Guests

Full Transcript

Episode Teaser –

0:00:03 – Eric McCoy
I didn’t need a wake up call. I really look at PPP and the divergence of you know who really excelled during PPP or were able to deliver in the marketplace. It was a very small set of financial institutions. Because of that, there were a lot of businesses that missed out, that had to close their doors, weren’t able to continue on. I was an institution. In five days We had a PPP process up and running off of Salesforce Very simple They’d take a lock and we were able to extend record amounts of capital into the market. So you know, those are the things that really gets me excited.

Episode Intro –

0:00:55 – Fred Cadena
Hello and welcome to Banking on Disruption. I’m Fred Cadena. You’ve turned into show number three and let me tell you it’s a whopper. Last Tuesday to Thursday in Sino, the Salesforce-powered bank operating system held its annual conference in Charlotte. Since neither Dane nor I were able to attend this year, we invited two blockbuster guests to fill us and you in on all we missed. First up will be joined by Devin Griffin, director of Product Management at Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. On deck is Eric McCoy, principal banking consultant at Zennify. I can tell you we’re super pumped to be bringing you not one but two perspectives from the Inside Conference. Finally, in this installment of Banking on Disruption, devin and I will discuss unintended consequences in AI and, now that the call for submissions is open, why you should consider submitting a proposal to present at this year’s Dreamforce during our popular Quick Take segment. And while you’re listening to this podcast, why not take a moment to follow us on LinkedIn at the Banking on Disruption podcast, and on Instagram at Banking on Disruption? Now sit back and strap in, because our show is coming to you right now.

Interview – Devin Griffin, nSight 2023 Takeaways

0:02:15 – Fred Cadena
Hello, this week, Dane and I are excited to welcome Devin Griffin.

Devin is a director of Product Management at Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank, and a leading executive in financial services. With over 14 years of experience in global banking, devin began his career with credit handling portfolios of middle market and institutional real estate clients before pivoting to product management, where he now leads C-suite level initiatives for enterprise banks. He has led multiple nCino banking platform implementations, accounting for over 5,000 users and over 10 business lines, utilizing customer-centric product design as a foundation to deliver on business value with a focus on enhancing end user experience. Devin has become a trusted advisor within the financial services SaaS community, speaking at past events for Salesforce, nCino and Wacome on driving innovation and creating a competitive edge through digital transformations.

Devin attended Temple University for his undergraduate degrees in real estate and finance, as well as his master of business administration in strategic management, with a focus on digital innovation and service design theory. He’s an active member of his community, supporting both Temple as well as other volunteer organizations, and lives outside of Philadelphia, pennsylvania, with his wife and four children. Devin, welcome Thanks for making the time to chat with us, especially this quickly after the conference. I hope you’ve had a little bit of a chance to dig out of your inbox.

0:03:38 – Devin Griffin
A little bit. still have a couple hundred to go, so we’re the rest of the week.

0:03:45 – Dane Grove
So I thought we would kick off nice and easy by asking Devin what is your background using nCino So like for how long? what products and features have you worked with and used Like? just give us the whole scoop.

0:03:59 – Devin Griffin
So when I originally started with nCino, it was the you know new technology on the block and it’s kind of the cool thing. And now, you know, showing up at the conference, i realized I guess I’m part of the OG community of it, which makes me feel very old. But I started around 2016 when I was with TD. We were doing our major transformation of the whole credit infrastructure databases. You know pretty much everything under the sun. We were going with this. You know new technology called nCino And we were one of the big enterprises to go after. You know, suntrust Bank of the West were using the product, but it was mainly credit unions and smaller institutions. So it was a pretty big deal when we had selected it And it was really fun. They were always somebody that they were coming up to New Jersey to our tech center, everywhere, down from the C-suite down to product managers, everybody and really trying to learn from us and grow the product.

And thinking back to then in 2016, of things of they were telling us like imagine you know what the future would be And it was. Then we would look at it. Actually in the platform. We’re like it’s pretty far from there, but I continued working in that segment for TD for a couple of years as we implemented new business lines and then really drove some additional technology on it. We used it to support our PPP program and some other initiatives.

And then I jumped over to Silicon Valley Bank and we were implementing it there And really purpose there was to continue seeing how we can really drive ROI. And so I think, when you look at it from the now and especially showing up for conference, like a lot of those things back in 2016, that they were saying look, imagine when are real realities that a new customer just turns on. So it’s really cool to see it come full circle and see people actually put their money where their mouth is and see that come around with it. So you know pretty much every topic under the bank platform I’ve been able to kind of see come to life organically.

0:05:55 – Fred Cadena
Yeah, seeing the product evolve You know, Sun Trust was a client of mine back when I was at Accenture And seeing where the product was then and how the products evolved today, both in depth and in breadth. Right, you know, nCino started out of Live Oak Bank. You know, with that commercial lending product that commercial lending products continued to get more resilient, have more features And at the same time nCino’s been investing in some of the other areas of banking. I think they brand themselves, you know bank operating systems. So they’ve rolled out products in, you know, treasury management and in retail and in deposit origination, mortgage, and just seeing the amount of investment that nCino’s made in their product is very impressive. I wonder, devin, like you know, have you had a lot of exposure to some of those other products as well, or has it primarily been in the commercial space?

0:06:48 – Devin Griffin
My experience is predominantly in the commercial space Through the different organizations I worked in. we either had different instances or different initiatives that were in, you know, small business, retail, treasury, and some of those leaders implemented. So got to kind of go along for the ride and watch it And, you know, in the lens of you know, can you really put all this stuff under one platform And is it going to disrupt the commercial platform? And you know it’s a little TBD on some of those as everything kind of comes together. But it is something that’s there, right And you can just utilize it right And I think that’s one of the really cool things about it is that you can keep building on it like Lego pieces, which is obviously the whole you know premise of being on Salesforce and you know what you can do with the platforms.

But I think they really to your point by becoming really a bank operating system or platform. they want to be the Lego pieces instead of just, hey, i’m going to put a custom object on something from nCino. It’s that you’ll have configuration embedded into the product that will allow you to create the experiences and keep them as separated as you want to. So I think, in a good way to their product. I haven’t had to have much overlap to it, but there have been those turned on in the systems that I’ve used And we were able to kind of stay at our lanes and really use it as a tool operating system.

0:08:05 – Fred Cadena
It brings up something that I want to maybe pull forward that we’re going to ask later in the conversation. But one of the sessions that I was interested in attending was the Your Future with Salesforce Flow and nCino session, and you know, nCino being a product that’s been around for as long as it has, obviously heavily reliant on workflow, and I’ve been very curious to think through how nCino is responding to Salesforce Sunsetting workflow. I think Process Builder a little bit less of an issue, but did you attend that session or have you dug into that topic? How is nCino customization going to work in a post?

0:08:47 – Devin Griffin
workflow world. One of my colleagues from the bank. She attended it. She’s our lead designer And she takes the lead on all those kind of things. But it is something I’ll say from you know, the conversations we have from a partnership conversation exactly that topic right, like how many people are going to have to redo half their systems to be able to upgrade the flow And is it really that worth it Slash? you know what are you going to do. Are you just going to kind of lift and shift to it, or are you going to really kind of harness the capabilities that Salesforce has really invested in and go from there?

The thing that I like just from you know, holistically, starting with automation, that began. Almost everything had to go through Apex And then it was okay, we can use some of these workflow rules and are they really advanced enough? And then you really get into flows and it gives you kind of the basket robins of everything you want to use on the free sun And that’s a lot of the stuff that when I talk to engineers, when we look at design things, it is really fun And I actually think it gives you much more flexibility using the managed package, right. So if you look at something like the digital application right or some of the other kind of aspects before in the managed package it would be. Its managed package is blacklisted code. You got to use it, take it or leave it right, and if you don’t like just even the smallest thing about it, customized right. And you hear a lot of those stories out there in the enterprise, right, that like it’s just the constant conversation. Oh, i don’t like this. One feel now everything goes out right With flows. It offers truly that template, right, take in the managed package and adjust it however you want. It’s clean visibility, right. You can see everything that’s going on. And they did that.

I stopped by the small business booth to check out what they were doing there And the individual that was presenting from nCino, i mean, she just literally clicked open the flow And she said like here, this is what we’re doing And it was so nice and easy And that’s what I love about flow. You know technology and names, like you said. Like it was Apex and it’s process builder. That was this, that was that. They’re always going to keep changing. That’s the whole kind of point of being in the SaaS community is that you got to be on the latest and greatest.

The thing I like the most, that I think is the most revolutionary around flows, and why it helps in the nCino world, is because of that transparency. Especially with being in the financial services world, you have to explain everything you did right, and I remember at my predecessor bank you know we would go into rooms and regulars would say you know, prove out that this is actually working right. And you open up a JIRA ticket and they’re like no, no, no, no, i want to see it in the system. You’re looking at process builder like no one’s going to understand this, right, right, and we can literally open up a flow and put it out for somebody, right, it’s that simple And I think that’s what really gets the benefit for nCino, in my opinion, is that now people can really understand what’s going on.

They can really try to take in the product instead of just jumping to hey, i’m going to customize everything and do my own thing. You can actually really understand it in plain English, and so I’ve had a conversation with a bunch of the guys in product how you can use that to your advantage And, specifically, a lot of the stuff we look at in general and discussing with them is If you don’t like a UI they built, but you like the data architecture, blow another flow on top of it and you can design your own UI for that very quick, like, hey, these five, six things. I want some of the answer in a different way from my institution, and so it gives us flexibility again, without kind of throwing out the baby with the bath order just because of the fact that we didn’t like one thing that someone that didn’t see know designed. You can actually really partner with them a lot more through it.

0:12:18 – Fred Cadena
Yeah, i think that makes a ton of sense, that there’s, you know, an opportunity to reduce your overall technical debt by leveraging the flow product.

0:12:28 – Dane Grove
Yeah, it’s a great segue. You know you were talking about the inside conference and what was for you. What was the most exciting takeaway from this year’s conference?

0:12:39 – Devin Griffin
So the thing I liked the most and you know, when I landed, i got the opportunity Justin Norwood and I have known each other for a little bit who heads up their data and AI and he and I were able to meet with my team and, you know, kind of have an informal discussion around this topic.

But you know, in most insight years, it’s been latest and greatest feature now retails out, and it was, you know, everything that they’re going to do this year was just so focused on data And I think it’s just so important, right. It wasn’t hey, let’s turn on a billion new features, right. It was like let’s really harness what you have, and he and I were talking a lot about that in terms of what nCino is now able to do if you sign off on their partnership for data, what they’re looking at using it in their own models. But it’s really around. You know you get something and especially, there were, i think, more customers than probably prospects this year just on my kind of talking around and things like that, and I think that’s telling of okay. Now we’ve all invested across the industry in this thing. We’re all using your latest and greatest like why you know there’s that feeling of. I need more And I think.

nCino hit a spot on, you know, between their keynotes and then the different sections on data and AI from you know, third parties or Justin’s self, i know, spoke on it.

It’s really there like you got to take a step back and slow it down and really understand if you’re asking somebody to collect a piece of data, what are you doing with it, right, and what are you really going to invest in and use that in. And to me, every piece of data is like a penny in your bank account, right. If you’re not accounting for every single piece of it, they’re not going to add up to the sum. And so I think that was a really cool way to come into a conference and actually feel like, hey, i didn’t see anything that new or that exciting. But then when you take a kind of a step back and realize it’s like, oh, i should be actually getting more out of my system, right, and that was the kind of feeling out of it. And then that allowed me to go into a sessions, really engaged, to see like, what am I missing, right, what am I not using? What are other people using, and go from there.

0:14:39 – Fred Cadena
That’s an awesome point And I said it wasn’t at this year, is I was at last years and I got that sense as well When I thought back to, you know, earlier in senior conferences it seemed like a pretty decent mix of banks that had signed up and are on board and figuring out how to either implement or maximize, and about half that we’re still looking at in senior and kind of kicking the towel ears and saying, you know, hey, is this something that is right for my bank? And there’s certainly a certain energy around that. And you know, selfishly, as a consultant, we always like to, you know, have those conversations with banks that are evaluating new technology. But last year even I got that sense that it really became more of a user conference, more of a practitioner conference, And most of the conversations were from the perspective of people that had been on the platform for years and are talking about Oh well, i took this feature and I took this direction And I really wish nCino would do this And I definitely found nCino last year I’m assuming this year as well spending a lot of time listening to their customers about what they wanted to see the platform do and really acknowledging with some of the trade offs or some of the things that maybe aren’t working as well, and baking that into the product map.

You did touch on one topic that I wanted to get to.

Obviously, we know that AI is like everybody’s top of mind topic these days And I think it’s funny because you know I was at World Tour a week before last and you know a lot of my clients sent you know two or three times as many people as they would normally send you know so they could go in, ingest everything that they heard about AI and kind of figure it out, and I I said AI is great but you need to have a handle on your data before you can really get you know anything out of leveraging you know any kind of AI model. But I know nCino has been thinking about AI for a while. I forget how many years ago it was. It was definitely pre COVID when they announced the, the, the NIC, the nCino IQ initiative, and I haven’t honestly kept up with that. But was there a lot that came out of the inside conferences here on what nCino is doing with AI and kind of how they’re baking you know more AI or different models into their, their products or journeys? I’d say it’s more.

0:16:55 – Devin Griffin
You know gone back to, you know when we talked about how long you know being in the nCino industry, and I remember distinctly when Nathan Chanel was at nCino, you know meeting him in Mount Laurel. You know he was resigning to a whole bunch of us and he told us this crazy idea, right, and so what it was going to be able to do and automate it this and automate it that, and then it was effectively Nick, right, and then, like a year later, they announced it as a formal product. But, to your point, it’s really kind of like there in the background And I think it really is. nCino is doing it right. They’re not just like throwing in some fancy tool to it. Yeah, some of the products run on Nick, you can use it, but it really is around. You know, you got to.

Us as a community need to harness all this data right. The only way that an AI model is going to really work for credit And for the type of banking that we all do, no matter how big or small, right, as long as you’re outside of your general, just like peer to peer and things like that. We need to really understand how enterprises are looking at this right, and that’s what nCino has to offer. A lot of us is that community and that understanding of the data, and you know what a specialized and not And I think that the vibe I got from talking to everybody and attending some of the sessions was more so like nCino’s, they’re ready to actually like, make this and start turning on the engine. I think they’ve built a lot of the components. I think that it’s all there, but it’s now putting, you know, gasoline into the engine, and that’s where they talked a lot about it during the keynote and some other aspects of it, of utilizing the customer data, being able to really run trend analysis and really started advising all of us on what’s there in the industry based off of, you know, real collective data, and I think that’s going to be the coolest thing about it.

And so because, to your point, everybody talks about AI right now. Right, it’s, it’s, it’s literally you can’t log into LinkedIn or anywhere else in the world and not seeing somebody tell me that you know they use AI or chat GPT to do something, and you know, to me it actually reminds me very much of you know, right when COVID started, we have a family friend that runs a rare bookstore, right He was talking about. You know how. You know books are flying off the shelves all of a sudden, right, and everybody wants a first edition sitting behind them on their Zoom backgrounds of you know we did 20 other different things, right, we want to show they happen. Then to me, that’s what AI is. Right now, everybody wants to go buy some SaaS platform, turn on AI, right, the only people that are winning contracts are because they have an AI component, right, and it’s becoming something of just like the book sitting on the bookshelf.

Nobody really knows what to do with it outside of you know the, the true trend centers in the industry that are predominantly outside of financial services, and I think that when you look at credit and you look at banking, we’ve been collecting data for so long and you know, predominantly for regulatory purposes, but now it’s really trying to change it into how can you protect the bank the best, how you can protect the industry, and then how do you actually, you know, kind of utilize it to basically make an exoskeleton for your bankers to just put them on, you know, super speed to be able to help customers, and I think that’s going to take a long time to kind of change those trends right, and that’s where I feel you know it was nice coming in and, yeah, there were some topics on it, but to your point, it was mainly on data.

It was not Hey, here’s some fancy feature, let’s go, you know, turn it on in your sandboxes. And you had every consultant you know pestering you about how they can turn it on in 60 days, and I think that was the one in the industry guilty.

Yeah, we all do it right. We all want to turn on something in 30 days and improve. We did it And we do those hackathons all the time, right And but at the end of the day, you got to really understand what you’re delivering and how that’s adding to a customer, and that’s something I think you see it’ll actually gets in space.

0:20:42 – Fred Cadena
Yeah, i love the reminder of the evaluation of people’s zoom backgrounds. I don’t know if it still exists. There was that Twitter account that would rate people that would go on television based on their background And it definitely became a bit of a niche business at the time. I mean, we’re not recording the video. My background would probably get an F today if we were. it’s just a very plain vanilla conference room. So, from a data perspective, what is nCino’s push into data this year? Is it about helping banks get more of a handle under data, make sure that the data governance is more straightforward? make sure the data is cleaner?

0:21:27 – Devin Griffin
Yeah, i think it’s more of getting a handle of what you’re actually using And it’s almost the conformity measure. They’re not conforming data from an industry and then spitting you back out of number necessarily, but it’s more around. How are we actually going to look at this And giving you some of the trends that are out there that may actually even as a customer, you can pause and be like, oh no, that’s completely wrong. Well, why is it wrong? Prove to me it’s wrong And a lot of us know actually the real answers. I think that’s actually when you deal with frontline bankers, no matter what institution I worked with, it’s always like Groundhog’s Day, right, it’s the same conversation. No, that data is wrong. I’m telling you it’s this right, and I actually trust my members when they tell me that, because 90% of the time they’re actually correct, right, they know their customers, they know their deals. So, in and out And to me, that’s really what nCino’s kind of stance is is like okay, how do we translate that?

Right? How do we actually get it to the point that the industry is looking at things in common terms? How do we actually then use that to leverage it? Because if one of us is talking about days to close, but we’re only actually meaning X, and others are saying days to close, which is a managed package field that they’re calculating, but we’re using it for Y over here. Well then, they’re going to look like they’re on super speed and I’m going to look like I’m the slowest bank in the world, right? In reality, there’s no apples to apples comparison And I think that’s one of the things that, in the commercial space, is the hardest thing across the industry Like, how do you really compare one process to another? And I think that’s really their stance is really, you know, what are you going to feed into these models? What does it really mean? Let’s start actually looking at it, and I think that’s why they were so, in my opinion, so public about. You know they were, they were very excited.

I think they use the percentage, like 97% of banks have signed up to use, you know, this data sharing service, and I think that’s that’s what it’s really going to lead to. It’s really understanding what you’re collecting, right, and I think that’s the value add. And then, once you understand it, then you can use it for whatever purpose you want to use it for AI and training a model. Go for it If you want to use it for just truly saying I understand the value and the KPIs that I’m getting out of the system and being able to articulate that back up, you know, to your leadership or sponsorship of something right that’s, that’s a value add, right. And so I think that was really the kind of theme out there was that you know the data is broader and more purposeful, that’s cleaner than just AI. But I think AI is going to be the conversation that forces people into oh, i can’t use it until I get clean data. Okay, i’m going to finally go clean my data after 10 years.

0:23:55 – Fred Cadena
From from your lips to God’s ears, I hope conversations I’ve been having for a long time. I want to pivot just for a moment. You know, obviously this year’s conference took place in the shadow of some of the recent regional bank news. Even during the conference, PacWest, you know, had some some sheer volatility after it disclosed that its deposits fell about 10%. How was this reflected in the conference? You know what was the general mood. Were there any new approaches, either from nCino or maybe from some of the other banks that you talked to, around how to gather and retain deposit?

0:24:30 – Devin Griffin
Yeah, I’d say from the nCino perspective to all of us this customers are even prospectus in the financial services industry was a lot of compassion I felt across the board. Whether it was intentional or not, you didn’t feel a lot of that cell. You know, obviously, you know if you talk to them about it, they’re salespeople, they want revenue like anybody else, But I think they really are cutely aware of it. Right, Half the people that work in nCino probably actually more than that, used to be bankers. Right, Some of them are, you know, recent converts and They understand what it’s like. They had either been through the SNL debacle or to dot com, bot or 2008, right, in the Great Recession, And this is unfortunately something that continues to occur over time and time again. But they were really really empathetic to the fact that people were walking in in a lot of different situations or thinking about that right And recent announcements. Right, We walk in to the conference and you were happening to be from Pap West, which I don’t know if they were there or not But like that’s all of a sudden your whole viewpoint on life changes And so definitely kudos out to them on having that reflection. They’re just there to support, I think that amongst the community there was definitely much more of an aspect of togetherness, right, And so it’s always been a really good spot to come.

You see, old colleagues It’s one of my favorite things I get to see the old TD team always comes. When I say old, it’s like 25 people, 20 of which are like brand new people that I have never worked with, and then five people that I worked with back in the heyday. But it’s always a great time, right, And you get to see people you know, and I think that’s like any conference. I think this year was specifically different that you saw a lot more conversations amongst the banks, talking to each other, trying to really understand best practices and really just how you can protect talent.

I think it’s a very rare talent set in the nCino world as large as they’re getting. It’s still rare to have people that have done so much. And it’s a small community. People trade up everywhere, right. Even joining our new institution, I met people around it that were at SunTrust or other areas, right, And so it’s definitely a small community and that really shined in a positive light this year. And, you know, I think even the enterprise banks all of us were talking and just really helped me help each other out. How do we help protect talent and people? So I think that was you know you can read all the headlines on all of the doom and gloom out there. I take the positive light at least of that conference. Provided us an opportunity to come together as a community and try to do what we can with what we have.

0:27:12 – Fred Cadena
That’s fantastic. I love that. I love the community aspect of these conferences. always You touched on something that I hadn’t thought about asking but I will now which is the talent and the very specialized way that nCino is different than Salesforce. You know you can’t just take a Salesforce practitioner and throw them into an nCino implementation and expect them to succeed. I founded the nCino practice at Silverline and helped them scale their capabilities for the first three or four years that that practice was moving. I’ve nurtured nCino practice at a couple of other SIs in my career And one of my suggestions is that if I look at Salesforce more broadly, salesforce has done a ton to help democratize information, to help you know new practitioners learn, you know trailhead, you can go and you could get, i think, a million badges.

I mean there’s just you know so many things out there to learn. I have seen that shift a little bit from nCino in the last couple of years but it is very difficult as somebody new to the ecosystem or maybe somebody that’s starting a Salesforce career in financial services and wanting to learn more about nCino, to really, you know, get access to training materials, to get access to sandboxes, to really, you know, have an opportunity to leverage the product. You know, i wonder, from your perspective number one, do you see that the same way? And number two, as you’ve been building nCino capabilities at TD and then at Silicon Valley, you know how have you dealt with that particular challenge.

0:28:50 – Devin Griffin
I think it’s in university with Jen Adams has done with it certainly going a long way from just you know some videos and things into. You know it’s bridging on, you know getting there, but to your point it’s not trailhead. I think designing a trailhead is next to impossible, right, it’s just what the resources that Salesforce has to be able to do demo works and developer works to do that is. It’s great, right, but it’s heavily highly specialized to them. I think reading, like the gold standards, nCino community, all those kind of things, you can definitely get enough to be kind of a call it, conversational Spanish. If you’ve never touched nCino, right, you can understand it, you can get through it. I think the biggest hardship into breaking into the financial services industry has always been the you kind of had to be there to really be able to walk into a room, right, if somebody just wants to turn on Salesforce CRM, you got to know the industry a little bit, but you really got to know Salesforce CRM right, and you got to walk into a room And I think that’s why you see a lot more people that are practitioners of that And you know anything that’s more of a platform related thing on Salesforce. You see a lot of people that have jumped in their careers in industries. People that have done nCino particularly stay in the banking ecosystem And I don’t think that’s because you can’t pin it out of it And there’s not trend. You know skills that can kind of translate to other industries. I think it’s the opposite. It’s like you said, you can’t really bring that many people into it.

In my career I was fortunate that at TD there was you know it was such a big initiative. There were so many us across the bank right And some of us, you know, really dove into learning, you know it from a technical side, which is what I wanted to go do. Others really stayed more on the process side. So you know, we were really large institution and the management put a lot of weight behind it to use that internal talent. We obviously had a censure and others there to the help out from that Over my career and into the later ages of the TD days.

And then you know how I’ve been looking at talent, you know, just more broadly and even advising people on, you know, building out their nCino teams, finding the unicorns of the nCino world, somebody who was a banker, who understands technology and Salesforce platform, who also has a deep connection to nCino. We exist out there, right, you know, there’s probably like 10, 15 people that can really claim that. But what you really have to do from building that talent is building teams. And everybody always says that like, oh, i’m going to build a high performing team, right, but they really just stick a bunch of individuals to contribute this together. Right, and it’s just like you’re good at this, you’re good at that and that’s going to work. Right.

And what I want to look at it is that you have to almost have a whole journey, right, and everybody has to be actually in that whole eternity to support each other and figure it out. Right, you’re going to have one person that’s probably an ex-consultant, you know, just knows how to execute and go that day long. You need somebody who actually can walk into a room and the bankers are going to respect, you know. Whatever. That background is right. It could be somebody who’s been doing projects that just has that trust. It could be somebody like myself that used to be a banker. That’s always what I break the ice with. Even, you know, coming into a new institution after spending 11 years at TD, i was still able to walk into a room and say that I’ve named clients, i’ve underwritten credit, right. I’ve had a credit officer throw a package back in my face and told me it’s horrible, like I’ve experienced those things and that really helps break the ice right. And you know, i think then the last part of that is you need somebody who really has understood and seen, and you always need three resources for where one would do Maybe, maybe not right, hopefully, you know, as things get better and people are able to upskill into it, you should hopefully get to the point, like a Salesforce CRM, where you can have one individual jump industries and you’re good to go.

I think that at this standpoint, you’re still looking at something of. You’re really only looking at about 10 years of you know the company being in existence and from an enterprise level, you know you’re just breaking that. You know nine, 10 years of when Bankwest and SunTrust started, so there’s not a tremendous out there that you can just like hop, skip and steep. I do think that you are seeing more people that are attributing to that and actually saying, hey, if you have talent, that’s in this space. Let’s have a conversation right.

It’s a small world. People want to expand their careers. I am not a person that believes somebody’s going to work for me for 25 years. If I get a couple of good years out of somebody and then they want to go experience something else, I hope it’s within the organization that I work in, but if it’s not, i’d rather, you know, help that person out right, and you can talk to anybody on my current teams or old teams and they’ll pretty much attest to that And I think that’s what you’re going to start seeing. More in the industry is actually that community kind of trading up resources to help build and build and build until we get a critical mass that all of a sudden you can go out to market and you can just get an nCino person, you know.

0:33:39 – Dane Grove
Devin, you were earlier.

You were talking about at the, at the inside conference, the emphasis around data analytics and how you’re able to use data and use in the platform, nCino platform and just a lot of energy in that area. We’re also talking about AI and two-year point. It’s hard to get away from that topic lately. One of the things I’m curious about and I’m not sure if they covered this at the conference or not or what you know about it but what’s going on with regard to fraud detection And how AI is going to play a part there and nCino’s platform, et cetera. I’m like do you know much about that, or was that talked about much?

0:34:24 – Devin Griffin
Definitely not my domain, so I leave that to all the people that spend all their day looking through transactions, but there were some sessions on it. I really think it just comes down to you know, to understand. In my eyes, you know the highest level of you to understand fraud. You have to understand what’s good, right. That’s what you’re comparing against. I mean, that’s what every single AI model really is right. When you look at the heart of a machine learning model, it’s trained me, binary, right?

It’s so funny that everybody speaks of AI ML. All this kind of stuff is the most you know intensive models out there and they really are. But at the end of the day, when you get down to it, it’s just a decision tree that says yay or nay, or my good or bad, right. And so to understand something that’s fraudulent, in my opinion, you have to understand everything that’s good, right, because we all remember those days that you know you swipe a credit card and it comes up declined, right, and it’s for $2. So you know it’s not like the money or you hope not.

And then you get the phone call and you know it’s hey, we thought there was fraudulent because yesterday you bought something for $1,000 and that’s abnormal, right. And so I that, i think, is great protective mechanisms, because they’ve had good data to be able to say I never spend $1,000, right. I think that those trends need to actually come outside of just the transactions and more upwards, because if you’re looking at commercial clients, you really only you don’t really care at the credit metrics, you don’t care at the approval that’s not going to indicate somebody’s fraudulent or not. But you’re looking at the KYC, you’re looking at their actual transactions, which are outside of Encina, right. But I think that you can start leveraging it in terms of you know what actually clarifies this client in that whole 360 view, right, is it abnormal to spend $1,000, right, you know, is it because we just gave them a loan and that’s why they just wanted to spend $1,000, right, because they have it and that now makes it okay. So I think that’s where you’re going to see those trends. It’s less that you know Encina and its own right, in my opinion, is going to be that you know core area of you know fraud features and things.

I think there’s a lot of great vendors out there for it. I think it’s more going to be how do I enhance all those models to really tell me, okay in the credit workflow or the deposit workflow, these are okay things. Let’s make sure we scrub those out so that we don’t get those false positives. Right, we’re not declining people’s credit cards and other kinds of things because of something we already know inside of our bank. Right, and that’s where you know, i believe, encina staying on the Salesforce platform, everything being public API, you know, really driving in that direction. It’s all your fingertips. You need to start doing it And that’s really what they’re kind of pushing in that area. It’s like, okay, great, you want to use this vendor for any purpose? right, and you heard them talk about that on the stage with, like the digital app side, go, use that vendor, but use our APIs, use our data. Like it doesn’t mean you’re kind of keeping those things separate. You should understand what you’re going to push and pull from these systems to create that better experience or something.

0:37:24 – Fred Cadena
I think, oh, that makes a lot of sense And I think that one important thing to balance is the customer inconvenience, customer experience, risk of false positives versus the you know true financial risk of false negatives. right, and as I see more banks pushing towards true breakthrough, processing true hands-free underwriting, i think that’s going to be something that’s very important is to make sure that they’re balancing that appropriately.

0:37:53 – Dane Grove
You know I was just reflecting back on more from, like a consumer standpoint, like with my wife and I are favorite to credit cards TJ Max, mastercard she racks up points and we go to TJ Max and she gets $100 worth of stuff for nothing. And then American Express And I remember about four years ago it was evident that TJ Maxx had implemented or at least that MasterCard had implemented new like fraud detection software And it was like every time we turned around, you know, the card was declined and it was shut down and you know, and that’s not as like we actually pay our credit card bills in full every month, like we do not pay interest ever. And and then just knowing more today about AI than I did then, and I think about topics like supervised learning versus fine tuning a platform like an AI platform or an LLM whose maybe job is fraud detection.

It’s going to be interesting to see how that story continues to unfold. You know, like do you find yourself in a situation where clearly your credit card has rolled out to be software and every time we turn around you know it’s getting declined, or I wonder if that smooths out in the future. So any thoughts on that?

0:39:15 – Devin Griffin
Well, I think the interesting thing I think might maybe Pierre said it or someone when they’re only to know how they said the consumer experience has transcended into small business. I adjusted to say the consumer experience is the only experience, right, Bank doesn’t exist, right. A corporation doesn’t exist, right, It’s just legal paperwork. You still have a person that’s sitting behind. It’s the same person that’s buying something off Instagram. That’s also signing your documents for a billion dollar loan at the same time, right, And those experiences, the more digital we get, the more consumer like we get.

And I think that you know you look at it on the standpoint of whether it’s fraud, whether it’s just, you know, filling out an application, any of that kind of stuff. People always are going to attest it to their consumer life, right, Like how was I able to buy something in one click on Amazon And it takes me all these things to go, you know? do a loan application Everybody wants to forget. Like, okay, well, you’re buying something for 10 bucks on Amazon, right? Versus, you’re getting a hundred billion dollar loan, yet you probably need a little bit more things for us, right, But that’s the anticipation going into it, right, That’s the expectation, even if it’s unset, And so I think that’s what we’re going to see a lot of And I think that’s kind of where also nCino’s getting to of this. You know, data community is that doesn’t exist within corporations like a can of consumer life, right? We why we’re all worried about the fact that chat GPT can read all of our data and all of our Facebook posts And, yeah, it’s kind of fun to play around with, but it’s also super scary that it’s going and doing all these things and how interconnected all of our consumer data really is within the corporate and the financial services world. It’s not like that, right, And that’s the really hard thing as product managers for us to create experiences that are consumer like but not right, We don’t have those same error.

So I think that’s, you know, probably the biggest thing you’re really going to see pushing out of it, whether you want to use it for fraud detection, you want to use it for, you know, better customer 360 and an application, or just you know, your ongoing portfolio management, you know, and just really understanding your client over its time. It’s really that you have to start actually looking at our data. Look at consumer data, right, Like what’s actually relevant, What’s not. What can I pull from other sources. What do I need to get from a human Right? It’s like old school, you know, college, primary and secondary research, And I think that’s the really interesting thing.

It’s not just Hey, I went and bought fraud detection, I went and turned on something from nCino you know I’m using some flow from Salesforce. It doesn’t matter, right, It’s all just shiny objects. And so I think that’s what it really comes down to is Okay, now that I have all this, now that the you know industry for the most part has breached this, I have data and I’ve been begging, you know, my people that give me this data for the longest time, whether that comes from a customer or it comes from a banker. And now I think it’s actually that pivotal time that us in the technology space or the project space, actually have to kind of, you know, step up the bat and then do something with it across the board.

In every industry, right Or a bank is, you know, we actually have to prove to people that all this investment was worth it and all this data that we’ve been collecting you has been worth it. And that was definitely a big kind of undertone theme that all of us resonated with Right, We? no matter what bank you talk to, it was always the. What are you going to do with all this data? Right, I don’t ever see you doing anything with it.

0:42:37 – Fred Cadena
Well, and I think that’s the that’s the important part, right, like, i think that the more and everybody’s always being asked for more permission to access data.

But you need to get something out of it, right, you can’t just keep handing over data and then walk into an experience where it’s very clear that the bank doesn’t know anything about you. Right, that creates a real, you know, cognitive dissonance, i think, in the customer and leads to you know them going back to your point and comparing that experience they just had with the bank to the experience they had at Amazon. Right, if both these organizations know as much as they know about me and you know, arguably your primary banking relationship should know way more about you than Amazon does. Right, like, they’ve got you know your transaction history. You know the commercial side. You know they’re, they’re looking at all the data in your treasury, like they should know your business inside and out, and when they’re not coming to that relationship leveraging all the power of that data, you know that that sends a very strong signal about how much they care and invest about that business.

0:43:43 – Devin Griffin
Well, and that’s where, like, I always, in almost any future I create, i take it back to the Amazon by now feature. I think it’s the greatest feature right For its data that sits behind it. Right Because everybody’s looking at it and saying like, okay, two clicks, surf for something, or sometimes it’s pushed to you right And I like it click done shows with my doorstep in 30 minutes. The amount of data that Amazon has collected over the years to be able to produce that experience is just literally breathtaking, because they’re actually using it right And I feel like being an Amazon customer and I use it way more than I should, given my trash is just all Amazon boxes 24 seven, like it happened over time, right.

The first Amazon experience wasn’t that great. It asked me a lot of questions that I really think matter, right. But then it finally figured out enough and then you didn’t have to put in your address anymore and you didn’t have to put in your credit card every time, and then you didn’t have to put in.

You know, this is the preference, the subscribe and save is, you know, my default. Like, all of a sudden, things started clicking together and then you hit that epitome of just click, done right, and then that’s triggering off because I can’t imagine on their upside everything that they’ve had to collect to be able to route that to the right center, to the right truck driver, to the right packaging person, and then it lands, you know, on my doorstep in 15 minutes.

0:45:08 – Fred Cadena
It’s magic. I was thinking the other day, this is going to definitely date me. But when I was a kid I used to like watching Lootie Toon cartoons And I remember the you know the coyote or, in some cases, Bugs Bunny, would reach for the Acme catalog and, like you know, write something, drop it in a mailbox and stand there and like, tap their feet three times And then up would come the mail truck and deliver whatever it would they ordered you know, the anvil or the bomb or what have you And literally that’s what Amazon is doing today. Right, Like we sit there, we open up the website, we click a couple of buttons, tap our feet three times and it’s at our doorstep, which is just amazing when you think about it. Listen, I would love to keep chatting. We’ll definitely have to have you back at some point in the future. Devin, I thank you again very much. Let me ask you, where can our listeners reach out to you if they want to connect?

0:45:59 – Devin Griffin
Just on LinkedIn. That’s always the best way to get me And so happy to chat with anybody after this and appreciate you guys having me on Awesome. Appreciate it. Have a great day.

0:46:09 – Dane Grove
Yeah, great to connect. Have an awesome day. Thanks everybody.

Interview – Eric McCoy, nSight 2023 Takeaways

0:46:19 – Fred Cadena
I’m excited this week to welcome Eric McCoy. Eric is a leader with more than 15 years of consulting, banking and relationship management experience. He brings extensive knowledge of the banking industry through having held several leadership roles It banks, including in the commercial, retail and technology realms. He’s a sales force and casino expert that’s helped many financial institutions implement and optimize both platforms, improve the lending process, increase loan volume, manage risk effectively and improve both the user and the client experience. Eric, welcome, glad to have you on the podcast.

0:46:56 – Eric McCoy
Thank you, guys, yeah glad to be here.

0:46:58 – Dane Grove
Oh, I thought we could kick things off kind of nice and easy by honest getting Eric Tell us about your background using nCino. I’ll be getting into. when did you first start using the product Give?

0:47:10 – Eric McCoy
us the rundown. I’ve been specifically in the ecosystem since 2019. So about four years using nCino. I worked for a bank that had nCino. I’m kind of helped lead their commercial group in it. I think from a holistic a little less perspective and just its integration into sales force, there’s a lot of power behind what nCino has offered and, for whatever reason, not a lot of other solutions have really been able to come and compete directly on that. That’s still where I think nCino has a pretty big advantage. Those specific features and ports.

That product that really stand out for me is, i think a lot of what they’ve done are really getting into automation and spreading. That’s come a long way within nCino. I work in that space. Obviously, clients in that space We’ve helped clients to kind of accelerate that as well. But also that end-to-end quite portal where you can engage the client through either document exchange or even online application. Getting people through that has been pretty powerful from that standpoint. But just the UI I think that stands out for most people because it’s a consolidated environment, an ecosystem that’s there that you’re not having to use. Typically that new UI represents probably three or four systems out there that you’d be having to use another system, for That tends to be where I saw a lot of value and a lot of other non-quiet as we work with that value.

0:48:54 – Fred Cadena
I’ve worked with nCino, i believe, for about six years now. I founded the nCino practice at Silverline and then have nurtured the practice in a couple other SIs. I think I think you’re spot on, Eric. The spreading feature definitely has had a lot of enhancement. It’s really powerful now. The ability to work collaboratively in a portal environment and really cut down on cycles around iterating, asking for documents and giving the borrowers the ability to go in and see exactly what’s needed and upload that in a secure fashion is super powerful. Then I agree out of percent, especially in the commercial, the heavy CNI, cre space. If you’re in a bank that is leveraging Salesforce, there’s really no question as to why you wouldn’t want to use nCino for those processes, especially in eliminating those swivel chairs, those moving between four and five different systems, getting that all done in one pane. It also happens to be the same environment where you’re tracking your relationship management. Your overall decline for your business is phenomenally powerful. I agree with that 100%.

0:50:09 – Dane Grove
Yeah, just a nice segue. We’re sitting here talking about features and capabilities. always new things happening, sure, in the nCino world, In site 2023, I understand you were there, Eric. Are you excited and take away from?

0:50:27 – Eric McCoy
this conference. Do you think you want to hunt a lighter Talk about it? Yeah, i think the biggest one is nCino continues to invest in its platform and what it can deliver to the industry and into the market. I think, specifically, that’s not necessarily been a hidden factor, that they haven’t really considered this, but the bigger thing has been really around data. I think them seeing where AI is going and making more emphasis of, hey, we have a house along the data.

One of the great things about spreads is that you might be taking in a client that you’re spreading and they have another entity that that bank might not have an engagement with, but it might be a big entity that is in some way connected to that borrower. They have to go and create a relationship for that so that that information spreads fills into the spreading. That itself is creating this data of externally generation that’s within the system. Now I think nCino, over the last couple of years, have probably put an emphasis on trying to really understand all the data that’s coming through. Now they’re putting an emphasis on really pushing that out as the opportunities for them in the future of collecting that data, being a data warehouse and an essence themselves that they have a lot of data that comes through there. I think that’s really a lot of the focus that was on this year. You look at the sessions live data-driven sessions that they had and to ensure that becomes a focus That’s going to be a big one.

I think there are some adjustments to a platform that they need to make. That’s probably going to be for people like me and Fred where we’ll wait and see are they able to make those adjustments to ensure that they can really be what would be considered an open platform As that continues on. I think that’s there The one that I think for me personally probably was not as impactful. But I think, as you look at the sphere of financial industry, there’s also that investment in simple nexus and how they’re putting this focus on mortgage making mortgage a little bit, opening that up so that there’s more of a competitive area Right now you really have encompass out there That’s the main one or having nCino come along to have maybe a product that can compete with encompass and then also leveraging some of the capabilities that simple nexus has in their UI and some of those other things that might make nCino a little bit more agile was interesting to see. Definitely a big focus on that.

0:53:12 – Fred Cadena
I think that makes a lot of sense. I know you started off by mentioning the data and the AI. Ai is obviously everybody slips these days. Everybody wants to inject more AI. I love that nCino is taking the tact of focusing first on the data and getting the data right. In addition to that, was there a lot of announcement around new features or baking more AI into the process once you do get the data right. I do remember one of the prior inside conferences that was at the announced NIQ and nCino IQ, as I haven’t kept up as much with how that’s really been manifested in the product. Any new announcements or roadmap from that perspective.

0:54:02 – Eric McCoy
Yeah, i think a lot of it was around kind of enhancing that a little bit more with NIQ and predictive analytics doing a lot more, or bat. They talked about rich data code, that they’re partnering with RDC, so they’re going to be doing it, which does some analytics on their compliance side for assessing leading and those pieces. There The headlines were more when you looked at peers, the headlines weren’t within that. They did some on the ancillary callouts there, but a lot of the keynotes are really expanding on that. So, adding that more data that kind of becomes more predictive so that you can be baking predictive decisioning or other things like that, or even risk management. You have that on the other side of the client so that you can have a little bit more risk management pieces. So those were a couple of the things that we, the high herd there and we actually got our chance.

I got the chance to talk directly with RDC on kind of what they’re looking to do and so they’re in the early stages of their partnership with nCino to bring better data into it and do it in a way that they can really position things around, especially around like renewals you know, the credit actions that you would call that might be. You know you’re generated to have more of an automated process there because, realistically, a lot of that lives there. You’re not having to create some pain. You know it’s not. There’s not as much science to that piece as there is and really collecting the data and understanding what the mitigations might leave or any shortfalls within a credit credit request, reviews and renewals typically are a lot more. That is what the data is.

0:56:08 – Fred Cadena
No, i think that makes a lot of sense. The other area I was really interested in from what you mentioned was, you know, simple Nexus, and I’ve had a little bit of a look at the platform. I’ve been a little bit hands-on with it. I’ve not leveraged yet with a client. I think that last year and I don’t know about it in your business, you know we made a little bit of a bet around mortgage, just a little bit ahead of the interest rates going up and mortgage companies kind of pulling back on investment. So I’ve not had a lot of opportunity to really take that out to be client facing. I do know, or I think I believe that I know, that Simple Nexus still maintains its own user conference and its own user group. So are they doing some stuff to bring that more together? or, you know, i don’t know if you have any insight in that or not.

0:57:01 – Eric McCoy
Yeah, I think that they had. They had a strong enough only to call it already that they’ve kept that there. But at the conference there were much more. I would say. I don’t know if I have a guess I might be a little high on this guess but about 25% was mortgage, like mortgage related in one way or the other, which was vastly different from last year where they had just announced it, for obviously from like had just done it, but there definitely was a bigger emphasis on that piece of it And so they had bigger, bigger displays, bigger opportunities for people, at least in their immediate lounge, to come through and see things that were specific to the mortgage side. So definitely was an effort to put more behind that.

0:57:51 – Fred Cadena
That’s cool, that’s exciting. It’s definitely a neat product for what I’ve seen so far And I love that it’s getting more exposure across the broader nCino community.

0:57:59 – Eric McCoy
Yep, it is, it definitely is And we’ll see. But to your point, i don’t know that. If you could always predict hiding the things with somebody as mortgage based, i don’t know. The good news is they’ll have probably a fairly good runway to get things right. They’re kind of aligned things before there’s too much of a high demand.

But yeah, same thing is, i think, coming on the other side of this, not so much for mortgage companies but definitely more for banks that want to have maybe a simpler online experience on the mortgage side or they want to streamline their own mortgage process. This should give them that capability, yeah, kind of to probably compete a little bit with, on the sales side, rocket Mortgage and that offering they have there. So I think that’s that’s definitely. If you read between the lines on, this is kind of what nCino was looking to do, but at the same time I’m sure it was to solve some technical debt that they were hoping to do with some of the UI front end and back end UI and capabilities that they needed to probably sure up a little bit better.

0:59:11 – Dane Grove
Eric, I was interested in the E-Water T-Shirt with Salesforce Flow and nCino session. Did you attend that?

0:59:19 – Eric McCoy
session. I did not get to that session, unfortunately, though It was our list. I was able to make it. What I gathered from what was discussed was really that whole cleaning up the technical debt a little bit, you know, kind of from an offering perspective and streamlining it a little bit. The person that went that we had go, said that it was pretty good but was expected. I think it was a little bit basic and injured. But I think that’s going to be the interesting thing of is how much can nCino adopt some of these things and improve upon what the platform and how the platform is designed and managed, because Visualforce pages is still an issue And so we get past that. That’s definitely got to still kind of have when they get full and migrate off of that. Then that would be a big one.

1:00:18 – Fred Cadena
Did they articulate you know whether it was that session or somewhere else kind of a broader strategy to mitigate some of the technical debt on the platform? I mean, it is really powerful. Having seen it over the years, i think there’s definitely been a lot of emphasis and obviously the market rewards it in rolling out new features. But to your point, visualforce is still a thing. There’s a lot of workflow rules that are behind the scenes. Any visibility into what that looks like on the product roadmap, or was that not a big topic?

1:00:50 – Eric McCoy
That wasn’t a big topic, and I think the biggest reason is because of what they’re trying to do with their client portal and trying to get that fully exposed, and we’re still getting deferring tidalized, but when that’s supposed to happen, that’s the biggest one because it has an impediment on the positive account opening, which is a really big need in the marketplace today, and then also online application. I think, fred, you probably are. You see, some of these larger implementation partners that have more of a technical approach on this. That can be fairly complex. We don’t like going there because it’s, in our opinion, for law requirements. It’s just not manageable, and so it makes it a little bit more challenging for that.

But I think it’s some of this happening on the Salesforce for it, you know, kind of, because that’s obviously what impacts on nCino. The bigger one, though, because of how data needs to flow and now are bringing in because that’s the piece of when you look at that even these flows and other things. That’s architecture in the background. It’s all data related, and so we’re going to want to get to a point where that is. You know, it’s not all being put in nCino Salesforce, it’s being put into a warehouse somewhere And not even that it’s stored like. It’s just the L that populate that data fairly, fairly fast.

So that piece, i think, plays a bigger part in the future of all this that some of this, because you know, validation rules, other things like that, those which not this year rules will will definitely play a part. To what extent is that needed in terms of all this kind of that? And if you can limit that by how your your data automation, whatever the triggers are or whatever the orchestrator is, then that that changes it. So I think that’s going to be the biggest thing is we definitely are getting stuck within our organization of how do we do that. How do we really start to solve for future?

1:03:12 – Dane Grove
problem.

1:03:13 – Eric McCoy
It’s interesting.

1:03:14 – Dane Grove
I’m thinking about snowflake again. Yeah, fred and I were talking about snowflake just earlier today. So let me ask you this, eric was there, was there anything about In the Site 2023 that that you wanted to see at the conference and it wasn’t there? Maybe something that you were surprised that it was missing, or hoping for anything that comes to mind?

1:03:40 – Eric McCoy
They had a pretty good broad offering there that you had. You had a very broad offering and there wasn’t anything that was outside of it. I think for all, the biggest thing was things were so condensed it was really hard to get there. So there’s probably things that they were offering that just wasn’t easy for to get to And I think you know that’s some of the feedback. just overall, i think to the band is just making it a little bit easier to get there and then being in the lounge and things like that. But I think they did a pretty good job of balancing everything that was anticipated and kind of on the forefront of what they’re trying to do. So I didn’t necessarily see a big miss on anything there other than just the ability to get to all the sessions.

1:04:36 – Fred Cadena
Yeah, sounds like a bit of an embarrassment of riches, you know, similar to DreamForrest. There’s no way you could possibly make it to everything that’s offered and it’s difficult to you know, to your point, you wanted to get to the session about Flow that Dane asked about and you couldn’t make it to that one and you’re just not going to get everything And I don’t know that there’s a really good way to solve for that.

1:05:00 – Eric McCoy
I think they’re getting to the point where you have to almost at least for the people that go provide the on-demand piece, because they don’t do that where Salesforce does. So I think that’s an opportunity just to provide it on demand.

1:05:16 – Fred Cadena
you know, beyond the keynotes, Yeah, i think that would be really good. I mean, i know you always want to strike the balance between cannibalizing people showing up at the conference and I always say and this is not just me as like the consultant sales guy, but just in general that you get way more out of going to a conference and just kind of sitting back and watching the webinars. It’s about the hallway conversations, it’s about the networking, but for the people that can’t make it, or for the people that do make it and just can’t get to everything, some kind of a library I think would make, you know, phenomenal sense.

1:05:54 – Eric McCoy
Yeah, i think you need to spend that amount of money or invest in that. They should have that so that you can go elsewhere and do that. So hopefully that’s an area they open up, because you know this was their biggest one yet I mean they tripled in size from the other years.

1:06:11 – Fred Cadena
That’s amazing. There were back in Charlotte, definitely a different field than Raleigh. How did that all work out? How was the conference in that bigger environment?

1:06:23 – Eric McCoy
It was good. I mean it’s funny when you look at it, because I think toll registration registrants was around 2000 and, if I’m right back, and when you compare that to the last, i mean I went to last year’s Dreamforce, but the last big Dreamforce before COVID was 180,000 people in San Francisco for Dreamforce, and so you’re always thinking of, oh well, this is going to be huge. You’re thinking about nCino and it still was. It definitely was bigger and there was a lot going on. I mean, for as many people as there, there sure were a lot of events.

I thought it was good, you know, whereas you know they definitely had a much bigger space. It was probably about three times as big, which made it a little bit more challenging getting around. There were so many competing events. Even the ones that we were sponsoring and posting had challenges in getting people to it because there was just so much going on. Yeah, with that, i think for it being the first, and I think this was nCino’s own feedback whereas, yeah, it is the. We’re kind of growing up here and you know this is a new, a new operatary, and so it worked well. They centralized it as much as they could, so you could make it as easy. Not all the venues could be as close, but I think that it was done. It was done well And you know they’re looking to probably capitalize on some lessons for it.

1:08:05 – Fred Cadena
Yeah, i mean, i think every time I’ve gone it’s been, you know, bigger and more exciting. So I’m sure they’ll take that feedback to heart. I know that, in having you know planned experiences at the last several in Raleigh, like it was just so nice having everything you know very close, and although the options were not probably as extensive as there were in Charlotte, there were plenty of things you know kind of right walking distance, and so I’m sure, though that’ll just, you know, continue to get better. I wanted to ask about something else, just to pivot a little bit. you know, the conference, in the shadow of just the general banking news, regional banking news, during the conference, there was another bank, pacwest, that had some news that caused their shares to cease all a little bit based on their deposit loss. you know, just in general, how did that show up at the conference? you know, whether it be from nCino’s perspective or from other attendees. you know, was that the elephant in the room or were people talking about it?

1:09:06 – Eric McCoy
You know it’s it’s. It’s interesting because in talking with our clients just across the board, sure it is a challenge to answer your question directly. It was not a big topic because a lot of the institutions golly, you know now have a pretty good idea of where they’re at or they start to assure things up. I think the Fed has helped with some of the communication to assure you know, really to reassure the public and those banking customers that you know the banks, really banks in general, are not at risk. You know, totaling wise. They’re still at risk there because we are in a raising, continuing to be in a raising rate environment And for some banks that made the choice of keeping, you know, continuing to offer low interest rate loans, that is definitely a need and especially if they are in a need of deposits.

But what I’m hearing from clients and that we talk with a lot is they’re a lot of feel good about where they’re at. You know, from that, from that standpoint And so I think that was the most reflective in at the conference was people feeling good enough with their, with where they are at and how they’re mitigating the challenge in the marketplace. I think you’re going to out of 8,000 institutions and take 4,000 banks, you know. If you just want to call banks because credit unions aren’t having the same, you know, which is just partly because of the big model but themselves.

You know you’ve had three get hit pretty hard. You know, call it four if you weren’t, and now five. So I think that from from a percentage wise, it’s still pretty low and it shows kind of an addictiveness that at at large, banks are feeling pretty good about it, because I think you would have seen much more of a domino effect. I still think that five to 10 more banks enter enter next year probably are possible, but looking at their grand scheme of things, that’s still pretty low.

And we’ve had, actually, you really look at, we’ve had historical low attrition, meaning bank failure in the marketplace, for the last, you know, probably 10 years. You know it’s been a lot lower because what the, what the Fed did, the good thing about what came out of 2008 was the stress testing and the requirements and then lowering the ceiling of. You know we’re now hitting $10 billion threshold. They accept the $10 billion level has to be out of certain compliance and regulatory have all these requirements now that they didn’t have before And I think those things are ensuring that some of these things are stronger and able to weather storm.

1:12:01 – Fred Cadena
Yes, no, i agree with all of that 100%. I think it’s very much become a little bit of a tail wagging the dog scenario. It is the outliers that are getting all the headlines and you know, looking to your point, at the rate of bank failures, the banks are failing at a much lower rate than they ever have since the beginning of the banking system in this country. However, we did have some very big blips right, and I think that you know it’s got people a little nervous.

I was the most interested in some of the things we’ve talked about on the podcast before is you know where’s the opportunity for the banks to come behind and pick up deposits or to project strength into the market? I don’t think everybody who is looking at the balance sheet strength of their bank or maybe was you know, had deposits that one of these banks has been taken over is going to end up with the big five, and so if you were outside of the big five and you’re interested in growing your deposits, you know what can you do to take advantage of this situation. And then how can you respond if you’re on the bubble and potentially, maybe one of those banks at to your point, there could be a couple more down the road. How do you get in front of that less from a balance sheet perspective and more, just, from a communications and customer experience perspective?

1:13:25 – Eric McCoy
Yeah, i agree, and it’s a really important conversation we have.

I mean, it’s a message that we’re really trying to send to our networks not just our clients, but our networks is, you’ve got to continue investing your digital capabilities.

Like it’s great that we want to have these relationships that are face-to-face driven, cult, high touch, but you’ve got to have the capabilities of taking that and really ensuring that you’re able to support necessary growth, deposit growth and even the ability, through some marketing tool, controlling that narrative that you have with the clients and ensuring that you’re having direct interaction with them.

That shows that, hey, you know quickly pick up or maintain deposits as you need to, or even more, you know lending side, depending if you’re able to be aggressive on the lending side but the other side, that you have the capabilities there to do that and ensure that you’re managing those things. Because on the other flip side of this, our third wheel that we talk about is that risk management. You know, having things in real time and you can go through reports and dashboards that you can easily ensure are actually accurate. Because that’s the other thing. They mess it. All this, the gaps that you probably talked to a lot of banks about is they have broken data, like their data is broken, and so when you look at those digital capabilities, it’s ensuring that you have the data that works for you, because you could be thinking a lot of things fine, but your data is broken or something like that, and it stopped the right story there.

1:15:04 – Dane Grove
I actually do have one other question. So what is what’s the vibe at these at like an nSight conference? Is it fun? Is it? what’s the energy like? Is there music? Are there colorful characters Like there are at Dream Forest? Talk about that aspect of the conference.

1:15:25 – Eric McCoy
Yeah, i don’t know, Fred, how much you remember from last year, but they definitely increased that. Like, when it came in the first evening for the kind of kickoff that was on Tuesday, they had like this kind of hallway where they had all these different lights that you could walk head’s cool and take pictures and then they had people on stilts and you know, kind of walking around to make it fun. It definitely was that. and then this year they did their big thing at NASCAR HoloFane. That was cool. And so, yeah, that was cool.

I think many people that thought from last year because they had one republic as a band for last year was at the museum. They didn’t have a band this year, but they had good music and there was a lot of activities to do. So that was good. because it’s such a small population of people going and so many people are running, i think you start to see the drop off of energy pretty fast, whereas you know not that you don’t have that dream for us. but yeah, we were necessarily ready to all of our, you know, break out session, because that’s just not a winnable, that’s not a winnable plan. You’re not going to do that. You need to make your choice. What are you really going to do? Maybe a couple sessions to go through, but then you’re making sure you’re getting in contact with other people or meeting up with people.

But I thought that energy was pretty good and there was good excitement. You know people are excited. There’s continued optimism with what You know. how’s the ring and just the fact that you were up in that 2000 ring who’s pretty good kind of reflection of you know a lot of the market buy-in and market adoption that’s happening around there because you have larger banks like US Bank and Wells Fargo leading the way on the innovation side to kind of be the example to other banks that this is what’s possible with nCino. Cool, great information, eric.

1:17:33 – Fred Cadena
Yeah, i really missed the opportunity to go this year. Every time I’ve gone it’s been enjoyable, and so I’ve definitely already added next year’s dates to my calendar and hopefully I’ll be able to make it. But thanks again, eric, i really appreciate your time. Let me ask you if our listeners are looking to reach out, if they want to connect with you, what’s the best place to find you?

1:17:55 – Eric McCoy
Yeah, definitely LinkedIn. I’m Eric McCoy at Zennify. It should be fairly easier to lift me up and I just connect with me and I’m happy to always have conversation with people. I love talking about things like there’s some very passionate about what I get to do or what we get to do.

I think I didn’t need a wake-up call of how important these are, but I think I really look at PPP and when you look at the divergence of who really excelled during PPP and were able to deliver in the marketplace, it was a very small set of financial institutions.

Because of that, there were a lot of businesses that missed out, that had to close their doors, weren’t able to continue on, and that opened up that. You know I was at an institution. In five days we had a PPP loan process up and running off of Salesforce Very simple, didn’t take a lot, and we were able to extend record amounts of buck capital into the market, and so those are the things that really gets me excited, and so I love talking about this because it is part of who I am and I love helping institutions to cost to do that out and say, hey. One of the questions we like to ask and I like to ask is before PPP, where do you wish you would have been and where are you now? Are you still where you wish you would have been? Because, if you’re not, that’s where your investment needs to be and you need to really focus on that.

1:19:28 – Fred Cadena
So it’s an amazing point. I couldn’t agree more. I mean, this really is, in the same way, a passion for me. I really feel that my mission is to help organizations, help the public you know, consumers and businesses be connected with the financial resources that they need. And PPP has come and gone, by and large I mean, obviously there’s still outstanding loans, but that’s not the last time it’s going to happen and having those digital underpinnings, that digital foundation, really lets banks respond in a way that they’re serving the communities and the peoples that they’re trying to serve. So I think that makes a ton of sound. Well, thank you again for the time, Eric, and hope we’ll chat again soon.

1:20:11 – Eric McCoy
Thanks, man Appreciate it.

Quick Takes –

1:20:17 – Fred Cadena
And we’re back with Quicktakes. Dan, what do you have for us this week? Hey, you’re back.

1:20:22 – Dane Grove
Hey, Fred, great to connect. As always, i’ve been following the Senate hearings in and around AI regulation. So Sam Altman, ceo of OpenAI, has been testifying in these recent hearings in and around AI regulation. Altman believes AI will be transformative, of course, in very positive ways transformative. He also wants to ensure it’s aligned with human values and public good.

1:20:55 – Fred Cadena
What’s your take. I think it’s a critically important question. I have not been following the Senate hearings really at all, although I have been following kind of the broader topic. I think that in my mind I generally think of regulation around AI in two broad buckets. You know, one is I think it’s the part that always gets the headlines is regulating model development. So there was the open letter that was signed by Elon Musk, several other leading technology and AI figures basically saying let’s put a pause on developing new, more sophisticated models until we can understand what’s happening.

I think that threat is overblown. We’ve talked for like I just don’t think that you’re going to take the technology that’s in use now for things like chat, gpt, which is large language models, and get to general intelligence and get to something that these, these folks are nervous about, which is, you know, skynet, for lack of a better word. It’s also difficult to regulate right Like you can readily buy the equipment that a friend that just built a computer with two graphics cars and is designing you know a model in his, in his house. You can go spin up some capacity on Amazon or in Azure and start trading a model that it’s just very difficult to detect. So I think that part of regulation is, you know, difficult to execute and probably reactionary.

The other side, though, on model deployment, i think we definitely need to look at how these models are having an impact on individuals lives, and you know I’ll pull a page from both of our lives recruiting and hiring And I know there’s differences.

We’ve talked about a four in what you can do, an inbound versus outbound recruiting But when you think about some of these aggregators, like a zip recruiter and others, you know they’re using algorithms to present qualified candidate lists And in many cases you talked to the hiring managers that are leveraging services like that. They can’t necessarily point to what makes the magic in the middle work. You know what’s inside the black box, and is that having disproportionate impact on people and excluding people that would otherwise be qualified for a job? That’s real impact and we probably should be looking at it. And then you start thinking about deploying AI models into more and more places that are going to have impacts on people’s lives, like healthcare, like finance. We really need to make sure that we understand what’s going into those decisions, and I welcome and I’m glad to hear people like Altman welcome, you know some level of oversight to that, because it’s going to have a real impact on real people.

1:23:58 – Dane Grove
Yeah, you’re bringing up some really great points, fred. I’m, you know, sort of summarizing. You know, clearly regulation must consider issues around, around, data, around. You know data use, privacy, intellectual property, algorithmic bias which is probably going to be a hot topic, workforce impact everyone is talking about that. Don’t mess with my money. Right Regulation can be restrictive and can slow progress and can impact, you know, competitiveness. So determining the right approach definitely is going to require a stakeholder approach input. It’s going to be interesting to continue to follow this story and just see how it unfolds.

1:24:47 – Fred Cadena
Yeah, you know, absolutely.

I mean there’s a ton of issues. You know. One thing that you brought up just now is data availability and data rights. You know there’s a number of lawsuits right now. Everybody from Getty Images, individual artists to you know people that own large collections of publications that are seeing their work being reproduced in part in the output of these models, and you know, have they been compensated for that? How do you deal with rights and attribution? It’s authority issue And I think that you know.

I mean it’s exciting that there’s this much progress, but we do need to start putting some guardrails around how we govern both the data that’s going into these models what’s happening in the middle and then the data that’s coming out of it, to make sure it’s having the right impact. And it’s an exciting time. And then to your point, like we don’t exist in a vacuum, i want to raise another thing around AI in external impacts that we didn’t initially realize, and that is, you know, the impact to energy and carbon. You know the development of AI models is using a ton of energy, you know, both for the power and the cooling needs for these data centers, and I know that both of us, you know we’ve been using and trying a lot of AI, but have you given any thought to the carbon?

1:26:09 – Dane Grove
impact. It’s a really good point, you know. Great segue, great point. I, you know I’m a total tree hugger man. I love Mother Nature. I’m always thinking about our environments, not as hardcore as some are about, you know, putting all the blame on humans. I think that there is a natural cycle that happens there, but it’s a closed loop system, at least as I understand it. I’m referring to our atmosphere and you know massive amounts of computing power going into, especially these mega sort of LLM models, and there is a carbon footprint there. You know, technology is also contributing to capturing carbon in some pretty interesting ways. So I think we’re going to figure it out. But it’s just another aspect of this that you know obviously has to be taken into consideration.

1:27:03 – Fred Cadena
You’re spot on and it’s very clear. The weather patterns are changing, earth is getting warmer. The more carbon in the air, the warmer the earth gets, right? So, whether you say it’s human or whether you say it’s not human or a combination of the both, you know those are the facts, right? So the problem is carbon. And the more I think about it, the solution is not changing human behavior, right? We’re not going to change consumption patterns. We’re not going to change, you know, people’s desire to travel, people’s desire for technology on any kind of a scale. That’s going to really, you know, kind of put that genie back in the bottle. And so, from my perspective, we either need to one, find a way to generate truly clean energy at scale, or, two, find a way to do carbon sequestration at scale, or both, And I love that you brought it up. I’ve been really excited to see some of the commitments from companies like Oxonella Petroleum. They’re building a $1 billion facility right now in the Permian Basin, near and dear to where I grew up. You basically suck carbon dioxide out of the air, turn it into some kind of a solid, semi-solid substance and pump it down back into the earth. And they’re not just building one. They’re building a second one in South Texas that should be operational in 2024. And then they announced that their goal is to roll out 70 of these facilities across the globe by 2035. And so if we had more companies making this type of commitment, both on, you know, the carbon generation side like you know, occidental is a petroleum company as well as on the consumption side you know these large data centers, you know making commitments to carbon sequestration. I think that is part of the answer.

And the other thing that I got really excited about fusion energy. And you know, fusion energy has been a dream, but since I was a kid reading about it, And I know people have been working on it for long before then. But last week, an actual commercial deal Microsoft signed an agreement to purchase electricity from a nuclear fusion generator called Helion Energy And the thing that I’ve come the most shocking is that Helion thinks that they will have their facility up and running and able to deliver energy to Microsoft by 2028. Quick math that’s five years. So we are, according to Microsoft and Helion, five years away from commercially viable fusion energy. And you know this initial commitment is not huge. It’s 50 megawatts, which is tiny compared to how much we need for the national grid or global consumption, but it’s not nothing. You know, the US first two offshore wind farms generate about 42 megawatts, so it is going to have an impact and I just think that’s super exciting.

1:30:05 – Dane Grove
You know I definitely keep up with a lot of different sustainable energy initiatives etc. Living in Florida, i’ve got to say, like you know, the solar panel programs that are here are really attractive. They’re super hard to say no to And you know, we’re actually exploring one for our home as we speak And I’m seeing them crop up in our neighborhood and people are reducing their energy bills And it’s I don’t know. It’s interesting to see how it decentralizes. How it works in Florida is when you’re capturing energy on your roof, you actually send that energy. For all intents and purposes, you literally send it to the power company or the light power And then they give you your a lot and then any additional energy that you’re producing they share with other people And there’s some other kind of nuances to that that some people aren’t fond of. But overall I think it’s a good deal. To your point on fusion Now, when you were talking about it, i couldn’t help but to Google it. You know fusion was first sort of like detected, discovered, etc. In 1933.

1:31:20 – Fred Cadena
Yeah, not crazy. Wow, it is 100 years. Let’s, let’s hope that Helio has it figured out, let’s hope that, you know, 20 other people haven’t figured out and that we can roll this out, because, i mean, i think solar is definitely a piece of the puzzle, i think wind is definitely a piece of the puzzle, but we are hungry for energy, not just in the US but globally, and and we need a lot of different options to move to truly clean energy. You know across the board And I think that would be nominal. Last thing I wanted to bring up was last week the call for speakers at Dreamforce opened up. It’s exciting. It’s crazy to think that Dreamforce is literally right around the corner.

For any of you listeners that follow the blog, we did put out a post earlier this week with eight secrets to Dreamforce speakers success. I’ve spoken to Dreamforce a few times and I’m actually speaking at Midwest Streaming in August, and I can tell you firsthand that preparing your submission, preparing your presentation, is no small commitment. Dave, i wanted to get your take. You know they always say one of the benefits you get is you know visibility and career development From your perspective. You know what are your thoughts. Is it, is it worth the squeeze to go in and put the effort into putting together and submitting a Dreamforce presentation.

1:32:48 – Dane Grove
I think so 100%. I, you know, i view it as it falls into like that brand building bucket And you know, anytime you’re doing your taking steps, you’re doing things like, for example, joining us. You know, here on our podcast or someone else’s podcast even steps like that, you know. Anything that’s building your brand is super smart in terms of you know advancing career. I think it also feels good, you know like a lot of times those initiatives are, you know, really about making a difference and making an impact, and that’s kind of what we’re thinking about first, not necessarily just you know our careers and how we’re advancing our careers. So maybe the career piece is like icing on the cake, but without question that is brand building and definitely makes an impact on career path and career advancement.

1:33:42 – Fred Cadena
Cool. No, that’s, that’s great. I’m excited for my Midwest Dreaming slot. I am thinking right now and hoping to get a couple of submissions in for Dreamforce and you know, I encourage everyone out there in our audience to see if you’ve got something interesting, interesting use case, interesting, how to some business perspective submit it. I think the more diversity that we have in submissions and ideas, the better the conference is going to be, And if you do get selected, I will, I will try to make it to your session. I’d definitely love to hear anything that our audience has to share. Well thanks, Dean. This was a awesome quick takes and I look forward to chatting with you again soon. For sure, Have a great day, Fred.

1:34:28 – Dane Grove
You too.

Episode Outro –

1:34:34 – Fred Cadena
Well, everyone, we hope you enjoyed episode three of Baking on Disruption. I can’t think our guests Devin Griffin and Eric McCoy enough for sharing their insights pun intended from the 2023 Insight Conference. We have a lot of exciting stuff planned for upcoming episodes, but most importantly, we want to hear from you, dana, and I would love to hear your thoughts, feedback and ideas for new episodes. Why not drop us a line? New episodes drop every other Thursday, but in the meantime, you can visit our website at bankingondisruption.com for show notes, including a full transcript of today’s show. Also, if you like what you heard today, please subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review. And finally, we’d love it if you followed us on LinkedIn and Instagram at at bankingondisruption. Until next time, this is Fred Cadena, wishing you success in your digital pursuits.