Three Things You Missed at Experience FinXTech

The rapid and ongoing digital evolution of banking has made partnerships between banks and fintech companies more important than ever. But cultivating fruitful, not frustrating, relationships is a central challenge faced by companies on both sides of the relationship.

The 2019 Experience FinXTech event, hosted by Bank Director and its FinXTech division this week at the JW Marriott in Chicago, was designed to help address this challenge and award solutions that work for today’s banks. Over the course of two days, I observed three key emerging trends.

Deposit displacement
The competition for deposits has been a central, ongoing theme for the banking industry, and it was a hot topic of conversation at this year’s Experience FinXTech event.

In a presentation on Monday, Ron Shevlin, director of research at Cornerstone Advisors, talked about a phenomenon he calls “deposit displacement.” Consumers keep billions of dollars in health savings accounts. They also keep billions of dollars in balances on Starbucks gift cards and within Venmo accounts. These aren’t technically considered deposits, but they do act as an alternative to them.

Shevlin’s point is that the competition for funding in the banking industry doesn’t come exclusively from traditional financial institutions — and particularly, the biggest institutions with multibillion-dollar technology budgets. It also comes from the cumulative impact of these products offered by nondepository institutions.

Interestingly, not all banks struggle with funding. One banker from a smaller, rural community bank talked about how his institution has more funding than it knows what to do with. Another institution in a similar situation is offloading them using Promontory Interfinancial Network’s reciprocal deposit platform.

Capital allocation versus expenses
A lot of things that seem academic and inconsequential can have major implications for the short- and long-term prospects of financial institutions. One example is whether banks perceive investments in new technologies to be simply expenses with no residual long-term benefit, or whether they view these investments as capital allocation.

Fairly or unfairly, there’s a sense among technology providers that many banks see investments in digital banking enhancements merely as expenses. This mindset matters in a highly commoditized industry like banking, in which one of the primary sources of competitive advantage is to be a low-cost producer.

The industry’s justifiable focus on the efficiency ratio — the percent of a bank’s net revenue that’s spent on noninterest expenses — reflects this. A bank that views investments in new technologies as an expense, which may have a detrimental impact on efficiency, will be less inclined to stay atop of the digital wave washing over the industry.

But banks that adopt a more-philosophical approach to technology investments, and see them as an exercise in capital allocation, seem less inclined to fall into this trap. Their focus is on the long-term return on investment, not the short-term impact on efficiency.

Of course, in the real world, things are never this simple. Banks that approach this decision in a way that keeps the short-term implications on efficiency in mind, with an eye on the long-term implications of remaining competitive in an increasingly digitized world, are likely to be the ones that perform best over the long run.

Cultural impacts
One of the most challenging aspects of banking’s ongoing digital transformation also happens to be its least tangible: tailoring bank cultures to incorporate new ways of doing old things. At the event, conversations about cultural evolution proceeded along multiple lines.

In the first case, banks are almost uniformly focused on recruiting members of younger generations who are, by habit, more digitally inclined.

On the flipside, banks have to make hard decisions about the friction that stems from existing employees who have worked for them for years, sometimes decades, and are proving to be resistant to change. For instance, several bankers talked about implementing new technologies, like Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management solutions, yet their employees continue to use spreadsheets and word-processing documents to track customer engagements.

But there’s a legitimate question about how far this should go, and some banks take it to the logical extreme. They talk about transitioning their cultures from traditional banking cultures to something more akin to the culture of a technology company. Other banks are adopting a more-tempered approach, thinking about technology as less of an end in itself, and rather as a means to an end — the end being the enhanced delivery of traditional banking products.