Small Business Obsessed - a Podcast by Autobooks: Recent Episodes
Chris Spiek, Derik Sutton, Kyle Bazzy
In this episode, Derik is joined by Tom Shen. Tom has a storied fintech career that includes founding, leading and serving on the board for some of the industry’s most impactful organizations. Tom’s latest company, Malauzai, was acquired by Finastra in 2018. Since then, Tom has joined the boards of RoamHR, Zsuite Technologies and Sensibill.
Derik and Tom discuss a variety of topics, starting with the similarities between Tom’s first venture, SDI, that helped financial institutions better serve customers in branch and his last venture, Malauzai, that helped financial institutions better serve customers online.
Conversations with Tom are always insightful and you always walk away with two thoughts.
· I am better for having just heard from Tom
· I can’t wait for the next time I get to hear from Tom again
On today’s podcast, Derik is joined by Ted Brown - Co-Founder of Digital Onboarding.
Derik and Ted talk about the founding of Digital Onboarding, which like many startups, was a result of a pivot from the original idea. Ted shares how the Digital Onboarding platform can help financial institutions drive product adoption and revenue without requiring implementation of a complex marketing automation system.
They also discuss Ted’s experience in fintech, starting in college for a company named Andera (now owned by Bottomline), one of the first digital account opening solutions. With digital account opening being such a hot topic these days, it’s interesting to hear how much different the conversations were with financial institutions 15 years ago compared to now.
Ted provides a lot of great insights as to how early stage fintech companies should spend more time and effort on educating financial institutions, rather than selling them on features and benefits.
About Digital Onboarding
The Digital Onboarding Our platform makes it easy for people & businesses to adopt products & services that make life better. Our team has a deep history in the digital account origination space. We know that account holders don't always turn into deep and profitable relationships. After a conversation with one of the nation’s largest credit unions, DCU, we decided to address this critical gap. The Digital Onboarding platform was born in the fall of 2017.
On today’s podcast, Derik is joined by Nikhil Lakhanpal - Co-Founder of Narmi.
Derik and Nikhil talk about the unique founding story of Narmi and how that background provides their company a unique lens on the market. They also discuss Narmi’s recent release of digital account opening – which features the ability for a consumer to open an account in 2.5 minutes and a new refer a friend feature.
The conversation then transitions into an upcoming release from Narmi, their new small business product suite. Derik and Nikhil discuss the needs of today’s small business owner and how customer interviews led the Narmi team to several simple, yet impactful product enhancements.
Abount Narmi
Narmi is a NYC based financial technology firm that builds enterprise solutions in digital banking. Through Narmi’s digital account opening, mobile banking, online banking and banking APIs, banks can become digital-first companies.
About Nikhil
Nikhil drives Narmi’s vision to provide a highly adaptable and open framework that empowers banks to reimagine what’s possible with digital banking. Nikhil has long had a passion for technology and financial services as the former CEO of a financial institution and an investment banker at Citigroup.
About Narmi’s new small business project
Built with the business owner in mind, Narmi’s business banking platform brings user experience, security/control, and depth of functionality front and center. Narmi’s integrated banking offering and simple design empower businesses to focus less on banking and more on what matters most - running a successful business. With Narmi, financial institutions will be able to streamline operations, drive business deposits, and get ahead of Fintech competitors stealing away market share.
In this episode, Derik asked Kyle Bazzy – Head of Enterprise Growth at Autobooks to join him for a conversation about 2021 budgeting. Kyle meets with small business champions within financial institutions every day, and offers up great insight on how many of them are navigating the 2021 budget season.
During the conversation, three themes emerged:
- Budgeting for small businesses is changing from we have to do it, to we need to better monetize this market segment.
- Small business banking is becoming cross-departmental
- There is new, emerging competition is making digital enablement for small businesses table stakes
If you are in budgeting season and would like more information about small business banking, we have developed resources to help you Build Your Small Business Case.
You can find them here.
In this episode, Derik has a conversation with Greg Varnell, VP Engineering at Q2. Greg has been with Q2 for over 10 years and is leading a team on the rollout of the new Q2 Marketplace, a product that can be traced back to the original foundation of the company.
The Q2 Marketplace brings together financial institutions, fintechs, and end consumers in a way that has yet to be done in the industry. Leveraging the Q2 Caliper SDK, fintechs can connect their apps to the Q2 platform and make their apps available to over 450 financial institutions serving over 13 million end users.
During this conversation, Greg and Derik mention that at the time of the recording it was Finovate week. Later in the week Q2 was announced as a Best of Show Winner for their announcement of the Marketplace, in which Autobooks was featured
In this episode, Derik and Chris go deep on the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) in small business banking. Joining the conversation is Ryan Garner, Principal Customer and Product Lead at 11:FS. He and his team released an in-depth report on small business banking, centered on the JTBD framework, that is cited throughout the episode.
Download the report here
In addition to the 11:FS report, the Autobooks team has started a project to better help financial institutions “Build their business case for small business banking.”
Visit www.autobooks.co/businesscase to learn more and get started.
Episode outline:
Why should banks focus in on the small business market
- The overall market size
- SMBs are stuck between consumer and commercial banking
- FIs are under attack from non-bank competitors
- The need for truly digital services
- There will be winners and losers
Reports and insights
- 11:FS report
- Autobooks Cornerstone report
The JTBD of an SMB
Defining a 90 day plan of action to improve small business banking
In this episode, Derik talks with Jason Henrichs. Jason is CEO at Alloy Labs Alliance and Founder/Managing Director of Fintech Forge. They cover a lot of topics in this interview, including Jason’s recent blog posts on community banking evaluated from the perspective of Michael Porter’s Five Forces Analysis.
Jason has been a founder, venture capitalist, executive, board member, advisor, angel investor and mentor in the startup world for two decades.
More about the topics they cover:
- Alloy Labs Alliance is a member-driven shared innovation lab that helps reduce risks, lower costs, and shorten the time between ideas and results.
- Fintech Forge helps financial institutions build and leverage their innovative capacity internally and through strategic fintech partnerships and investments.
- Jason was COO of Perk Street Financial, one of the first challenger banks in the U.S.
Core LeBlanc [DS1]
Chief Digital and Innovation Officer at Origin Bank
In this episode, Derik talks with Corey about digital transformation in banking. They cover a lot of topics, including:
· Improving the customer experience
· Why digital transformation is not just a job for IT
· Open banking
· What Corey would fix about banking if he could wave a magic wand
You’ll also learn why Fintech is a 24/7 conversation at the LeBlanc house, as Derik asks Corey who knows more about Finteh, him or his wife Cassie.
[DS1]
During the conversation you’ll hear us talk about Jobs to be done, a product development framework that we use. You’ll hear terms like demand, supply, customer progress, and jobs. These are all terms used within the framework.
To learn more about Jobs to be done, we would encourage you to read Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen.
Joining us this episode is Bob Moesta. Bob is President and Founder of the Rewired Group and is among the principal architects of the Jobs to be Done theory, which emerged in the mid-90s out of the Harvard Business School under the guidance of Clayton Christensen.
Bob recently co-authored Choosing College with Michael B. Horn, written to help individuals of all ages navigate their lifelong learning decisions by starting with them understanding their “why”.
Show notes:
- Follow Lee on Twitter or LinkedIN
- The latest article from Lee
- Invictus a new album from Carlito Smith, designer at Autobooks
- Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
- Banno is the product group within Jack Henry that Lee references
- Ramit Sethi is the creator of the Ultimate Guide to Personal Finance: Money Management Made Simple
- Podcast on Jobs to be Done where Des Traynor from Intercom makes the comment about fighting hard to not be put into a legacy product category
Derik and Chris talk about how ten interviews with small business owners gave them a deep understanding of what each customer was struggling with, and how they took that insight and launched a successful new feature in Autobooks in just twenty days.
Welcome to Small Business Obsessed - a podcast by Autobooks about small business and fintech product strategy.
In this episode you'll hear about a woman named Lisa and the real story about how starting her small business drove her to shop around and ultimately switch financial institutions.
We use Lisa's story as a jumping off point to talk about what we can learn from having the right kinds of conversations with customers and how we can use those learnings to form a successful product strategy.