What Banks Can Learn From the Insurance Industry

00:03 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

One of the things that I built was I'm doing a Dan Go has a fitness program for busy executives and he gives you this list of food that you can eat and you figure out your macros. But then I thought this is where I get stuck every time is like the meal planning, shopping list. So you can build an app that I was able to just take a picture of the list of food that was on his program, plug in my macros and ask for 20 meals and the amount and the shopping list. So then I had my meals plan for the week, the exact amounts to eat and the shopping list to go, and it. Now I can just plug it in once a week, ask for the next round and it. It's just moment.

01:02 - Fred Cadena (Host)

banking marketing trends for: 2024

02:32

Welcome my friend, to the podcast. With over two decades of diversified experience, stands at the forefront of integrating insurance and technology. Her career has encompassed pivotal sale leadership and business development roles with industry leaders like Aetna, Regents Blue Cross Blue Shield and The Standard. career trajectory shifted with her involvement in brokers portal, a startup that redefined agent and carrier collaborations in employer proposals, sparking her interest in Salesforce. Her pursuit of Salesforce certification led her to a practical role at Gallagher, where she furthered her exposure to service cloud applications. Committed to community contribution, shelling volunteers with supermoms, mentoring mothers toward flexible, rewarding careers in the Salesforce ecosystem. Her experience with the Salesforce recruiting team has given her a deep insight into evolving needs of the industry. Welcome to the podcast. Banking on disruption. I got to start off by asking you, shelling, with your background in insurance and Salesforce, what are some of the biggest ways you see the Salesforce platform transforming legacy processes in the insurance industry.

03:48 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

Well, first, thank you so much for inviting me to be on the podcast. I'm thrilled to have this chance to visit with you. For me, it's been very transformational journey in my career from being involved with large insurance companies, being in sales leadership, business development, working with underwriters and systems, and we implemented Salesforce. At that time I learned painful lesson about the reality of big enterprise insurance companies and certainly banking is going to be the same heavily regulated variety of systems, many very, very old legacy systems and some of the carriers are on with Medicare in particular, on systems where I swear they're just encased in glass and everyone's just hoping, please, nothing happened. But it was a really painful process to go through, trying to figure out how do you actually innovate, how do you leverage technology changes as they come, given what you have to work with, and it's really difficult. But where things are headed and there's been a lot of progress. But now, with AI, the cost and the capabilities and what's coming very quickly is inspiring and I think from my perspective, is the consumer experience.

05:08

I think both banking and insurance can be incredibly complicated. It's so personal for each one of us. Our family situations are different, our financial situations, our health, all the dynamics, but because of the regulation and the size and the variety of individuals across the world, it's so difficult to find out what you need, understand what you're buying, be able to find those customized solutions that are the right choice for each of us, and participating in the healthcare reform early on until now, and seeing honestly the lack of progress. That's something that I'm so excited about in terms of what's coming now is that ability to get hyper focused and the cost of being able to do that and just the technology to be able to do that is. It's right around the corner.

06:04 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more, and I love that. I love the vision of leveraging the technology to move forward, to deliver that tighter, that obviously not just compliant you mentioned the regulations but I would say also trusted right. Whether it's banking or insurance, we're dealing with things that are highly sensitive, highly important to the customers. This is not like you went to Amazon and you ordered something and your socks didn't come here tomorrow. This is really sensitive information and so creating those experiences in a way that's both meeting customer expectations where they've been set, but in a trustworthy way. So what are your thoughts on that?

06:47 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

Well, I think it's critical and that is actually one of the areas in my role at the time at Moda Health, which I was over a team for individual service.

06:59

It was the customer service team and sales team, so we were getting all these phone calls and it was people yelling at the team most of the day.

07:08

It was at a difficult time during healthcare reform where there was just a massive lack of trust and I think in a political season like we're in again right now, this is a very easy place to get polarized around finances and healthcare and Medicare.

07:27

All of those things creates a lot of emotion and so for me, that trust element is critical and, frankly, that's why I think Salesforce and the partner community around Salesforce is a smart place for companies to be, because, inherently, salesforce is leading with that, with all the innovation around trust and security and values, and it's a great place to be working and leveraging this technology. Knowing that that's a bit there, I think it's also a time where the leaders, thought leaders, the drivers of these organizations and innovation need to do a better job of getting out there and sharing the stories and explaining how this innovation is not as scary as it seems. I think there's tremendous fear and concern about privacy, lack of security. Where's my information going? I think that the industry is not doing a great job of getting out and telling the story, the other side of the story of what's possible.

08:33 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Now, I think you couldn't be more spot on with that observation and I'd love to hear from your experience, and especially, you know, I think people hear Salesforce and we have a broad cross section of listeners, some that are Salesforce practitioners and know the platform very well, others that are more in the banking space and may or may not even been seeing Salesforce. I think people hear Salesforce and they think, okay, it's pipeline management, it's CRR, it's CRM. You know, but, as you and I both tell from working with the platform pretty sensibly, there's a lot more to that. I'd love to hear, just you know, a couple of the exciting use cases that you've worked with in insurance, leveraging Salesforce to deliver on that promise.

09:18 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

So the innovative use cases that I've seen existed in my experience with service cloud. So I did a season I just on purpose so I could be on the front lines and learning. I was an enrollment specialist with Gallagher and worked with two of the largest companies. One supplies Chick-fil-A, the other is one of the largest independent hospital chains.

09:43 - Fred Cadena (Host)

You don't want to get in the way of people over Chick-fil-A? I will say that right now.

09:49 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

It was really actually an interesting experience because it was during the pandemic and both of those groups of people were at high risk because of their types of jobs. So it was a very stressful time of people calling in and really some tragic situations and trying to help them through enrolling for benefits. So it was during the fall. They were one one effective date. They were having to make decisions on all of their benefits and when they were calling in, we were using service cloud, which was leaps and bounds away from other solutions, but it would still take 20 minutes trying to figure out how to go answer their questions and go to different resources and different tools. So today, the advancement from then to now the systems are just bringing forward the right information. They can hear the conversation instead of having to just a moment hold and go figure out. Look at the date is this even accurate?

10:48

The companies have really spent a lot of time getting their data right, getting their documentation cleaned up, so that you can actually put information you can use into these systems and now it just will bring it up. And the next phase of that and some are already there and it's coming rapidly is those times where I don't need to talk to you. I could have an agent, an AI agent, just answer my questions 24 seven, instead of during the business hours to call in and talk to that person. But when I'm the person who has had a tragedy or needs help, needs information about their life insurance, then there's more time to give that layer of service and be there for our customers when it really matters. But the times it isn't, it's not them trying to figure out how to call during their business hour. They can get what they need at 10 o'clock at night before they go to bed.

11:42 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I love that and you're hitting right on a subject that has been a debate between myself and a lot of clients and a lot of other people that are consultants and work in the industry. I am very squarely in the camp of people would. People don't really care, in general, about the form factor and how they're getting their their answer, whether it's chat, whether it's an AI voice over the line, whether they're talking to a human being. They just want the information that they want when they need it in a quick and efficient way. What is your perspective on that?

12:20 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

I well, I agree, and I think of just my, my personal life. Right, I'm a busy working mom and when I can just go get what I need and feel confident that it's the right answer, right, there's still a ways to go with the technology that we've had. You kind of get an answer and think, hmm, or it feels like you're actually talking to somebody but you're not, and it's just very clunky. But very quickly that's going to change. We had an opportunity through Supermoms, which is the Salesforce training for moms. We have an AI course and it was been fascinating. It's 10 weeks and we've been able to invite just experts from around the world. And there's a global shipping company, cruise Company I can't say the name, but they're doing this really cool project and it is an AI like vacation agent, so you can call and have this incredible conversation and it's so fun to see what's happened so that it keeps the the tone of the company. This company is fun and innovative and they have trained that agent with that style so that it it doesn't seem like it's a person, but it is this perfect, just experience of getting your vacation planned and it was really exciting to see.

13:42

I think another one is, you know when you're in insurance or banking we have you know how many different languages spoken around the world or in the US specifically, and so often you'll have someone call in and then you've got to connect to the language line and do all this back and forth. Or you have a video that's done in English and the time and money to change over to other languages is just prohibitive. So you end up with maybe Spanish and, where I am the country, maybe Russian. But now with AI you can actually, just on the fly, it can be translated into just about any language and even video. You can have a video answer, a video training, and it can just be translated into maybe not every language in the world, but dozens and dozens and dozens, and it's excellent.

14:31

It may not be perfect and I know with the regulations that's going to be a little bit of a sticking point, but I think another use case that I think is fascinating, both in banking and insurance. It's what we're required to put in front of consumers with all the disclosures, and I can't even understand it, and I've been working for 20 years in the space, so some of the AI is so good at being able to translate it into a usable explanation and if you have a customer service agent who isn't an expert at insurance contracts, they can. Obviously the person has to have it to comply with the law. But an AI can actually serve up just an understandable plain language explanation, and that just was impossible before.

15:18 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, no, I definitely love that. I would you that. I share some of the concerns you raise about the compliance and the regulatory risk of having generated, I do, some of those summations or translations. But I do think AI is as bad now as it's ever going to be. It's only getting better and I think over time, so, so quickly, and I think over time, we'll get to a point where some of those solutions can be really trusted and we can put checks and balances in place to make sure those translations are are appropriate.

15:54

I mean and you think about it today, right, what's the risk in having your agent make a language translation or try to explain the nuances of legal ease in a policy or in a bank policy? It, for that matter, right. So you're trading one risk for the other, but I think you're spot on with where that's going. You've definitely highlighted and I know artificial intelligence is one of your passions You've highlighted a lot of service related use cases for artificial intelligence in insurance. Have you seen anything interesting come up in some of the other areas, like claims or underwriting or any of the other insurance use cases?

16:38 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

Yes, absolutely. I think one of the areas that's been so challenging is every insurance company has pretty much all the information that they need. If you've been, you know, seeking health care over your life right, almost all the information somebody could need to give you a really accurate prediction around health concerns or challenges or where there might be a mismatch or a problem. It's been very difficult and very expensive to do much with that. So many of the innovations were reserved for enterprise level companies that have been able to invest, you know, millions of dollars into some of these programs. Well, that cost is coming down. That ability to take data and find out on a personal level, right, like flags of wait a minute. You went into the hospital, you're on vacation, they saw you for 15 minutes and they put you on this medication and our system immediately can tell like that is very dangerous for you, right, flag that. So there's, I think, just some really consumer information. The other piece is claims information. So the cost of insurance is so prohibitive.

17:57

Most people, at least in the United States, are getting their insurance through an employer or many people, a big percentage of people that is getting more every year, just more and more expensive and being able to have any kind of customization for smaller companies has been extremely limited.

18:14

And now there's company, there's a local company called Rover AIco and they have created this system that they can get your data of a small meat mid-sized company, pull out of that what's happening, and actually work with carriers to get you, you know, create an RFP to get solutions that are going to give the care that your employees need, but knowing what that cost is going to be. So there isn't a one size fits all, because most companies or industries have really different needs and that just wasn't accessible, it just wasn't possible. And so, you know, people and companies that have been in the industry for a long time are now being able to bring to life what they've been wanting and imagining, in some cases, with this particular couple that started Rover AI was, you know, what they'd wanted to do for years is now possible, and they've been able to just, you know, bring that to life and work with carriers and agents and companies together to come up with solutions, and so that's been really fascinating.

19:23 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, I love that. I love anything that opens up, you know, additional access. I know that for my work in consulting into insurance companies, the process and the amount of data that's needed to go through an RFP and underwriting process for these, you know even small to medium sized companies, if the level of complexity is large, and so be able to put the artificial intelligence around that to you know unify, you know data standards so that they can send out data to you know six, eight, a dozen, maybe more carriers, is only going to be beneficial for both the carrier in reducing the risk and for the employees and the employer in reducing their cost. I think that's a phenomenal use case.

20:11 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

Yeah, and it's come a long way. When I had the opportunity to work for a startup and this has been quite a long time ago now it was really exciting to me and you know we landed a bunch of carrier deals right. We were carrier partners. We're going to help with this quoting solution. We have a lunch, cheers with champagne, super excited, big valuation and, you know, not a few weeks down the road, we realize that the systems just could not talk to each other and there wasn't going to be a way to actually bring this to life and it was so difficult. Well, things have come a long way in terms of being able to get data out, and now Salesforce having data cloud is incredibly important because you're not having to go out to multiple places, so that's been a solution for companies that can make all of this work together better.

21:09 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, no, absolutely. I love that. I'm curious. One of the topics that I frequently talk about in with my banking clients is how to improve access to banking services for, you know, underserved communities and I think there's a lot of similar issues and concerns in the insurance world. And I'm curious, you know, have you seen? You know, insuretech broadly, whether it's AI or other innovations help to promote financial inclusion and close those gaps for underserved communities.

21:45 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

Yeah, I think there's a number of ways. One is just having access now direct to companies, where before there was so much, and I'm from the agent community, I'm a licensed agent. I think that's a really important way for companies and individuals to get help. But the reality is there aren't agent communities available in and with enough people to serve everyone, and there's many situations where there was just people not finding out the information they needed. Well, it's much easier now. So technology has allowed that to happen. Mobile devices, direct to consumer. There's so many solutions now, but I think one that's really interesting is the marketing element of companies has been so.

22:34

It was involved in a lot of conversations around how do we serve these different environments? We look, the pictures that people were using looked the same same with banking too, for a long time. Like everybody kind of used similar images and now, if you wanted to serve another demographic or another age or any of the differences, you're having this whole huge marketing project. Right, photoshoots and all of the components will. Now there is a way to take just a few images and just change those, so you can take one photo shoot but make it very applicable to change the age, change the race change. You know so many of the, not just the look of it but the language, literally the language, but also the cultural language around it. And so you can take one product, develop it, have the information and then with these solutions and Salesforce has been really innovative of who they're buying and where they're headed. With that you can very easily, quickly and affordably now translate that into a lot of different communities and get that out in a digital way.

23:50

So even some of the you know and that this maybe is not true globally, but certainly in the United States most people can have access to a computer or a cell phone and now it's really easy to get that information and find out, answer your questions. That's just gonna get easier and easier. And then I think for most people it's also what are the solutions that matter to that? That's individual situation and help me figure it out. And for those that perhaps an agent isn't gonna be making the money on you know, sometimes that is the reality, they're running a business you can find what are the more affordable options, cause even you know, 20 years later, trying to deal with understanding how to navigate through all of these healthcare options is, I find, it impossible. People ask me for help all the time and I direct them to somebody that specializes because I can't even figure it out. So I don't know how a consumer's supposed to. So I think it's gonna solve a lot of those issues in terms of being able to understand and have access and have choices.

24:55 - Fred Cadena (Host)

No, definitely, I really resonate, especially with your first example. I have somewhere and if I can dig it up I'll put it in the show notes a screen grab. This was from three years ago now. I follow, as you can imagine, a lot of banks and other institutions on LinkedIn and I was going through my LinkedIn feed one day and it wasn't exactly back to back to back, but it was across four or five posts in a row.

25:25

The same image was being used by three different brands. You know it was an image of an ethnic minority executive kind of in a business meeting making a presentation, and they were each using that same image and that just doesn't. And I took a screen grab of it because I was like here's a really good example. This is before Generative AI was really in a position to do anything about it at scale, but it was really more like brands. You need to try harder.

25:57

Maybe let's not just go grab the first result when you do a stock image search when you're looking for this. But now to your point. We can take all of the data points that we know about our customers and really hopefully not in an overly creepy way, but put together something that's really gonna resonate with them you know, with people who look like them and a message that resonates with them in their language, both literally and culturally, and so I think it's really exciting to say thank you. Can't underscore enough. I mean not that I'm saying things like developing the right products and doing things with underwriting and other things are not equally important, but sometimes just making people feel like this is something for them, like they're part of the customer base that this institution wants, is that first step in getting them through the door.

26:53 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

Yeah, no, absolutely, and being able to make it happen. So being from behind the scenes, of being on the teams working on the projects and working with underwriting and compliance and sales and developing so many products and solutions, but going from having the solution to actually getting it in the hands of consumers is just has been so challenging because there's so many layers that have typically been between the customer and the consumer. That's changed a lot, even in the last few years, but being able to make it so much more inclusive without the huge cost is, I think, it's so important.

27:36 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I could agree more. So we've talked a lot about what is happening today with AI. Talk to me a little bit about where do you see this going? Six months, 12 months, 24 months from now? What is the future for insurance companies to leverage AI?

27:54 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

Because of my background, I've had an opportunity to watch insurance companies hiring more and more data scientists and generative AI specialists. So the chief medical officers are getting involved. So much in terms of that technology from data. Where is it driving decisions and products and helping with customers, and that's been incredible to watch. But it is a bit of a dynamic that I think is interesting, because the people that you need in your team to drive innovation are those that are willing to be on the leading edge. They're willing to fail right. They're willing to take risks. They're individuals who are not looking for safety right Like those are the employees that you need, the ones who can be innovative and vision something different. But you're putting them into these institutions and organizations that are incredibly risk averse, and so I think that's gonna be an interesting dynamic to see what happens and how they attract the type of talent and move things through to actually bringing what's possible to fruition in banking and insurance. It's gonna be fascinating to watch.

29:15

The piece that I'm most familiar with is really that consumer element, that sales element being able to come up with solutions that are really driven by data and not just risk. So there's so much that's done from an underwriting perspective that's risk oriented along large groups and it's been really difficult to trust the data and the analysis and to have that drive decisions for giving companies you know little bit more custom solutions and you're seeing more self-funded kind of solutions in smaller companies and there's a lot of dynamics there. But I think really just that ability to bring that to fruition. I think smaller companies are gonna come into play, which will be interesting to watch. I think the delivery is gonna be different. So, instead of that traditional agent community and the way that insurance has been sold, especially in the group side, we are likely to see much more direct insurance to employer is what I predict may be happening.

30:26

I think the agent community is gonna need to really step up and be willing to learn and be uncomfortable and I think for many of us that didn't. I think it's have so much technology in our career development. This is new and it feels very uncomfortable and risky. And how do I bring these solutions to my customers? Because if it doesn't go well, I may lose this account to another competitor. But if I don't bring solutions, what do you do?

30:59 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I wanna pick up on a thread that I think might be interesting, especially to like some of our commercial bankers and commercial banking listeners, because I think it's very similar. Right, I think we're seeing the same thing on the banking side, when there are a lot more direct lending opportunities, especially in maybe not like in large commercial real estate, but in equipment financing and other places that are helping to cause a disruption in banking. So you said, like you have to step it up. So what does step it up look like from your perspective? Like how can, whether it's an agent, whether it's a commercial banker, bring more to the table than hey, here's my bag of products.

31:47 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

Yes. Well, I think that it's a great opportunity for us to be much more open-minded. So, whether you do it from like I know you and I have a shared passion for this and there's an excitement, so nobody's having to motivate us. But there are a lot of people, there's a lot of fear and they're busy, right. They're busy running their businesses. So I think right now is an incredible time to be a learner, be a learner, be somebody willing to get into it right.

32:16

I think that's one of the things that for many of us being leaders at organizations whether it's financial institution, insurance company it's difficult to bring this type of technology if it isn't something we've been working in right, like those of us in Salesforce live it, breathe it, work it. But a lot of the decision makers at these companies are doing other things right. They're doing banking services, they're selling insurance, they're working on employee benefits, innovation. They're not doing technical work, and so you're getting into meetings and making decisions about things that you don't understand and are uncomfortable. So one of the companies I love is called UAIAI, and they have created a platform that allows you to just kind of jump in. They have a training. It takes about 18 minutes and you can build your own custom apps and it works with all the chat, gpta versions and many, many others, so you can just play in your own life. So, for instance, one of the things that I built was I'm doing a Dan Go has a fitness program for busy executives and he gives you this list of food that you can eat and you figure out your macros. But then I thought this is where I get stuck every time is like the meal planning, shopping list. So you can build an app that I was able to just take a picture of the list of food that was on his program, plug in my macros and ask for 20 meals and the amount and the shopping list. So then I had my meals plan for the week, the exact amounts to eat and the shopping list to go, and now I can just plug it in once a week, ask for the next round and it's just moment. So that gave me the personal motivation.

34:09

It was something I was doing. I got to mess around with it. I didn't do anything that was gonna cause a problem at work. But now I know, wait a minute, we can do the same thing. And that is actually what they're doing is they have.

34:23

You know, hundreds of enterprise companies that are going in and they're thinking. Individual leaders like I have this problem or my employees are spending so much time on this one thing. Let me solve this issue with our own little app and it's been amazing. So I think, once you can get comfortable with what it is, how it can work, what are some use cases, and then jumping in and doing some pilots. So some of the individuals that I've had a chance to interview and work with are part of these programs that their customers, sales source customers are just doing pilots and they're trying things, and I'd say that is gonna be the smartest way is to just start taking action and learn and try, versus trying to figure it all out. And I'd say the areas that and you probably are seeing this too where they're running into trouble, where all of us as leaders can take action today is you need to clean up your documentation, because you feed a bunch of junk into any of these systems is gonna give you bad answers. And make sure that there's a data clean up process and that what you're putting in is clean, going forward. So there's always been that motivation, but now it's critically important so I can tell you.

35:42

Another use case that I thought was interesting is so Heather Black with Supermums wrote a book and how to be a super Salesforce consultant and A to Z guide and we're doing once a week we're doing a 15, 20 minute LinkedIn live talking about one of the elements. Well, I read the book, but it's 10 weeks later. We're doing 26 weeks of this. I forgot what I read, so I put the book into one of these apps. It read the book and then I ask the question, whatever question I want, scenario I want, and it gives me back the information directly from the book in the voice of Heather. So I have okay, we're gonna talk about B as business analysis and I said please give me 10 perfect interview questions for business analysis for me to interview Heather about her book. And it gave me 10 perfect questions. That would have taken me a couple of hours to prepare and you know you do podcasts. That takes time. It took me 12 seconds.

36:49 - Fred Cadena (Host)

That's phenomenal. And you recently, obviously, as being a guest. The podcast went through my onboarding process and I will admit and I've admitted before on the show I extensively use AI in doing prep. I'll go to my guest LinkedIn. I'll read some of their posts. I'll ingest it all into.

37:14

I tend to use quad for a lot of things. It's just the AI that I. It's my go-to. I use a lot of them but that's kind of my go-to. But I've got a whole set of prompts that I just kind of copy-pasted, like here's a LinkedIn bio. Here's some of the recent posts, here's.

37:29

You know, this is what I want to talk about. Give me some topics, give me some questions. So all that hard work that you think I did it wasn't me, it was all anthropics so thank you to them. But I think that's phenomenal.

37:46

I love that and I love the idea of taking things and putting them through a pilot and maybe starting with things that you know your info security team is not gonna like blow their top about, right, like if you're using something that doesn't contain any personal quality information, that doesn't, you know, contain any real secret sauce, but you're just giving people an idea of, hey, this is what AI can do here's. You know how easy it can be to like start putting some of these things together and then you kind of get everybody's you know creative juices flowing for when you finally want to build something that, yes, maybe is a little bit more sensitive, maybe has a little bit more data, and then, of course, you're putting in all of the additional layers of protection and anonymization and everything else that needs to happen to do that safely. But I love the idea of already the pilots. I have not used my studio, but I am definitely gonna go check it out. You could probably sell. You probably sell that, that app you made with the macros.

38:52 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

It's fascinating that I think for so many people and why I love it so much. I think where the passion comes from is just, even on a personal level through the years, there's so many creative ideas that I've had about oh, I wish I could do this. Or I wish I could develop a website that does that. Or I have this great idea you're part of a meeting and you get excited with the group, but the lift of making those things happen, or even just trying to describe something to a team like an internal team. We want to do this marketing campaign, but you're trying to put words to a team and advertising your marketing team. That's going to create something and it's not right. And now you can just create the image and nope, that's not quite right and give it a different prompt. You can give it a base image. Okay, we love this image that we used in the past, but we want to make it more modern. You can bring things to life. You can write out a web page design or maybe something you want to use for a consumer page and you're trying to describe what your agents aren't happy with, and you can write it out and then take a picture. And so many of these solutions will just give you the code or create the image and you can share it with the team.

40:14

So there's so many good use cases internally that save time and, I think, just bring things to life that aren't this huge project or this.

40:25

We need to go get budget. Nope, we just need to work on a team trying to figure out how to leverage the tools that are free or cheap right now. And internally, you know, come up with these solutions that are very branded. You know, I think some of the interesting marketing cloud solutions is these branded elements that you can take an image and then change the personality of it. Or you can take the message. You can have 100 people who are, you know, at a financial company or insurance company answering the phone that you're writing an email. That's factual, you're needing to answer it, but you want to make this common tone, and so it just plugs into a template that makes it so easy and the person's not having to think of how do I say this? Right, I'm tired, it's fourth quarter and I'm done with this. It's like the brand, the consumer, the consistency is just so much easier now, or will be even more and more.

41:27 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Absolutely, and it's moving so, so quickly. I'm excited, you know, to see where things go in the next. You know six months, I think, back even to. You know what we were talking about six months ago and it's come so far. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about something else that you've been doing that I found fascinating. So I noticed, maybe about a week and a half, two weeks ago now that you started I don't know if I'd call it a LinkedIn specific challenge, you'll tell me more about it, but I noticed it on LinkedIn that you're writing and posting and something of substance, like it's not like you know, three lines. It is a substantial, you know, thought provoking piece of content every day for 30 days and I think it's called hip 30 for 30. So what motivated you to do it and what have you learned in doing this so far and how far in are you? Has it been two weeks?

42:28 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

Yes, just about two weeks. So ship 30 for 30 was designed. There's two gentlemen that started it. They're both digital writers. Their stories are really interesting. So, cole and Dickie, it is phenomenal and it is now a seven figure business. These are two gentlemen that met on Twitter. You know they were introduced, but interact on Twitter. They, you know. A common friend of theirs said and this was a bit of sort of like who you know and how you know. Them said I'm not quite sure why I'm supposed to introduce the two of you, but I'm going to. And they came together. One was a ghost writing agency, really involved with that other, very digital writing. They actually weren't very big at the time in terms of followers, but they have this program and it's designed specifically around how do you write with impact in the digital world.

43:24

And for me I came from the insurance industry, I did not. Linkedin to me was a digital resume, pretty much an old, outdated one. And when I shifted to Salesforce world, I actually quit my job to do a web developer boot camp because I didn't know anything about technology and get Salesforce certified. Well, I quickly found that this beautiful network that I had built in the insurance industry was not transferring very well into Salesforce and I was a bit worried and then the pandemic hit, so actually took a really expensive class because I had to make it work, I didn't know how. On leveraging LinkedIn, and Shanae Morey has just about a million followers on LinkedIn and has it dialed. She's a great course. So I did that, but in the reality is I didn't do a lot of writing. I've been selling insurance and leading teams selling insurance and then you are on LinkedIn as well.

44:25

It's really hard to figure out how do you convey your message, and one of the things that I was really passionate about and most people don't know is I do some ghost writing for healthcare AI leaders, because I believe that technology is going to be the solution that we need, or part of the solution we need, to bring costs down and to improve the healthcare in our country and in our world, but people are not getting the word out. It's very difficult, and so I and I've seen a lot of these leaders not do a good job of getting the word out to employers, to the agent community, and you and I have both learned the benefit of leveraging LinkedIn and building a community and learning how to do that, but I was not good at writing or figuring out how do I actually communicate this in a way that the algorithm is like and so Ship 30 for 30 is very intensive. It's really cool. You meet twice a week and you have these assignments that you do for the 30 days and it's really to showcase and teach you what is working specifically on Twitter and LinkedIn, and it's that kind of cohort environment. I have a captain's table that they have where you can get feedback from them, and it's just been a lot of fun.

45:50

ut quickly it went from maybe: 1200

46:58 - Fred Cadena (Host)

It sounds phenomenal. I definitely need to look into that. I would say my style is to produce content in fits and spurts and, like I will like take time sometimes, you know, every few weeks, and I'll write a few stuff and then it'll just kind of be sitting out there and it'll get spread out over nice few weeks and then I don't get to it in time. So then there's there's a big gap and I know that's not effective and I know part of it is, and I've read a little bit of your stuff that I got curious about, since that's all you did it and I do have some of that like you want things to be perfect, you know, and so you keep going back and over editing and stuff. So I definitely, I definitely need to go check it out. So far, I mean, you're halfway, halfway to 30 working, good results, happy, happy with it.

47:49 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

You know, a lot of it is the, the learning and the practicing. But what I can? I actually signed up for it two years ago and got a little bit into it and then there was some work stuff and I didn't finish it and that's been bothering me for two years. So I was very excited to start. But what's happened in the last two years that's part of the program now is the prompts. So before, like the writing, the structure, everything's there same content. But now they have prompts.

48:19

So one of the prompts was so let's just take Salesforce in the financial industry, right. So it's a prompt that then looks at it'll bring up all these different, various topics. So it'll be a how to a story, the biggest challenges. Like it's just this great prompt that has there's like 11 different components and ideas and that prompt gives you like 87 different ideas for content that all lead back to your baby. You know your topic and it made it things like I never would have thought about, like oh, this is really cool, because you get a little bored with your own Even when you're living and breathing your own topic. It was really cool to see. So they also have a paid newsletter called write with AI and I don't pay for many newsletters. Oh my gosh, I just wait. The minute I see it, I open it because they have another prompt and the story in the UK's and I immediately go use it. So I would say, from a writing perspective, I and people talk about you. Know, if you want to be authentic on LinkedIn or anywhere, do not use AI like that's not your voice. Well, for me it feels like an incredible assistant and writing coach where now I feel like I can for them the same amount of time I can really and I haven't done a lot of that yet because I'm doing the assignments, but I feel like now I know how to quickly get the structure down, the ideas, the brainstorming, then really pour my heart Like what's the story, what's the, what's the unique takeaway? And then have it also help you edit it so that it's designed well.

50:10

Or you can also take, let's say, you have a really good piece of content that takes off right and you're conveying your message. So in this case it's like healthcare transformation, right? So this leader has something that really resonated Well, you can take that, put it into one of these AI tools and say this particular piece of content really resonated and is shared, and that's what I need, right. I need the message to go out. Help me analyze what happened and then let's recreate it, but take this twist, or let's talk about this product or this situation, and it takes what works and just makes more of it. So it's where how you can get data right from what you're doing that you're kind of hoping it works. I don't know. I'm just doing the best you can to. Actually, some of these tools will pull up. Out of the last year, I can see exactly what, or, for these clients, I can see exactly what resonated, what didn't, what was the structure in in a minute, whereas it was like go through, try and manually do it.

51:18

Now there's incredible tools that are all AI based, right, that are pulling all that information so that you don't need to be a paid team of 30. It allows some of these creators or you know, when you're building a company, you're doing a startup, any of these tech startups. You don't have time to sit on LinkedIn all day, but you do have is. I mean, the buying power of the world is on LinkedIn. That's just the fact. In the banking industry, the customers you want are on LinkedIn because they have the money, they have the jobs. So if you're there and you're present and you're leveraging that and you're building trust.

51:59

I've been a customer of First Republic and mostly that's because of my parents, so they welcomed me because of my parents, but that wasn't an experience of access or accessibility. A lot of personalized catering right, but it's interesting different buying process or working with those, the teams, and how you get information and how to make that happen. But I just think it's just fascinating to see what's available, what's happening both in insurance and banking it's kind of that the sister industries, for sure.

52:38 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Definitely. There's definitely a lot of interchange, and that's one of the things that I think has made this conversation really valuable is just to see how closely things parallel between our two industries. Well, this has been a phenomenal conversation. I know we probably could sit here and talk for another hour and a half. However, I really want to give you an opportunity to let our audience know if they are interested in learning more, reaching out, talking to you about any of your services. What's the best way they can reach you?

53:11 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

Yeah, absolutely Well. I am most often on LinkedIn, so I know that my LinkedIn informational be in the show notes. I also have an educational series that if you're somebody in especially in healthcare leadership, ai leadership, but actually the content works for anyone If you go to LinkedIn for aileaderscom, you can just sign up for a five day educational series that'll teach you how to leverage LinkedIn and really build some thought leadership to spread the message that you have to share. So those are two ways to connect and this has just been so much fun. I've always enjoyed running into it, salesforce conferences and enjoying your content. You have a great show and I'm really grateful to have been invited. It's been a lot of fun.

54:06 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Well, awesome, I appreciate it. It's been great for me too. It's wonderful to see you virtually, but over the video here, and I look forward to running to you and again, hopefully sometime soon. Take care.

54:17 - Chelyn Briand (Guest)

Take care, bye, bye.

54:23 - Fred Cadena (Host)

And we're back After not having a quick take segment last week. This week we have a bit of a abbreviated team, you know, it's just the busyness of life and the busyness of each of our schedules. Eric and I are joining you. Josh was unable to make it this week. He's got some intensive planning meetings with his team, which we wish him success with, and Eric and I are both on the road. Where are you at today, eric?

54:52 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Yeah, I'm sitting on a veranda in the dark in Tucson, arizona, as we record this at Oak Dark 30 before our meetings get started today, and I'll have to admit it's a little chilly. I'm looking forward to some coffee when we're done, to warm my fingers up, just at least grab the cup.

55:08 - Fred Cadena (Host)

So what is it? 5am over there.

55:11 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Probably no, it's 6. It's 6. We got a two hour difference, but if I'm still on my Eastern clock it's only eight o'clock. So I it is only eight o'clock. I justify that as it's easy to get up early. I've just gotten here, but I'm out in Arizona for some planning sessions for the graduate school of banking and as I'm staring at the screen, fred just has to hoist up a cup of hot coffee in my angst. So I appreciate that. So thank you very much I do what I can.

55:43 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Well it is eight o'clock for me. I am in your time zone. I am in Atlanta today for some meetings with a couple of clients here, and then I'm very excited for dinner. I'm a little bit of a foodie, as some of our listeners might know, and I'm going to a Michelin star restaurant for dinner called Lazy Betty, which I'm pretty excited about. So that is my plan for the day. But I already had breakfast. I already have a cup of coffee ready to go for the session. So I'm beating you, I think, on at least two fronts.

56:20 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Yeah, so you are fueled and caffeinated, which I am not. I am fueled and caffeinated, so good on you, man. You might have to carry the water on this one.

56:30 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Well, you know, they do say that fasting provides people with a bit of a focus state, so maybe you'll outperform me on the two person quick takes.

56:40 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

There we go. Let's go with that.

56:43 - Fred Cadena (Host)

priorities and challenges for: 2024

57:18 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Yeah, so I was picking around the financial brand and hopefully those of you that are listening that have any sort of banking or financial background or familiar with that site. If not, I recommend going and just consuming as much content as you can. It's great, but Jim Rue put out the state of financial marketing and did a nice summary of it. The formal full blown report is a premium option, but there are a number of priorities that he talked about and just where marketers in the financial space banks, credit unions, et cetera are really focused on. And, no surprise, right at the top of the list was a top priority of deposit and checking growth, and I'll tell you out here.

58:03

In our planning session yesterday we joked about renaming our sales and marketing school to the low cost deposit acquisition and retention school, and what would happen was Double enrollment oh, I, enrollment we would have to extend, get a different facility with everybody interested in joining that school if we could put a school on that did that. But it talked a lot about deposit growth, customer acquisition and my initial take on this was there were some granular items that I didn't see listed in the actual report or mentioned in any of the metrics or the graphics. Which financial brand does a great job of putting their information in graphical format to make it really digestible and easy to see, but I think under the covers, a lot of what I was not seeing was, I think, included and with access to the full blown report, maybe some of that additional information would be revealed. But I didn't see specifics of personal branding and thought leadership development for staff. But there was build the brand, there was adoption of digital channels, which could very well go into both of those areas.

59:23

But at the very bottom of the list was attracting the younger audience and seeming that I don't know if the reason for that is we're not really interested in getting the younger audience at this point in time. We've got other problems and fires to put out and if that's not a super profitable segment for us right now as a customer. Maybe that doesn't need to be a priority and we don't feel like we need to compete. Let them do what they do and maybe they'll come to us, maybe they won't, as we embrace some of these other things. So just some high level observation, yeah, your thoughts.

:: 00:00

I would say I noticed that as well, and they had, I recall, a grid where they showed kind of year over year what the trend was for each of those, or at least what the score was, and it seemed like attracting younger audience was at or near the bottom every year for the last at least four or five years, which I found a little surprising, because in conversations it seems to be something that frequently comes up and my initial thought when I read it, before I saw the graphic, was I wonder if now it's a low priority because of all the inflation.

:: 00:41

We're seeing younger depositors those of us that are not lucky enough to be bored with trust funds typically have very, very small balances, which are only smaller in inflationary times like this, and so I mean, yes, you might get some transactions, some interchange fees, might generate some other fee income, but probably not getting a lot of benefit from the deposit like you would with somebody more in the middle of their life or an older person. So that was kind of my first brush, but I was surprised to see that it's been a trend, at least for the last several years, when I would have thought that some of the younger customers would be a little bit more flush, so did you have any thoughts on that particular trend?

:: 01:31

Well, I guess not on that particular trend, but I'm looking at the graphic right now and just kind of going back in time and looking at what happened, because you mentioned the younger audience really has been at the bottom of the heap, and this goes back all the way to 2013. So in 2013, the younger audience so we're looking at a 10-year span here. But the younger audience was tied for fourth as the most important and it's slowly gone down and down and down and now it's been tenths the last couple of years. But what's interesting is pre-COVID deepening relationships, improving wallet share, getting more from your existing customers and stealing business from other institutions maintain the top spot all the way until 2018, with loan growth nipping at its heels pretty much consistently and then swapping back and forth with customer or member acquisition. So it was all about getting market share, getting wallet share and focusing on those loans and then-.

:: 02:37

Just not from young people?

:: 02:39

Yeah, just not from young people. We want it from all the old people like us. But then over the last couple of years, deposit growth has pretty much unseated and loan growth dropped from one in 2020 and it skips from 2020 and goes right to 23. But loan growth dropped from the very first priority in 2020 all the way down to position eight, and I think that's got a lot to say with the rate environment and we need deposits. Loan growth is not something that we really need to focus a strategic priority on, because it's either happening whether we like it or not, or it's just we just need more deposits to fund this loan activity.

:: 03:23

Yeah, no, I hear that and it was most interesting. I hadn't noticed. I just looked at the graphic myself. That skipped the last couple of years. I wonder if they just didn't publish a report. I seem to remember seeing when I'd be interested to go back and figure out why that, why that gap exists.

:: 03:42

I think we can blame it on the virus. Let's, let's just everything's just blame it on Corona. Yeah, exactly that works. Yeah, that's a good.

:: 03:52

I've been thinking a lot lately, you know, in this deposit trend. You know I'm I don't have an answer. I guess I'll start by saying I haven't yet wrapped my head around to develop an opinion on this, but you know we all think rates are coming down this year, whether it's, you know, 25 bips, you know three quarters of a point, a point, whatever. So you know that that money that has been, you know, able to earn a really great return with little to no risk is now going to start looking around for other opportunities. However, the stock market is at an all time high which, you know, sometimes people are a little apprehensive with, with putting money in at the top, or what they says to be the top of the market. At the same time, we've got inflation depleting people's, you know, more transactional balances. So I'm curious, like, with these three factors in play, what is the overall trend for, you know deposits going to be over the course of 2023?

:: 04:58

Yeah, I think creativity is and, you know, is there a way?

:: 05:03

And it's really hard because it's a commodity and you know, I know there's, there's platforms out there that will bundle perks and premiums with a small monthly fee and that helps, from a non-interest income perspective, a little bit of a differentiator.

:: 05:19

You pay a monthly subscription, membership fee, whatever, and you get all sorts of extra perks and bennies and protect your phone and you get some insurance and you get coupons and travel discounts and take some sales effort in order to convince a customer that this account for five bucks a month is better than the free account or what the interest rate value is.

:: 05:41

And the value in those accounts sometimes can far exceed the amount of interest that somebody's going to make, even if it's a premium checking account paying 4%. Well, if the customer is keeping three or 4,000 bucks in a checking account, that's, I mean, it sounds like a great rate, but at the end of the day, what's the actual net dollars and pennies that make it into their account versus some of these others? So that economic equation is one that's probably necessary but not an easy one for maybe your frontline staff to have, either because of the time or just the accessibility to customers that are coming into the office to have that discussion, and how do you clearly communicate that through your digital channels? It might be a little more difficult.

:: 06:32

Right. When you have a greater and greater percentage of accounts being opened entirely or at least initiated online and maybe not, it's a great experience. You've got people coming in at the end for signatures or verification or what have you. That's not a great time to start making that sale. So integrating that messaging early in the digital process, I think would be key. Yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

:: 07:01

You also mentioned that when we started talking about this, that there was a lot of stuff that you didn't see, that you expected to see, in the marketing strategies, and a couple that I kind of felt the same way about was the social media marketing and the lack of specifically calling out short format video, because I think and those two are not necessarily entirely overlapping, but with the popularity of TikTok and YouTube adding support for short format, you know real, I don't know what YouTube calls them. I probably should remember. But that short format content, I think that's going to be increasingly important and I wonder if it was excluded because marketers at banks generally associate things like short format video and social media with that younger audience that they don't seem interested in attracting, or if it was off the radar for another reason.

:: 08:01

Yeah, there's another chart towards the end of this article, because the metrics that you and I just talked about were all historical. You know what was your priority for 2023, 2020, 2019, et cetera, and so there was a question that was asked of what's the single most important opportunity for your institution in the next 12 months, and at the top of that was acquisition of customers. So trying to get more in the door, if you were, didn't really talk about wallet share, even though that was kind of up there, so maybe that kind of is lumped into that. Social media and then also our friend AI were only like 3% of the responses. So it was mentioned. It was just mentioned very, very lightly and within social media. That's where the short form, vertical formatted video you know the snackable entertaining, educational, you know edutainment, if you were to blend the words together.

:: 09:08

That's where that type of content would reside. But there's also a lot of other things that can be done within social media, but the fact that it only garnered 3% of a hey this is where we see it as a strategic priority to be able to connect and engage and share your story and your brand and whatnot just seemed kind of low and I'm not exactly sure why If that's, senior management hasn't seen the value in it, if employees aren't participating. I know one of the challenges that I've seen firsthand when we do training for banks on LinkedIn and even some of the other platforms. There's some resistance, not because they don't want to do it, but they don't know how to do it and they are hesitant to take the time to learn how to do it by going on and doing things that you do really well, of being present on the social channels and not feeling like you're just out there hawking a product in the service and regurgitating the latest CD special, but really adding value and being a thought leader and thinking about well, what is it that the people that I'm interested in influencing, ie want them to bank with me? What are the things that they're interested in? How do I weave that into a conversation, share information that would peak their interest and spark some dialogue, to interact and have a conversation, and so that has been elusive because it's something that they've never had to do.

:: 10:40

I'm a loan officer marketing that's their job but people want to know you as a lender and so that gives you an opportunity. Your marketing director can't put that information out there. They can post your head shot and hey, get to know Fred and hey, fred's been at the bank for X number a year. But it means so much more when you're out there as an active participant, talking and being accessible. And I think of Jill Castile Don at Citizens as the poster child of someone at the C-suite executive level. That's out there, that's talking, that's communicating, that's accessible, that you have no question where her priorities are, where the bank's priorities are and getting to that point. Granted, she's kind of at the top of the mountain, but how do you put together some sort of an effort to emulate some of what she has done over the years? That's a challenging thing for a lot of bankers, but I think it's super important.

:: 11:40

Yeah, you're spot on, and I love her, I love her content. I think she does a great job of being authentic and transparent and providing to your point a lot of value in her posts. I mean, she doesn't shy away from tough questions. When there was perceived liquidity crisis early last year, she attacked that head on, and I think that's a big part of why what she talks about gets so much attention and traction. It is authentic, it's meaningful, it's value add. It is not just here's our CD specials, to your point, or here's our rate promo that we're offering Absolutely, and I think that's really hard.

:: 12:24

I think it's really I think difficult in a couple of ways. One, probably at a lot of institutions, there's a lot of compliance to jump through, to get them comfortable and to get them on board with a type of approach. I also think it takes a lot of creativity to combine both the message that is meaningful in a way that is creative and is going to break through the noise. So I think it's important, though I think that institutions and even individual bankers that figure out how to navigate that gauntlet are going to have a significant advantage over those that don't.

:: 13:05

Yeah, I would agree. One of the classic tweets that I'll sometimes even bring up during a session, when I'm talking about just visibility and transparency, is getting your time machine. And remember when Amazon made the announcement that they were going to start getting into checking accounts and Chase was going to be their partner, she tweeted out and tagged Bezos and was like, hey, why don't you partner with a community bank that cares about the customers? And threw her cell phone number in that tweet. And so it was. It's a pretty interesting, and of course, the question then goes how many of your CEOs are going to throw their personal cell phone number into a tweet? Now I post on X. I guess I have to use the correct vernacular, but yeah, it's just an X.

:: 13:56

It's an X. How many are you going to put your cell phone in an X, but yeah not a lot of hands go up when I ask that question.

:: 14:05

Definitely not. A lot of hands go up and I wondered a number of times because it wasn't the only time she did it like how much her phone blows up from people. But I mean, I think it's paying off. I think it's paying off in spades. I want to transition. It took us a whole 15 minutes to get to AI for the words. Ai to come out.

:: 14:29

I think that's a record. I don't know. I think it's a record.

:: 14:34

It might be a record, and now we're going to go deep in the AI rabbit hole.

:: 14:39

Ooh, I love what you did there.

:: 14:41

Yeah, thank you. So for the benefit of the audience, we Josh Eric and I have a group text. I want to say I don't know, a week ago, maybe a week and a half ago could have been longer. Actually, I think about it. You sent out a tweet I was on my way to the airport at the time and it was a link to a video for rabbitai.

:: 15:05

I think he meant text. But he did say tweet. But just just, oh, I didn't say tweet. I might have tweeted it.

:: 15:10

You sent out a text or I might have.

:: 15:12

I might have tweeted it. I might have xed it.

:: 15:16

But so you sent out this text and I'm in, I'm in the Uber on my way to the airport and I start watching the video, and I hadn't gone to the airport yet and they already had my $200. Like I was, I was sold for a couple of reasons. Number one, you know, if, if you're saying this is something interesting to look at also, $200 is a very attractive price point for for what it is. And I guess maybe I'll pause there and just for for those in the audience that have not heard of rabbit, what is it?

:: 15:48

Well, it's funny. I was listening to a video just this weekend about a recent announcement that we're going to talk about between rabbit tech and perplexity, and perplexity referred to a $200 price point for the device a couple of times and the CEO very quickly responded and said it's $199. So I just want to make sure it's not 200. It's $199. Is it?

:: 16:14

$199?. $199?

:: 16:16

$199. I don't think there's any pennies in there, but with shipping it's over $200. So we all round up, it is what it is. I don't know or remember exactly what got this little device on my radar, but I came across it it's. If you go to rabbittech, it's called the R1. It looks like one of the little square Pokemon, I think it's. I'm not a Pokemon person, so I'm going to say Tomaguchi or Yamaguchi or something Gucci, not a Gucci bag for anybody that it definitely doesn't look like a Gucci.

:: 16:52

No, it does not, but it's a square little device that is not intended to replace your mobile device, but if you go to rabbittech you can watch the keynote and he, I think, does a really good job and a lot of people have said, next to Steve Jobs, this is probably one of the best CEO presentations that they've seen and he explains in pretty clear means without needing to be a techno nerd, like sometimes I get referred to as. But it's a device that has integrated inside of it a large language model. So think chat GPT, think Claude, think Google Pard, so you can ask questions. It'll answer. Has access to Wi-Fi. You can put a SIM chip in it so you can get a cellular network if you want. So it's it's like an AI hardware device that you can carry with you that is very accessible and has a tactile button on the side so you can tap it and ask it. It has a scroll wheel and also a camera, and that camera is what drives the rabbit OS, is the operating system inside of this device, drives its large action model. So we are familiar with the large language model which is out there, but the large action model, this camera can watch you perform tasks from a digital perspective and the demo that I saw.

:: 18:14

The gentleman was, you know, had his rabbit set up and he was screen recording him going into an Airbnb to make a reservation and walking through the process and basically teaching this digital intern.

:: 18:28

We oftentimes refer to a chat. Gpt is you have a genius level intelligence intern at your disposal now that you can have it, answer questions, look up information, help you prepare strategies and documents, but now you have one that can actually look and watch and see what you're doing, and they're training this on ways to jump into an Uber environment and book you an Uber. And where all this large action model is going is right now. When you booked your Uber, you opened up your phone, you swiped, you found your Uber app, you tapped on it and then, if you wanted to get DoorDash to deliver something to your hotel when you got there, you had to swipe and find DoorDash and go into that app and do that. And so we're all searching and hunting for all these individual apps, whereas this large action model is like you should just talk to a device and tell it what you want and it does it.

:: 19:20

And yeah, it's been said, I think, on the show that English is becoming the most common programming language thanks to the large language model, and it's just taking this to more of a physical action orientated perspective.

:: 19:34

So there, yeah, no, no, I appreciate it. As I started watching the video, I think it was one of the first things they mentioned was you know, they're solving the problem of a bunch of apps on your phone and I'm like that, really think of that as a problem, like you've solved the problem. I am not identified. But then the more I started thinking and the further down the presentation, I got like the use case and I don't know. Like I'll be very clear, I don't know how good this device is going to be. Now, one of us at least I would say, I don't think either one of us have actually seen or held or used it. I could have just thrown my $200 down a rabbit hole for nothing, maybe you did.

:: 20:14

I am intrigued. Maybe I did, but I'm I'm. I'm optimistic that I'm not, and here's where I think the value is. So, yeah, I travel a lot. I've got Uber and Lyft both on my phone for a few reasons. You know the service levels, different, different cities. Because of my, my, my bank credit card, I get a preferred rate and rebate and discounts on Lyft and so, even though it's not necessarily the most prevalent service, you know if I'm going to get 10% off or rebate or whatever. Sometimes I'd pick that over the other.

:: 20:50

So if I could use the rabbit to say, hey, I'm trying to get, I'm in Atlanta, I'm trying to get from the airport last night, like I was to my hotel base, you know, and it knows the criteria I'm choosing between, like you know what's going to get me there the fastest and most price, efficient, whatever. Find me a ride, and it will. It hits both APIs right. It goes to Lyft, it goes to Uber, it figures out the options. It says here's the best option and I can take it or leave it. I love that.

:: 21:21

Or you know, I again I've got Grubhub and you know Uber, eats and whatever. And I've got like five different food delivery apps on my phone, because not every restaurant's in every network. If I could say, hey, I'm in Atlanta and I want to have a really great you know, I don't know really great burger or really great wings or good sushi that you know that's close to my hotel, you know when it delivered, it could go hit all five and give me an option like here this is the highest rated restaurant. They say they can have your food to you in 15 minutes sold. But that that to me would be a time saver. It's not like if if I only had to go to one app, right, it doesn't really save me a lot, but if it can go and do the research and comparison between two, three, four, five apps and give me the best option, I'm on board for that.

:: 22:10

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And if, if nothing else and I'm not here to say $200 doesn't matter, it's, it's still it's. It's a chunk of money and there are other things that I could buy for $200 that would likely support my cycling addiction and, you know, I could get maybe more outdoor physical enjoyment out of. But if nothing else, I think this beautiful little orange device at some point in time is going to look really cool in my discarded technology shelf along next to my BlackBerry and my, my flip camera and my PalmPilot. So it's just kind of an evolutionary, maybe my museum piece. But what was? What was really interesting in all of this is I've I've been playing around with a platform called Perplexity mentioned it. It also has a pro version, which is $200 a year If you want to use it, or 20 bucks a month, which is exactly what you pay if you want to use the chat GPT for pro plan with open AI. But Perplexity has been really interesting in being more of a replacement for Google and and I even shutter saying that as a digital marketer that works with financial brands on things like SEO to be found in Google. But figuring out where that whole thing goes, that's probably a completely different show for us to have a conversation about.

:: 23:35

But Perplexity has access to these large language models. It's bringing back info. But it was one of and still probably one of the more pervasive platforms that provides citations of where to go to find the things, and I think Bing Chat does that as well. But Perplexity is very good at giving you answers and providing you with info and and doing what a chat GPT, like experience, does, but telling you where it found it and then giving you other follow up questions, almost like the responses you're accustomed to seeing in a Google search where you get similar questions. You know people also ask this and when Perplexity and the rabbit folks signed the deal, the first 100,000 are one owners which, as I understand it, they've sold 50,000. So they're halfway through their run get $200 in credit at Perplexity.

:: 24:29

So my take and maybe this is more of a psychological justification for me spending 200 bucks in like 30 seconds when I saw the demo but you can use Perplexity Pro essentially for free quote, unquote and you get this really cool hardware device that you get to play with. And if you want to play with Perplexity for the year, to see how it compares, to see how it might change your search behavior. Discoverability you get that and the hardware devices just included, and it kind of flips the script a little bit, because now you're not rolling the dice on a $200 purchase for a piece of beautiful orange hardware with a cool screen, it's. I'm getting even more than that and I don't know what the financial deals were behind the scenes. But I want to first get your take on that deal and then we can further go down the rabbit hole of what this potentially could do or how this could tie back into the world of banking.

:: 25:33

Yeah, totally. I mean, I think it was smart, right. I'm very surprised I haven't followed the sales trajectory. I'm surprised, shocked, to hear that they've only moved 50,000 units, because I think you sent it to me on day one and you, me and Josh, within about an hour, had each bought one. Not that saying that we're the representative sample for the country or the world. Actually, I think it only ships in the US for now. So I'll say in the country, but like, over the course of the next 18 to 36 hours, like it was not quite every other post that I saw on LinkedIn, but it came up a lot, like a lot of people were talking about it and again, I think I have a network that tends to be a little bit more technology forward. But you know, 50,000 seems like a really small number for, you know, a device that's accessible at this price point. I mean, I, you and I were texting earlier this week when, when the Vision Pro finally came out for pre-order and something, at the other end of the website.

:: 26:42

Yeah, and I'll be very clear like I am not one of the people that thinks it's overpriced, I think it's fairly priced for what you get. It is a computing device as powerful as a Mac Pro and two 4K screens in front of your face and one outward facing. I mean, I think it's. You know, I would be surprised that Apple is even making much margin on it at this price, at this level of production. But they sold out of their run. And again it's Apple, right, trillion dollar company. They sold out of their run in in like 15 minutes.

:: 27:22

So I hesitated on the page. I probably would not have selected it. You know, by the I did the math between the larger memory upgrade and the Apple care and the everything else. It would have been about five grand, which you know is a little, is a little steep for being a bleeding edge adopter. But it just surprised me that this device does what it does, you know, at least you know purports to do, and only 50,000 people have bought it so far, and it's been out now for two or three weeks, so that that's shocking.

:: 27:59

As far as the partnerships, though, I mean, I I don't think, you know, as long as people are doing okay, right, as long as nobody's taking a bath on the partnership. I think it makes a ton of sense. Like you know, rabbit, you know, certainly jinged up a lot of excitement, at least with the initial launch. Maybe it didn't, you know, but it probably got a lot of buzz for perplexity, certainly, you know, for perplexity. These are consumers that are definitely interested in AI, are probably already paying for one or more subscriptions like I am and you are guilty and the ability to get in front, you know, early AI adopters and say, hey, try our platform. Yeah, I mean, I think it was kind of a no brainer, right, like the alignment of, you know, those overlapping markets is probably close to 100%.

:: 28:55

So I think it was. I think it was a smart move. I don't again, I don't know financial terms, I don't know if anybody's like, if anybody's making money on it, but but as far as, like you know, as a as a cost of acquiring customers move, I think it made a lot of sense.

:: 29:11

Yep, well, and what? When I got the notice and took advantage, it was really easy. I've got a perplexity account tied to my Google workspace and click, click, boom, as they say, and it was done and super simple. So now I'm on the pro, I can turn on their co-pilot version and and it's been one of my go-to tools now over the last probably four or five days you know weeks since I pulled the trigger on it. But what got me also thinking? Because every time I see something, one of the things that I put on myself is how can I bankify? This is what the word that I, that I've invented.

:: 29:48

So when, when I left, I like it when I, when I left the world of banking in 2007 and jumped into this digital marketing world, social media was just starting. So how could I bankify a strategy around this thing called Facebook or this platform called Twitter or what you know? And so now it's the same thing and, and back before, ai was really all the deal. I had an opportunity to get to social media examiners crypto business conference. They talked about web three and the metaverse and NFTs at one of their social media marketing world events and I got pretty excited about it, knew that it was out there, bleeding edge. But how can I bankify that? And the thought that I had was leveraging an NFT, some sort of a tokenized ownership, to say, hey, I am a new mortgage customer and can I take this NFT token, qr code symbol, whatever, into the local hardware store and they will recognize me as a brand new mortgage customer and for a year, I get a 10% discount on hardware stuff, or six months to to help me get my house, because you buy a house, you're going to need to fix stuff and do things or interior design or carpet and paint, whatever the case might be, and I don't know, as if the world was ready for that. Of course, nobody really even talks about NFTs and board aids. And now but this brought that back is to say they partnered up and I think you touched on it.

:: 31:22

These are two audiences that have a lot of overlap.

:: 31:26

So, especially in the community bank world, you've got the local hardware store, you've got, you know, customers, or maybe banks have businesses that would like to be customers. Can you put something like this together, like what Proplexity and Rabbit did? And when a mortgage client, when a new business loan, when a cash management customer, you know, end a little time brainstorming within your institution to see, well, what would be a complimentary feature or service or perk that you could offer that would produce a win-win that maybe the bank doesn't have to pay for it but the business is willing to offer something in exchange for cheap customer acquisition, you get foot traffic in that wouldn't otherwise come in. And you know the LinkedIn post that I did on that got a handful of comments and hopefully got some people thinking. So I wanted to maybe wrap up today's session with some of your thoughts on is there a model there where financial institutions can be looking for other types of partnerships and relationships to bundle at that same persona level to add value across the board.

:: 32:35

Yeah, I mean I love it. I love it. I mean, conceptually, I think the answer is yes. I think the devil becomes the details of what does that partnership look like? How do you drive financial incentives for both sides? Like when one of the first things that kind of came to mind, and it was along the same lines of you know, there's a local hardware store, there's a local grocer, there's a local whatever.

:: 32:58

You know for a community bank to drive those types of relationships and maybe one way to do it in a pre-NFT or maybe even a post-NFT world you know could even be, and which could also help, like with stickiness for accounts. Like you open a new checking account, you get a debit card and maybe for the first you know six months or the first year or whatever when you shop at this list of you know 15 local businesses, you know we rebate you a bonus 2%, a bonus 3%. You fund it with interchange fees. It helps with the stickiness of the account. You know somebody gets used to pulling that debit card out at the local hardware store. They might be more likely to pull it out you know at another store that you're not paying as much of an incentive for them to use. I'm the guy that juggles, you know, six different credit cards with all of the different offers so I can maximize my rewards. But not everybody is willing to do that much mental math and so you know, I think there's definitely possibilities.

:: 34:03

I think a lot of the devil gets down to the execution and I think you know, especially as you get into larger community and regional banks, it's how do you decide who you're playing ball Like, how do you decide who the winners and losers are? I mean so I lived in Chicago for 16 years, even in the city, but out in the suburbs there were basically two or three, you know, local franchise-based hardware store chains. Right, are you going to support all three? If you support one, I mean obviously, naturally you know you'd hope that they're doing business with you as well, but if two or three of them are, you know how do you pick the winners and losers and what does that do to your relationship?

:: 34:49

So I think there's a lot of like executional challenges. And again, I think the other thing is like finding those partnerships where there's a lot of overlap, right, like somebody who's a new checking account customer frequently not always has relocated to the area. So a lot of those like moving services, you know hardware, you know new restaurants in town. That kind of stuff could make a lot of alignment. I think it gets to be a little bit more difficult around some of the other products that maybe are not necessarily aligned as much with buying events and then I'm at a total loss on the commercial side. How to make something like that work on the commercial side of the bank?

:: 35:30

Yeah, and I don't have like the answers to it all either and the challenges that you explained, though I lived from a testimonial perspective back in the day when I was a small community bank and we had certain individuals that were just crushing our online banking service and paying all sorts of bills and using it.

:: 35:52

We would put certain individuals and testimonials, one of which was a local realtor, and I had realtors sending me hate mail and phone calls like why are you putting him in, why are you giving him all this free publicity? And you know the question was well, I get that, but first off, are you banking with us? Do you use our online banking? Well, no, I don't bank with you, but so you know that is always a very touchy road to travel because you don't want to offend somebody, but you know you can make it available, and I close those calls with if you're interested in trying our online banking and paying 40 bills a month like Matt does, I would be more than happy to feature you, and you could rave about how amazing our online banking and bill payment services.

:: 36:39

And here you are, all those years later, still fronting Matt, still pushing Matt.

:: 36:44

Exactly, exactly.

:: 36:45

I'm sure the hate mail's coming.

:: 36:46

The hate mail's coming, so but anyway. Well, there you go.

:: 36:50

No, I love it. And maybe the answer is, I'd be interested to like, sit down and build a financial model around like let's pull you know all of our clients as a bank that are, you know, in these categories and just say like, if we know, here's the debit cards and banks have all this data, here's the debit card transactions that they're running through with us today, you know, not not them as a business client, but are being run through them from our customers, you know, if we had a 25% jump and we rebate it back, you know 2%, what would that? What would that do financially? You know and you know. And then like, how how much additional volume would we need to get to offset that expense? I mean, and maybe that's the way around it, right, like you don't, you don't pick a winner or loser. It's something that anybody you know. If it, if you're, if you're pro-moring hair salons everybody hair salon that your customer gets the benefit, you know it could, it could be interesting.

:: 37:47

Although they wouldn't get the benefit from either you or I you know, I have a regular appointment with my barber every two weeks. My beard does not look like this by by my own hand.

:: 37:58

Well, there you go. I was playing off the top of the head and the the the lack of barber necessity, but I guess the beard could use a little TLC every once in a while. So too funny.

:: 38:12

That is the truth. Cool. Well, this has been great. I appreciate joining for another quick takes ahead of your day of busy, intensive meetings. Other than being in Tucson this week, are you headed out on the road? Any interesting conferences or anything the next couple of weeks?

:: 38:28

Well, I'm going to keep keep beating the GSB drum, if you don't mind. So the graduate school banking out of Madison, wisconsin, we are going to be launching our I think, fourth year of our digital banking school. It's delivered entirely online, starts in March. Financial institutions that join the digital banking school get a zoom link and you can have as many individuals within your institution join the program, which has been a really interesting and eye opening learning experience, because you can have your compliance officer sitting right next to your marketing director, right next to your chief technology and, for information security officer, right next to your CEO. So when you're talking about things like AI, like marketing strategy, like loan pricing, like compliance, like culture, staffing challenges, the entire organization gets an opportunity to be part of that dialogue, and it's all focused on ultimately building and I'll say a buzzword here digital transformation, but digital innovation within the financial services industry, and trying to figure out how you can bridge that gap and realize that it's not just what core processor you use, it's not just what FinTech you partner with.

:: 39:38

There's a lot of cultural, strategic moves that an institution needs to make in order to really leverage a true digital strategy, and so this program goes for the entire month of March and eight sessions. I get to be the program coordinator for that, which is why I'm out here in Tucson with GSB. But if you're interested, go to gsborg and go to their digital banking school under schools and sessions and learn more. I really just can't say enough about that program and the results that bankers have shared with us through their experience. So join us in March and prepare for that innovation, which is just continuing to go at warp speed. So what about you? Where are you off to after you leave Atlanta?

:: 40:22

Oh, after I leave Atlanta, I know no conferences on the horizon I will be at. I guess the next to I'll be at will be TDX, which is a trail head, trail blazer. Dx it's a Salesforce conference in the beginning of March. And then financial brand I'll be excited to go back. I missed the first one back after COVID. So I've been three or four times and always had a phenomenal experience. So looking forward to that.

:: 40:52

We will be there together. I think first and first time we've been able to like shake hands literally and enjoy a drink, and maybe we'll do a live remote, like face to face, as a quick takes from Vegas. That'd be pretty awesome.

:: 41:08

That'd be phenomenal. I'm 100% down with that. Well great, We'll have a great rest of your day and we'll chat again soon.

:: 41:15

You as well. See everybody Thanks.

:: 41:22

Well, everyone, we hope you enjoyed episode 21 of banking on disruption. Don't forget you can find show notes and a full transcript of the show on our website, banking on disruption dot com. New episodes drop every other Thursday, so we'll see you in two weeks and, in the meantime, don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at at banking on disruption. Until next time, this is Fred Cadena, wishing you success in your digital pursuits.