an ACH system, wire transfer, lockbox, all spread throughout the bank, and from an account analysis point of view, each of them is counting how many of each transaction you did for the month.

Dan Gill (06:11):

And in most cases, in a batch process at the end of the month, I'm just getting fed dozens or hundreds of batch files at the end of the month into this account analysis billing system that is 30-years-old, and trying to make sense of that, trying to price all those transactions at the customer level because they often have bespoke pricing, and get all of that out.

Dan Gill (06:38):

If you ever have the chance to sit with the operations group in a counter analysis after the month ends, they have usually between 6 and maybe 10 business days from the time the month ends to get statements out, which seems like all sorts of time. But in that time, they've got to get a hundred different files in, they've got to calculate all that price, all of that, and build a statement for every account out there.

Dan Gill (07:08):

Often, hundreds of thousands of accounts that they've got to get out in what is really a short processing window, maybe five or six actual base. And so, the challenge that we have with all of that is we get a statement to our corporate customers, very large, very sophisticated companies, and we get it to them just in time for it to be completely useless. Because telling me what I did two weeks ago in a month from two weeks ago doesn't give me anything I can take action on.

Jim Marous (07:45):

It's a rear-view mirror look.

Dan Gill (07:48):

Exactly. And so, the only purpose that it gives me as a corporate treasurer is something to fight with you about. That's its whole point in life. I'm going to get it and because I can't do anything with it, I'm just going to analyze the heck out of it, and I'm going to find errors and I'm going to fight with you about every little one of them, and you're not going to have access to the information enough to know whether I'm right or not. So, you're going to just end up giving me the waiver, and you're leaking revenue everywhere.

Jim Marous (08:22):

So, what we're really talking about is the existing account management, account analysis function is really built on, as you said, stacks of data that don't necessarily talk to each other naturally, even though from the corporate side, it's all talking to each other because all interrelates.

Jim Marous (08:40):

And actually, the way a customer would look at the banking world, they'd say, you have every piece of information of what I do, why is this so difficult? So, when you look at what's going on right now, where does this process typically break down?

Dan Gill (08:59):

Well, I think one of the biggest problems in it, is the customer looks at the bank, the corporate customer looks at the bank and says, “I am a customer to you.” When in reality, inside the bank, there is no unified vision of that customer, and it boils down to that tech sprawl I was talking about.

Dan Gill (09:23):

First of all, I've got the product teams, I've got each of the product managers for the different, whether they're deposit products or transaction products, they're the ones that hold the P&L for the product, they're the ones trying to figure out how am I going to make revenue, they don't even have a standardized product catalog that tells me what's everything I have for sales, so that's one. How do I get that?

Dan Gill (09:48):

Number two, then I've got a sales organization. These customers are sold to by actual salespeople. While I think there's a great opportunity to make this a little bit more self-serve and online, most large corporates, even down into the middle corporate will be served by a relationship manager or a relationship team, and they expect to negotiate prices and have bespoke pricing.

Dan Gill (10:17):

And so, I've got this group over here who doesn't know complete visibility of the products they have, they don't understand the customer themselves and what the hierarchy of how that customer or company is organized, or everything else they're buying from the bank.

Dan Gill (10:37):

When I'm selling treasury services and I have no idea about what that customer's lending relationship is to the bank or what are they doing in trade finance or merchant card or corporate card or any number of things because again, the system sprawl makes that invisible, I have no way of knowing whether I could give them a better deal on treasury services because we're making so much money on them everywhere else.

Dan Gill (11:03):

And so, it gets down to that I need a centralized place to get a 360-degree view of the customer so that I can then sell effectively to them. And then we move on to where we're going to actually build these bills every month, and I need to first of all, implement them quickly.

Dan Gill (11:24):

Today, usually the salesperson emails off a spreadsheet of some sort that says, “Hey, here's what I sold to ACME, Inc, go ahead and implement it.” And it's got wrong terms and wrong prices, and it's not even in the same language of the billing system. And so, it takes weeks, months to get them implemented. That means I'm not billing them for a couple of months, and it means that there's a lot of mistakes in there. So, because of the disjointed processes, I lose out on all of those things.

Dan Gill (11:55):

And then finally kind of to close the loop, I get commitments from customers of what they're going to offer back. Like I'll keep $5 million in the account on average, and you give me the special pricing. And that's the last time it's ever heard of because the current systems have no way of monitoring, is anybody meeting those commitments? So, again, we're leaking revenue everywhere.

Jim Marous (12:25):

So, what's interesting is in the discussion we've had with Zafin and people before (we've had two other podcasts that we've done recently), your firm really is a data company. You're a firm that makes it so that you help an organization get a single source of truth by unifying this disparate data sources and making them actually have an impact so that financial institutions can actually, from the financial institution side, see what an account relationship is worth, but also see where the opportunity is to grow that relationship where you really bring it all in a unified basis.

Jim Marous (13:03):

And you'd mentioned just as you were closing that last response, is that there's revenue leakage. So, let's make it so the ears perk up on the financial institution side to say okay, we're not talking just about a cost reduction situation here, because you bring together disparate systems, you're going to economize and make it less expensive to process, but you really start to see all kinds of revenue this leak because you're not really looking at the relationship on a holistic basis.

Jim Marous (13:36):

So, how serious is this issue, and what causes a financial institution to lose revenue as I was speaking to?

Dan Gill (13:44):

Most of it is it revolves around a couple of things. I kind of describe it as visibility and agility. Number one, when you can't see what's happening, you don't know what to do, you can't even imagine what you should do.

Dan Gill (14:01):

And that leaves you in a place where not only can I not come up with good things to offer to a client, I can't be agile with the market and offer compelling things, but the process itself is so broken that I just can't even see how the customer's lifecycle flows throughout my bank because it's not a single process. And in fact, the teams aren't even organized as a how do we treat this customer as a unified company.

Dan Gill (14:32):

And so, it really breaks everything down to where I can't even see what's going on. I don't know whether their contract is expired or not, I don't know if the pricing that I offered them or the waivers I gave them are within scope or have been approved, because I just don't have any good processes to manage all of that, and it really just leaves leakage everywhere.

Jim Marous (15:00):

So, really, your tool not only gives the back office of a financial institution the ability to see what a relationship is worth, but as you referred to also, if that financial institution actually shares the information with a corporate calling officer, which by the way, on those corporate calling officers, these are very high level people within the financial institution.

Jim Marous (15:25):

These are people that have gone through the ranks usually in the retail side, small business side to build the relationships and to be able to actually build the ability to communicate with corporate clients. But if they use the tools and if they've shared the information you're providing on a much quicker basis, this gives them an arsenal to actually sell but even more importantly, optimize the relationship from a loyalty perspective, doesn't it?

Dan Gill (15:53):

Yep. Totally. And you hit on a key thing there in my opinion. One of the key things we're trying to transform is that I mentioned before, the statements arrive, let's say two weeks after the month ends, just in time to be useless. And the only reason the statements are built that way is tradition. In today's world, there is no reason-

Jim Marous (16:20):

This is the way banking's done.

Dan Gill (16:22):

It's how we do it. And you ask most of the people working in these operations group, and it just is. I use this quote all the time, it's attributed to Henry Ford, but if I had asked my customers what they wanted, it would've been faster horses. There is just no imagination for doing it.

Dan Gill (16:42):

And so, we invented this term that I call real time account analysis that basically says when you have efficient interfaces between the tech sprawl that is out there, you still got all the systems. But when I can centralize it into a single place and get it quickly whether that's in real time or say, the end of the day, all of a sudden that statement that has to be built in a very compressed window otherwise, I can actually build it as the month progresses. And when I can do that, I can feed that back to the customer.

Dan Gill (17:18):

Because the number one thing treasurers are asking for is quick information, actionable information. And I'm sorry, two weeks after the month ends, it's not actionable. And so, when I can feed it back to my customer and say, “Here's your balances, here's your earnings, here's your number of wires you've done so far,” I can now also do things like just, “The 15th of the month, on average, you've kept $5 million in the account. From the looks of it, if you added another $3 million to this account for the second half of the month, you would likely offset all your fees.”

Dan Gill (17:59):

That blows people's minds. And that's how you achieve stealing from the retail bank again primacy of wallet. I believe that corporate customers can be influenced in other ways that we do with retail customers different. But when I'm their prime bank and when the next a hundred accounts they're going to open up, they don't look any further but my bank because I am servicing them in a way that's so different, that's primacy, and that's how I get more business and win more business in this market.

Jim Marous (18:43):

And what's interesting, it was interesting back when I was at the beginning of my banking career, is the corporate banking ecosystem is the only one that actually gives you value for the value that the corporation provides.

Jim Marous (19:00):

So, what's interesting is, be it right, wrong, late or whatever, it's the only place that we actually have the ability to reprice relationships on an ongoing basis based on the size of relationship. Now, similar to the retail banking space, it's unlikely and it's very difficult for a corporation, the bigger it is, the more difficult it is to unwind the relationships they already have.

Jim Marous (19:25):

But as you just referenced, the fact that they may open the next one and the one after that, and the one after that someplace else is not good for either side of the equation because obviously, if they open it with their existing account relationship, they're more likely to get an offset from the fees because of the relationship, they’re going to get a benefit for what they already have.

Jim Marous (19:47):

On the other hand, if they actually open it with the financial institution, they're with and they see no change in their analysis, then they're thinking to themselves going, "Why am I doing this? There's no benefit here."

Dan Gill (20:02):

What am I? Chopped liver?

Jim Marous (20:04):

Yeah, exactly. And so, what you're really doing is you're not only providing very quick, what I'll call side view or rear-view mirror perspective, but you can actually build a predictive behavior saying, “By the way, here's things you can do, as you mentioned, to reduce this fee or to eliminate this cost.”

Jim Marous (20:26):

And on the retail side, it's like an NSF or an overdraft, you never realize until after it's happened, and then it's unlikely you're going to get it waived. But this can be automated, and in such a way that it gives power not only to the commercial client, but also to the finance institution.

Jim Marous (20:45):

So, from the corporate client's point of view, what does a good account analysis look like and what are these corporate treasury managers, because everybody's, both sides of the equation are trying to squeeze the most out of a relationship, what are they looking for? You've already mentioned speed, but what else are they looking for?

Dan Gill (21:07):

So, I think speed is probably the primary one, but it is actually transparency. And sort of this sense that you hit on it there a second ago, that even though I'm not a person, in the retail side, we're all about making the customer feel attracted to me and whether that's because they give you a toaster or they give you a cash back on your debit card purchases or something, some reward — I believe that they are just looking to be acknowledged.

Dan Gill (21:48):

And it was interesting, just the other day I was talking to our head of AI talking about account analysis and explaining some of just the weird things that account analysis is, and talking about this thing, earnings credit, and he was like, “Wow, that sounds like a rewards program.”

Dan Gill (22:05):

And my mind blew up because I'm like, here we are, another parallel to the retail bank, am I going to entice a large corporate with airline miles? No, but what might I entice them? And I've had conversations with other banks, for instance, who are like, what if we took this earnings credit, this soft credit, and allowed them to use it to maybe buy carbon credits on a marketplace?

Dan Gill (22:35):

Now, all of a sudden, very innovative ways that I can convince a bank or a customer to bank with me and to bring me their new business and their balances. We've all been fighting for balances lately. I need ways that I can do that because these guys, many of them are the ones that have all the cash.

Jim Marous (22:57):

It's interesting because you've mentioned transparency. Transparency is good when you have a good back-office processing system and you have a good way of consolidating the view of that transparency. Transparency is a little less comfortable when your data is all crap in the background.

Jim Marous (23:18):

I kid about the fact when I go into my business bank, they always have a look at me going, "Okay, what's he going to get us on now?" Because there's a lot of common sense things there that banks have not put in place that you go, "Geez, I hope you don't ask me this."

Jim Marous (23:35):

And from your perspective Dan, what’s interesting is you came from the other side. So, as you're managing this entire process, you're saying, what are the things I would get the bank on to make it so they feel uncomfortable and adjust their account analysis to my favor?

Jim Marous (23:53):

So, I'd imagine you have a very interesting perspective at Zafin from the perspective of saying, “I know what the CFO looks for, I know what the treasury manager's looking for, here's what they're looking for, and here's actually the way they want to see it.” How is that changing banking? How's that changed loyalty? How does that change the relationship between the bank and the corporate client?

Dan Gill (24:22):

That's a perfect question. I think it boils down to the idea of not so much what does it look like. I'm not advocating that we change the monthly billing from monthly or that we even change what the statement looks like, I'm mostly talking about the when. I'm mostly talking about don't make me wait until halfway through the next month, and we've kind of covered that already.

Dan Gill (24:52):

But it is also the idea of show me that you know me. I want even as a large corporate to know that you understand not only me and my transactions, but my business. What are we doing? How are we doing it?

Dan Gill (25:11):

And in order to do that, you, my banker, need to have a complete 360-degree view of me. You need to know where I would get a bank putting on my other hat for a minute is mostly understanding that they don't understand me. They don't understand that I have a hundred million dollar line of credit-

Jim Marous (25:32):

I'm going to have some questions-

Dan Gill (25:36):

And that you're killing me on, but I'll use that to be like, you know what, I need a 20% discount on the 200,000 ACHs I send every month or whatever. And I can ask you things because I know me and you don't, and I use that as a lever. And so, it really boils down to this idea that I have to have all the information about my products, my clients, my processes and my sales all in a unified flowing system.

Jim Marous (26:12):

It's interesting because I think most banks recognize that their corporate fee billing processes are outdated. There's leakage of revenue, there's frustrations of clients. What is the starting point for a transformation? How should a bank approach what they're doing today to what they really have to move to very quickly because it's not like the marketplace is going to wait when everything else going on in the corporate world is changing so quickly?

Dan Gill (26:42):

I think there's two parts to it, at least two parts to it. The first is that we talk about legacy of core and we have all seen enough failed core modernizations to realize that this idea of rip out the core and replace it is probably not the best in most cases.

Dan Gill (27:04):

The same is true for the account analysis system because if there's one system that is probably more legacy than the core, it is the corporate billing system. And not only that, it's this whole sprawling thing. And so, if you take everything I'm saying and say let's look at this whole customer lifecycle and I'm going to rip that entire thing out and replace it, you're asking for a very risk prone project and nobody wants to do that in today's world.

Dan Gill (27:34):

And so, you need to be able to follow a progressive modernization, and that can be done by sort of segmenting, as I've kind of described this whole thing, this whole customer viewpoint into different things.

Dan Gill (27:50):

Maybe it starts with, hey, a centralized product catalog, what's everything we have to sell? Maybe it starts with revamping the sales process itself and giving the sales team effective deal management tools that they can shape deals and win deals while knowing what's my competitor doing while having AI tools that give me what's the next product I should offer this customer and things like that.

Dan Gill (28:17):

And then bringing the process, what most people call a counter analysis, the billing process into a shorter window. And so, I can do each of those in segments so that I am progressively modernizing the thing without taking a giant rip it all out and replace the whole thing at one point.

Jim Marous (28:39):

Which is interesting because that's what we're talking about on the retail side. I'm going to keep on referring it back to my retail background, but the reality is, as you said, to be able to do things in a compartmentalized fashion to make it so that I don't have to rip and replace, to be able to look at it and saying, I'm going to progress down a path that is going to make it so it works for what we have, but also moves us to be more resilient for what we need to do in the future.

Jim Marous (29:04):

You referenced it in your answer right now. You're doing a great job leading me in my questions today. You discussed AI a little bit, but I would imagine when I'm looking at this, not just from a proactive basis of saying if this, then that. That basically, geez, look at what's coming down the path, I can help them avoid this fee, this cost, or I can enhance the account analysis to make it so that the relationship gets even stronger.

Jim Marous (29:34):

How does AI being used today but more importantly, how do you see it going forward? Because you also referenced the account manager and being able to say, you know what, I can give them tools probably with AI to say, because of what's going on in this relationship, here's not only what you should sell, but by the way, how about going in and telling them I'm just going to make it so you know today we're going to be reducing your cost if banking by this much, because we saw that the relationship was a little bit over stacked in our favor.

Dan Gill (30:09):

That's the kind of stuff that wins you that primacy I'm always talking about. It is showing you that I see you. And so, where does AI fit into all this? The first place I actually describe it is in that monthly billing process, that compressed window. The challenge today with the tech sprawl that is feeding so much data in in a short period of time and pricing transactions as they're coming in for every customer who has different pricing, is it has become very error prone.

Dan Gill (30:44):

So, the first place that I pitched to these people who are used to statements go out on the sixth businesses day of the month, period. Whether they're right or wrong (nobody actually says that part) — but it all comes through and there is nothing stopping statements from going to customers, and we're going to have them as right as we can.

Dan Gill (31:08):

So, the first place I like to use AI because this is such a massive amount of data, it's perfect for an LLM to look at it. And so, what I can do is I can train the language model on what it should expect to see from an anomaly point of view. The idea is, is that I catch the errors before they go out to the customer who's going to catch them for me and probably cost me more.

Dan Gill (31:34):

So, the first place that I like to look at is anomaly detection, and we're doing that already, just this idea of look at all of this. And some of it is just rules-based kind of that you mentioned, but some of it is truly using LLM kind of analysis of, I didn't even realize this. The other place is then in the deal management side, and that is ideas like pricing optimization and what should I offer them next?

Dan Gill (32:04):

Look at this customer maybe from ways that I'm not even thinking of them; regionally, industry size, debt ratios, whatever, and come up with what do others use like that that I may want to offer to these guys.

Dan Gill (32:20):

Look at the competitive pricing information out there. There's several sources where I can get that information and wouldn't it be nice when I'm pricing a deal to either have AI analyze that or to simply know here's what my competition is likely pricing this deal at, and it's all about giving you the tools so that number one, yes, you're serving the customers, and number one, you are being profitable. So, it is an important thing just to have tools that make it easier for the people to do that.

Jim Marous (33:01):

So, based on what you provide from Zafin for your clients and also as I'm looking at it with the fact that you're trying to make it more transparent, easier to understand, easier to manage, and actually at some point the ability to look at it on a daily basis, is this something that becomes somewhere down the line, almost self-serve that a CFO or a treasury manager could actually get online, look at their relationship statement and on a daily or even on a monthly basis, but very quickly?

Jim Marous (33:33):

Be able to analyze it from their perspective, to actually take action for them to look at it as well from their perspective as going, “You know what, we got some balances coming up pretty soon that we need to access or we have funding that's coming up.” Does this become a little bit more self-serve?

Dan Gill (33:50):

It's a lot like the old days when we were doing almost all checks and we were doing controlled disbursement to know each day what's going to clear. It almost lets you have a strategic level of that kind of thing. I know what's going on in my business, I know what acquisitions or whatever are coming up, I know my balance needs or my cash flow needs, and the bank doesn't necessarily.

Dan Gill (34:16):

And so, when I have this information at my fingertips in a faster point of view, I now have the ability to make decisions that can affect my business and save me money. And the bank that allows me to do that is again, going to be my primary bank, or they're going to get awarded more business, or some sort of preference back from the customer, which I think we call loyalty, and that's the big thing.

Jim Marous (34:45):

And it's interesting because it's clear from what you've talked about today that your solution is really good for any size financial institution that has corporate clients. So, if you have corporate clients, it's something you can composability plug and play in the different functionality you need.

Jim Marous (35:04):

But I'm going to assume just knowing banking the way I do from the outside, that 80% of the financial institutions at least are not optimizing this functionality. That basically, it's been done this way forever, there's not a bunch of people knocking on my door, but that's more because a lot of corporate clients don't know what's possible because it's changed quite a bit, and you throw your arms up and go, that's banking being banking.

Jim Marous (35:30):

What would you suggest a financial institution that does not have the capability you've described today in-house, where should they start to at least identify the needs level that they may have, and maybe what is the lowest hanging fruit?

Dan Gill (35:47):

And the low hanging fruit is the way we usually describe it. I would say just first off, the 80% number is probably low because honestly, I haven't met a bank yet that is thinking of this. So, I might even say there aren't any banks that realize how much different this could be.

Dan Gill (36:10):

But what's the low hanging fruit? I think much of it happens between the sales organization and the execution of the relationship, because there's not just technological valleys or silos, there are organizational silos that are breaking this whole process down.

Dan Gill (36:33):

So, one of the first places that we often start with a customer is focusing on the deal management side; getting good deals in place, selling effectively, managing the customer funnel, doing all of the selling process, and then streamline, passing that off to the execution or the billing agents

Dan Gill (36:56):

And so, that's a good low hanging fruit only because much of the known revenue leakage is happening there. Things like over discounting because there's no rules that say how much I can discount a service or approval processes. They don't have a workflow involved, and so, that is perhaps the biggest one.

Dan Gill (37:18):

And while we can start at anywhere of the customer cycle, depending on the bank — that's the place we start most of the time because it gives you a nice way to ease into using a new tool, seeing what it's like, while you then progressively move towards the execution side, which is just sort of the mechanical grunt work of getting this done. And so, that's usually the most proper place to start but it depends on the bank.

Jim Marous (37:47):

Well, it's interesting because it's very clear that obviously, we all know that the banking industry has more data than any industry. And as you said from the very beginning, it was funny because you used at least two of the words that I say on an ongoing basis, the customer wants you to know them, understand them, and reward them.

Jim Marous (38:06):

And this functionality actually does all three. It helps you understand the customer better, it helps you actually understand their needs from their perspective better, it gives you the tools to address those things on a one-to-one basis and reward them accordingly, not in points or not in miles, but in actually the relationship pricing that every corporation is used to.

Jim Marous (38:29):

And I think this really cuts to the chase with regard to what Zafin does and what financial institutions are looking for. They're looking for ways to optimize their usage of data, to generate revenues, to reduce costs, but also very importantly, to build that long-term relationship or not to have it be lost.

Jim Marous (38:51):

And just like everything else we've talked about in the two other podcasts we've done with Zafin, we're finding out that if you use data correctly, you can address that relationship, that loyalty issue before your customer addresses with you in a much more uncomfortable perspective.

Jim Marous (39:11):

And I think at the end of the day, we're not going to get this capability in most cases from our core provider, what we are going to be able to do is actually bring this together, and use the data from the core provider to build overall better relations, but also to restructure the way we look at the relationships internally.

Jim Marous (39:33):

So, we still may have the silos, but when you find a partner like Zafin that will bring these all together, provide you the resource to look and say, how do we get the most out of this relationship, both from the positive and eliminate the negatives perspective, you're actually moving forward.

Dan Gill (39:51):

That is so right.

Jim Marous (39:54):

I strongly suggest for the people that have stuck on the podcast to this level, listen to the other two podcasts we've done with Zafin because everyone looks at loyalty and data in a different way from a different customer perspective.

[Music Playing]

Jim Marous (40:06):

This is one of the few podcasts we've done from a corporate banking perspective. But I think it's important because what we're doing in corporate banking (and I've said this since I started in banking) is from a relationship basis, what we're going to end up doing eventually from a retail and small business perspective.

Jim Marous (40:24):

We're going to look at the overarching relationship and say, “Where should the pricing be? Where should the account level activity be? How do we deal with them? Do we deal with them on a one-to-one human basis or do we use chatbots or something else?”

Jim Marous (40:39):

I really appreciate you being on the show, Dan. You really enlightened us, and it's always good to find somebody that's been on the other side of the desk to bring their capabilities to the table. And actually, you're working on behalf of your company Zafin, but more on the behalf of the corporate client, on behalf of the finance institution. So, it's a great triumphant, I think, of the insights.

Jim Marous (41:04):

So, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Dan Gill (41:06):

Thanks, Jim. It's been a blast.

Jim Marous (41:10):

Thanks for listening to Banking Transformed, the winner of three international awards for podcast excellence. If you enjoy what we're doing, we would really enjoy a positive review. Also, check out my recent articles in The Financial Brand, the research we're doing for the Digital Banking Report.

Jim Marous (41:26):

This has been a production of Evergreen Podcasts. A special thank you to our senior producer, Leah Haslage; audio engineer, Chris Fafalios, and video producer, Will Pritts.