When it comes to innovation, community banks generally don’t have the resources—either financial or people—to compete with the country’s largest banks—where the technical staff focused just on innovation alone is probably several times larger than a smaller institution’s entire workforce.
Of course, no one expects smaller banks to compete with a megabank like Wells Fargo & Co., but there are smaller institutions that are playing the innovation game very well.
One of those is Radius Bank, a Boston-based bank that has approximately $1 billion in assets and four years ago made the radical decision to close all of its branches except for one, and convert its local brick-and-mortar retail operation to a digital platform that operates nationally. President and CEO Michael Butler, who appeared on a panel of like minded bankers at Bank Director’s FinXTech Annual Summit in New York on April 26, said that one of the more challenging aspects of that decision was changing Radius’ culture to support its new business strategy. Not all of the bank’s employees were happy about the change in strategy, and Butler said there has been approximately a 50 percent turnover in the bank’s workforce over the last four years. Many of the older employees who resisted the change have been replaced by younger, more tech savvy employees who normally would choose to work at a tech company rather than a bank. Butler said the company has spent a lot of time trying to create the kind of “vibe” that will attract those kind of individuals. “It’s a lot about the people you bring into your organization,” said Butler. At 57, Butler has the background of a traditional banker even though he has led the charge towards digitalization. “My job as the grey hair is to not let them kill themselves,” he joked about some of the bank’s younger staff members.
Another panel member—Jay Tuli, senior vice president for retail banking and residential lending at Leader Bank, a $1 billion bank located in Arlington, Massachusetts—was instrumental in creating ZRent, an online portal that the bank launched in January 2015. It enables landlords to automatically collect rent payments via ACH transactions. ZRent has been a successful customer acquisition tool for Leader Bank, and it is now licensing the software to other banks that want to use it.
Radius and Leader Bank are both located in the Boston area (Arlington is just six miles northwest of the city), so they have the advantage of taping a deep talent pool in one of the country’s most attractive locations, with a number of highly regarded universities in their backyard. Like Radius, Leader Bank has seen a big turnover in its staff over the last eight years. Tuli said that the average age of its 300 or so employees is 31. “There’s a lot of young talent in Boston, and we’ve benefited from that,” he said.
So, if being located in a large urban market is a key element in the innovation game, how to account for the success of Somerset Trust Co., a $1 billion bank headquartered in Somerset, Pennsylvania, a small community situated about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh? Somerset had just 6,277 residents according to the 2010 census. A third panelist, Chief Operating Officer John C. Gill, said the bank has always placed a very high premium on having excellent technology, and sees this as a critical component of its organic growth strategy. Only about 19 percent of its consumer banking transactions occur in the branch today. It sees innovation as an imperative despite its rural location.
Somerset has learned to play the innovation game by partnering up with fintech companies. A couple of years ago, Somerset teamed up with Malauzai Software in Austin, Texas, to develop a mobile banking solution that allows Somerset’s retail banking customers to securely check balances, use picture bill pay and remotely deposit checks from any location or device. There are banks much larger in size that are still working on delivering these capabilities to their retail customers. Working with another fintech company, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania-based BOLTS Technologies, Somerset has also launched a new mobile account opening platform that has greatly reduced the time it takes to open a new account, and is expected to save the bank approximately $200,000 a year. Somerset and BOLTS were finalists in the 2017 Best of FinXTech Awards, which were announced at the event.
Gill said that Somerset is very comfortable partnering with fintech companies to develop product capabilities that it would not be able to develop on its own. “Banks have the customers and low cost funding,” he said. “Fintech companies bring innovation.”
Source: http://www.bankdirector.com/index.php/issues/strategy/can-small-banks-play-innovation-game/
