Digital technology impacts almost every aspect of a financial institution, from growth strategies to go-to-market approach. In this episode, we replay a panel session from this year's BankOnPurpose where FI leaders discuss opportunities and challenges with the accelerated market demand for digital experiences.
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Alex Habet
Hi and welcome to The Purposeful Banker, the leading commercial banking podcast brought to you by Q2 PrecisionLender, where we discuss the big topics on the minds of today's best bankers. I'm your host, Alex Habet.
So recently we hosted BankOnPurpose in Austin. You've heard us talk plenty about the conference on the show. But as we've done in the past, we'd like to take some of the best sessions from the conference and put them on this show here today for you all to catch up on. So for today's replay, I wanted to focus on stories from the banks. Katharine Briggs moderates a great panel where you'll hear the diverse set of stories across a few different institutions. It's a compelling view on growth strategies, digital innovation and banking, and navigating current financial challenges. Topics delve into how banks are adapting their strategies in response to changing market conditions, focusing on deposits—as we've been talking a lot about here on the show, margin improvement, cost management.
But the conversation also explores the panelists’ insights on leveraging digital technology to enhance customer service, streamline operations, and approve the overall banking experience for everyone through better adoption, better use of talent, customer engagement strategies, and real-life applications and challenges such as tackling and combating fraud. Of course, there's ample discussion on increased interest rates, capital requirements, loan loss reserves, and that sort of thing. And also we're examining how banks are integrating cutting-edge technologies like AI and digital platforms to stay competitive, all with a view toward the need for innovation and a balance with regulatory compliance and risk management.
So with that mouthful to introduce this episode, I invite you to sit back, relax, and enjoy Digital Designed for Growth.
Katharine Briggs
Good morning. Glad to see so many of you here. And in true Brandi fashion, she made sure we have great weather in Austin, which you never know, in October it could have been 95 degrees. So really glad to see everyone. My name is Katharine Briggs. I lead the Customer Success organization for Q2. Really excited to have this panel up here to share their experiences, their lessons on go-to-market strategies and using digital to drive that. Let me turn it over and let each one of you introduce yourselves please.
Jeff Lee
Hi, I'm Jeff Lee with Seacoast Bank. We're based in Florida. We're $15 billion in asset size, and I'm responsible for all technology operations, digital marketing, and analytics.
Chris Craver
And I'm Chris Craver. I lead digital products at Valley Bank. We're a $62 billion bank based in New Jersey. We have branches in New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Alabama. And I lead the digital products team.
Kirk Coleman
Good morning. Kirk Coleman. I'm president here at Q2.
Katharine Briggs
Terrific. Well, it's a tough act to follow Leda, we just kind of joked backstage. We wish we could have had a night to reflect upon all of the challenges. Again, philosophically what we're doing out there. I think one of the things that I wanted to point out, and I think we all know this, but there is some real virtue and value in the technical debt that we have because it means that our account holders really depend upon what we do.
If you turn something off and nobody noticed and none of your account holders called, you've got a real problem. So anytime there's a downtime, we hate that, but it also means that everything that you're doing is incredibly important. Leda also did a great job of painting the picture describing the issue that we have. So I think my first question, I'll start with you Jeff, is knowing all of the things that we could be working on—and this time last year we had a pretty balanced conversation talking about loans, fee income, and deposits—knowing all the things your bank could be working on, how do you guys think through trade-offs and priorities?
Jeff Lee
Right now it's pretty straightforward. If you look at the P&L and where we need to be driving things, obviously deposits, margin very important for us, for all banks, for the foreseeable future. Also pretty tight expense management is incredibly important, especially in our role. We're in a season right now where we're probably not making really big bets, but I'm driving the team pretty hard. We need to be the power users of what we have. We've made systematic investments over the last few years as we scaled this bank. Are we at the 90th percentile of using that? Do our customers understand it? So let's make sure we're wringing out the value of what we have while we're in this season.
Katharine Briggs
So driving adoption, not necessarily just new things, but making sure the things that you've already launched, put into the world, are being used appropriately.
Jeff Lee
That's right.
Katharine Briggs
And this time last year, Chris, we were, oh, I think, well maybe 18 months ago, April 2022, deposits were the highest they've ever been. We're down 5%. We've had a few hundred extra basis points of spread added in there. I've seen that 200 basis points of increase is when you even get the sleepy depositors to start paying attention and start moving around. So how do you guys think about trade-offs and priorities?
Chris Craver
Look, it's hard when you're competing against the U.S. government for deposits. And so price is certainly a lever, but also value that we provide back to our customers. So before all that happened, we had, I think, our CDs as low as five basis points, we were OK for some of that runoff. You can't do that in this market anymore. So pricing is a lever, but it's not the only lever and you're not going to win on that.
So from a technology standpoint, we recently launched a new deposit origination platform that spans both in-branch and online. And we took something that was a 45-minute process, sometimes multi-day from a KYC and AML check to something down to eight minutes online. And that's been a huge win for us in this market so that we can go out there and have an amazing experience for customers, quickly gather deposits, and we do have to work on what is the long-lasting value now that we're acquiring net new customers to the bank, not only in-branch but also online. And that's where we're putting our investment right now.
Katharine Briggs
And I'm assuming you're talking mostly the retail consumer side of the bank?
Chris Craver
So retail consumer side of the bank, but also this system allows us to gather business and commercial deposits, as well, too. So we talked about in some of the sessions yesterday as part of the CAB, some of the SMB activities that we'll be doing, we've launched online, small businesses can fully digitally sign up for deposit accounts at the bank now, and we're starting to see some traction with that.
Katharine Briggs
Signing up online, what's the biggest hurdle? What's the biggest point of friction there?
Chris Craver
So we talk about this in our funnels. First is we get really high first click and then drop off there. The second one is funding. Funding's an incredibly difficult issue, especially if you're online and all the intricacies of ACH connecting to your existing bank. What those experiences are that we all know today is a trial deposits. Even using things like Plaid, we see customers concerned because we've rightfully trained them about putting their credentials online and sharing those with others. And so there's a big pause in that environment. And so that's an area where we're looking to understand and how we can invest and improve.
Katharine Briggs
And Kirk, prior to being president of Q2, you came to us by way of one of your stops was Texas Capital Bank.
Kirk Coleman
Yep.
Katharine Briggs
What were some of the trade-offs and priorities there?
Kirk Coleman
Maybe the big business conditions were a little bit different back then, but some of the strategies for dealing with them were perhaps the same. We were a commercial institution and very mindful of where our funding was coming from, where were all the deposits. So they might not have cost as much. We were very conscious about what was the relative cost and liquidity risk associated with each part of our funding stack. And I think we sort of think about a lot of the work that's been done for many years, but particularly focused on over the last 12 months is understanding each part of that funding stack and what are the operating environments related to each part of those funding stacks. What's the risk that's inherent in them? How is the market changing for that? And frankly, every institution making its own decisions about where do we have the right to win business in our communities for each part of our business.
And I think in some helpful ways, it's brought a lot of clarity to the investments that we're making and the types of businesses we want to engage with or the types of individuals we want to engage with. And so although that's a very challenging thing, I'm also hopeful that that kind of level of strategic clarity also helps push us along in dealing with a lot of the things we've just kind of accepted as is, what Leda was talking about earlier.
Katharine Briggs
And I think while you were there, a digital-only brand branch was launched. Tell us a little bit about that decision-making process, the journey, what went great. And now that you know what you know, maybe what you would have done differently or now that there's different technology, what you might do differently.
Kirk Coleman
Yeah, we did. So I was there. We launched a brand called Bask Bank. My partner Greg, Greg Lewis is out here somewhere, shout out to him. We had done this exercise. We sort of were looking at our future growth and we sort of said, "Where are the deposits going to come from? What are our different options?" And we knew, look, we need to be talking about billions of dollars of deposits. Something small really won't move the needle very much for us and it'll be more of a distraction. And so we really leaned into that. It required us to do a little bit of soul-searching on what's that operational environment going to look like? What's the relative spend from a marketing perspective? But I became very convinced about the business case and it was very compelling. And I have to say it's turned out to be extremely successful.
We, at that time, chose to just kind of use a lot of the infrastructure that we had. We were a Fiserv Signature deposit core, and there's a lot to be said about cores and our need to get moving with core modernization. I think we can all agree that whether it's five, 10, or 15 years, we need to get on with it. We really need core modernization to get going. So I think some of the things that we see in the market now that maybe would've been a little bit different in terms of how we might've thought through that is how do we have lightweight dual-core strategies? And I think that's a way of stepping into both more economical operating environment for certain parts of your deposit strategy, but also a way of stepping into core modernization as you start to think about the fragility of our legacy operating environments.
And probably that also gives the opportunity for us to rethink some of the complexity that's inherent in our legacy environments and working through that. It's going to take a long time, so we really need to get on with it. We've announced this morning our own offering around this called Fabric, which is a combination of our digital banking platform and our lightweight core, otherwise known as Helix. And so there'll be others in the market that try these strategies. It's not the only one. And there's many banks that have also launched these kind of separate brands. What I'd like to see is those strategies kind of come back into the core bank, kind of merge back into the core bank in terms of how we think about serving all the different segments, all the different types of deposit customers.
Katharine Briggs
Great. Great. Thank you for that. Chris, you also, if I recall correctly, have tried a digital-only or kind of a different strategy. Tell us what you learned and maybe how you pivoted along the way.
Chris Craver
Yeah, sure. And we actually have that brand out now, Valley Direct, you can go to valleydirect.com, get five and a quarter, sign up now. QR code should be on the side. That's right. Agents are standing by.
Katharine Briggs
I love it.
Chris Craver
Just trying to drive some organic adoption. But no, we actually had this brand around for a while and it went stale prior to the recent events in recent market. And we said, "Well, can we use this as an avenue to experiment? Can we try some things out here?" And we've done that and we've got a lot of learnings from that. So you try a thing from a marketing perspective and it doesn't work. And one of the biggest conclusions that we've had is that trying to compete online with two brands is really expensive and really confusing for your existing customers. And so we're evaluating what we're going to do next year with that, potentially collapsing some of that.
But then you get into all these scenarios where you've got customers coming into your branches and saying, "Well, I saw this thing online." And then you're trying to explain to them, "Well yeah, that's only online." "Well, I've been a customer for 30 years, can't you give me that same?" And so you get into these difficult conversations with folks. And so how can we look at a more holistic pricing strategy and product strategy where we're really going to embrace digital adoption now that we've got new capabilities in place and offer all of our products in a much more consistent pricing manner in the various different channels.
Now there will be differences from the channels because the channels cost different, but that's one aspect. Another key learning for us was that the aggregators that are out there, how you're trying to amplify your voice are really freaking expensive. And there's sites that we just won't do business with because of how much money, particularly now, that they're trying to charge for the listing services. And so we're looking at other third parties where we essentially incent them and pay them to bring customers to us. But then depending upon the channels that you have, you might see an uptick in fraud and other things. So we're trying to find that right balance, but we have our goals established in what we're trying to do for the right pricing mix, the right product mix, the right customer mix, the right fraud losses, and we'll manage to that on an ongoing basis.
Katharine Briggs
Thank you. Leda gave us also a lot of cover I think for us to be really honest up here because she said what we're doing is really hard. And so I would, again, thank you for being vulnerable and sharing things that work and don't work.
Chris Craver
I probably-
Katharine Briggs
Yeah.
Chris Craver
I could have said another word instead of freaking, but I didn't.
Katharine Briggs
Jeff, I want to get back to you and talk a little bit about how you guys think through are we going to make investments in account holder technologies or employee technologies, commercial retail, despite the fact that there's a lot of cash sitting at your bank, you don't have unlimited funds.
Jeff Lee
The focus, at least in the most recent past, has been on building out Treasury, making sure we have a very competitive product set. We are looking pretty good there. We've done the work. Continuing to build out the technology around BSA, KYC, and fraud, I think, which we've all been working on, we've got to make it easier for customers. These are not big massive transformational bets, but they drive incremental improvements to the bank.
A lot of focus on our culture and in particular how our commercial bank works with our retail bank. And that's been good for us in making sure that our folks are energized, we're passing the ball appropriately, we have a team approach in our communities. So that's been a focus. It doesn't require a huge dollar investment, but it requires the executive team to say, "This is really important and how we work together projects itself in the marketplace, that helps us win customers as well." So those have been really important aspects of what we've been focused on. As well as I mentioned earlier, is use what we have. Are we getting the most out of it? Are our platforms working well together? And are we driving value out of those investments that we've already made?
Katharine Briggs
Yeah, I want to come back to fraud in a minute, but let's stay on culture. I know we have a panel later today that talks about culture and talent and how important it is. Jeff, when you think about hiring for your digital team, what are you looking for? Are you looking for somebody that comes out of Meta or Twitter, or X now, or are you looking for someone who's been in banking for 20 years? What's the right blend? What's the talent profile?
Jeff Lee
It's hard to say who's going to pop. I've brought people in from big name firms and they've just not done well. And then I've seen people when I joined Seacoast Bank who had been there forever and maybe in this hidden department who just blossomed. You just never know. Right? You never know who's going to rise to the occasion. But when you're small, in a rapidly growing bank, you've got to be used to operating pretty quickly. But you also have to know how to operate in a bank. Because you can get in a lot of trouble and drive a lot of shareholder destruction if you're not doing it right.
So an area I really enjoyed, especially when we were probably at our most innovative in the last decade that I was there, where we had a really nice balance between marketers, digital folks, technologists, and analytics folks. And then we all sat together, and we were smaller then, it was a lot easier. We weren't all fighting for the resources. I basically joined the bank and said, "I want all these people working for me." And we just started to ideate and started to actually connect things together. And so to me, it's the bundling of those kinds of talent. Because as long as there's a broad vision that everyone knows they're going to and then stand back as a leader and let them go see what they can do and just provide feedback and encouragement along the way.
Katharine Briggs
That's a good North Star to follow. Not necessarily rules-based, but principles-based. And then, Kirk, not only at Q2, at Texas Capital, all your exposure when you were at Accenture, you've seen lots of leaders, digital leaders, go-to-market leaders in the banking and credit union industry. What have you seen that's consistent? If you were to stack them on top of each other, what seems to rhyme across all of those successful innovators?
Kirk Coleman
A really wise commercial banker I once knew, he said, "You're always banking the operators." You always want to know who the operators are. No matter what business they're in, they know how to run a company. And I think there's something similarly true in terms of how we think about talent and leadership. And look, the truth of the matter is that although we have a lot of leadership in the industry represented by all these great people here in this room, there's not enough. And we can't just grow from the ground up. Probably enough leaders along the way as well though we've got to get started on that as well. So I think we've got to be willing to kind of go outside our industry a little bit. Maybe it's nearby, maybe it's adjacent, and bring new people into the fold and they'll bring fresh perspectives. Josh and Chen, who's also here, I'll give her a shout-out.
I don't know, I can't see anything with these lights, but she runs really vast day to day now. And we brought her onto that team to help us lead it. And she didn't have a traditional banking background and challenged us in ways that maybe we wouldn't have thought to challenge ourselves. And so all of us have to have a little bit of that courage and going, finding those really talented people that are ready for a new challenge that also might have just not exactly the right resume, that has this many years in banking and this many years in that operating environment. We have to have some courage there. It will almost always work out if we invest in those people and if we're strategically clear. And we desperately need those folks to come into our industry. I think the kind of long-term health of our industry really depends on it.
Katharine Briggs
We have to have people want to go into banking.
Kirk Coleman
We have to want them to go into banking.
Katharine Briggs
Yeah.
Kirk Coleman
It's a noble profession. Let's get them going.
Katharine Briggs
Yeah. Chris, what have you seen? Where's the burnout been? Where's the success been? Seen people banging their head against the wall?
Chris Craver
Yeah, so I think probably similar to Jeff, is that bring in people from the larger tech firms and you assume that you're going to inject that culture into your environment and they quickly hit the reality of what is a regulated environment and how difficult that is to work through. And I think if you break down what the intention of what we're trying to do with going after some of those people, it's bringing in the voice of the customer. They're always customer focused. And I know we talk a lot about that, but having teams that are focused purely on that and channeling that back to the teams that are the bankers or the people that do understand banking and payments infrastructure and then saying, "How can we do some things here to help our customers out?"
So we've got our best customers that are telling us our limits are too low for them, they can't make the deposits that they want to make online. All right, well it's great we received that feedback. Now what can we do with that? And how can the people that understand the payment infrastructure, the risk management infrastructure, help support what is the right experience then for those customers? So I think we're kind of saying the same thing, which is the diversification of the teams and bringing in what are their strengths across. And that's worked really well.
Katharine Briggs
And Valley may have it right or may have it wrong, but we had an interesting discussion yesterday at breakfast. Where do you put the head of digital in an org chart so that they're the most impactful?
Chris Craver
I'll be CEO, I'm fine with that. No, actually I don't want that job. But it depends on where you're at in your stage of your journey. And so particularly if you're already a top-down type organization and you're trying to build one that's more decentralized and more empowering of the teams, then you have to start as high up at the top as possible for that. And then what your ultimate goal is that you're trying to disseminate this new way of working and looking at bringing in the voice of the customer, being agile and constantly looking at performance and improvements, you need to disseminate that across all of your teams. And I think ultimately, that head of digital goes away because it becomes ingrained in part of all the other teams that we work with. So I have a finite lifetime in my role and I'm OK with that.
Katharine Briggs
How do you feel about that? Where should the head of digital for the biggest impact?
Jeff Lee
It's been under me for a long time and here's why we wanted to do it that way, at least for a period of time, is there's a lot of muscle memory across a 96-year-old company that kind of has to get, not broken down, but there's a lot of conversations that have when you start to drive this level of transformation into a business. And so folks who used to say, "Look, it was my job to service the customer for all these routine things," terrified of actually what we've done to their business. And so if that's stuck away in a skunk works and it doesn't account for the fact that we're really changing the day-to-day of a lot of people in this bank, then it leads to a lot of ill will in my mind. So we've had it up pretty high in the organization because it requires a really good relationship with the head of retail, really good with the head of operations, head of commercial or what have you.
Katharine Briggs
And we've spoken about customer experience and that being a great North Star, making sure we have the voice that customer in everything we do. We also saw a huge migration in the spring of deposits and account holders moving from the middle, quite frankly, to the biggest and to some of the smaller community banks. What are you doing to differentiate, I'll start with you, Chris, what are you doing to differentiate, either hold on to customers, getting new customers around customer experience? Is it just keeping up with the largest bank technologies? How do you kind of think through that?
Chris Craver
Excuse me, just breathed in and took, so thanks. So there's a couple of facets that we look at for that. So one, it's about capabilities. Technology is an aspect of that. We talked about the deposit origination platform. Then it's the teams that can affect and operate those platforms in a very nimble and rapid fashion. But look, there are things in my digital experience today that myself and my team are not particularly proud of and some of those things we have to live with and we have to be OK with. And that's also why when you look at some of the pricing that we have for our products and why it is so high right now, it makes up for some of those things. People will do amazing things for a high rate product and they'll be OK with it and amazingly they won't complain about it because they know they're getting that deal. And we know that can't last forever, we have to fix some of those things. But I think that's the way that we look at the world right now and how we're moving forward.
Katharine Briggs
And Kirk, what are some things, probably easier for you to talk about, things you've seen that haven't gone well, bets that have failed? Not from a Texas Capital perspective, but just because you've been a consultant and you can speak and it not wound something that you have chosen to do, tell me about some of the bets you've seen that have gone wrong and not just what the outcome was, but what were the failures and decision making and data gathering that went along the way?
Kirk Coleman
Yeah, we sort of think about technology. The truth is with technology that with enough smarts and effort, you can get the technology to work, you can get it to work. What usually prevents it from working or for you getting all that you want out of that is all of us humans kind of getting in the way in terms of either the decisions that we make or fail to make. I worry a lot about strategic drift when we make really big decisions about technology. And it doesn't have to be digital technology. It could be a lot of the traditional technologies and infrastructure and all the other things that we're all responsible for running every day. And so I just worry that we make one big decision and it just kind of drifts over a couple of years because we underestimate the amount of energy that we need to put into as leaders of keeping the organization on track with why we made that decision in the first place. The other part of that is having the courage to sort of take a pause and edit, edit that strategy.
Just because you didn't get it exactly right, you may be doing something very few people have ever done before, so let's give ourself a little grace to sort of take a pause, edit and then move forward. Probably, we were strategically correct to begin with, even though if we didn't get the execution exactly right. We just need to acknowledge that because again, I think in the industry we're going to need a lot of that over the next decade as we make some really material changes in our operating environments from all the legacy technology has got to get replaced, etc.
The other is what you were alluding to is just remember why you're doing it in the first place. Who are you doing it for? Are you staying true to that? And continuing to ask questions. Because their needs are going to change along the way as you're implementing whatever project or initiative you're doing. And so continuing to sort of say, "Are we still on the right track here in terms of who we're doing this for in the first place?"
And so again, the previous talk just really resonated with me on these fronts. Because that stuff takes a lot of energy, it takes time. It's a lot of shoe leather that you got to wear down, going through the organization and kind of evangelizing your vision for that. But if not us, then who? I think is the right way of thinking about that. So those are the things I think that when we look back, well, why didn't that go as well as we wanted it to? It tends to be, that not because we couldn't find just the right smart person to make the technology change that we needed it to, but it's the other things that hold us back.
Katharine Briggs
That makes sense. As an industry, we're not rewarded for move fast and break things. But I'll ask and I'll start with you since you shared the story, what's your leadership motto and is it different at Q2 than it was when you were a banker?
Kirk Coleman
Yeah. So maybe the context has shifted, but I'd say it's still pretty much the same. I always say I want to do meaningful work with people I like, and for me, meaning has both purpose and scale. It's just the way I'm wired. The scaling part is something I'm good at. And then the people I like doesn't always have to be people I'm friends with, although happily that has happened very often. But it's the people I respect. It's the diversity of opinions, it's different leadership styles that I can learn from. It's kind of that richness of this long arc of a career in an industry that is very tightly wired together. One of the things I've enjoyed over the last couple of days is people that sort said, "Oh yeah, we worked at that other place 10 years ago and now we're in different places, but we're still in the same room here together. Isn't that fun?" And that happens over and over and over.
And again, I want us to see the future of our industry with optimism, with a very strong lens of innovation, and big eye innovation on big ideas, but also lots of little eye innovation in terms of the way that we organize, the way we do our work, the way we partner with one another. I see a lot of positive examples of that that I get to go learn about and put the work here at Q2 in the context of the role I've got. But it's a wonderful industry to be in despite all of the bad things we might say. And by the way, go to a conference room like this full of oil and gas executives or even the seemingly sexier industries like tech and high-tech and stuff like that. They are dealing with very similar or structural problems in their industries and they're trying to figure it out the best they can as well. And so we shouldn't be too down on ourselves about the cards of fate might've been dealt to us. Yeah,
Katharine Briggs
The technical debt, the cost of capital, fraud, regulatory environment. Chris, what's your leadership motto?
Chris Craver
I don't know that I have a motto per se, but I would say some of the principles.
Katharine Briggs
What would your team say, "Oh, he says that all the time."
Chris Craver
Yeah. And so I think one, have a sense of urgency. There's so many things that we have in our industry that you can feel held hostage to, or what I'll tell my team, one of them I think is in the audience here today, but don't be a victim or don't play the victim card. That doesn't play well with me. What can we do? Have a sense of urgency? And then the other piece is how are we all lifelong learners and how are we as we go through these experiences together, what are our takeaways and how do we use that for a sense of continuous improvement?
It's difficult to be vulnerable, it's difficult to be transparent, but when you look at the agile way of working and having the impact that we should all have with a sense of urgency, you need to have feedback. And that feedback's not always going to be the rosy positive feedback. We say things like fail fast and have psychological safety in our team so that we can have that failure. But if you don't make it safe for people to have that failure and to learn from it and to move on from it, then you're not going to innovate, you're not going to make progress. And so these are, I think, important principles that anyone in technology, in any organization that they want to bring forward with their teams.
Katharine Briggs
Yeah. And I think as uncomfortable as this current rate environment, increased capital perhaps, loan loss reserves through the roof, secular changes and commercial real estate, I think for the young folks that are just coming into the industry, think how much they're going to learn. And those that started five or 10 years ago when everything was relatively speaking a little bit easier, you might've felt like you were really good when you might've just been lucky. And as you guys are out there thinking about your questions to ask this panel, Chris and Valley just had a very successful core conversion. So that might be something that you want to think about asking him lessons learned on that one. Jeff, your leadership motto?
Jeff Lee
Well, I have two. One is definitely more tactical and the others may be a little bit more lofty. The one that's more tactical has been framed by what we've been through as a bank the last two and a half years. We had a Q2 conversion and we've converted six banks in that amount of time. That's an extraordinary amount of work on the team. And I have really insisted that the team, you have to over plan, over communicate, you have to say it a hundred times in a very nice way. When you're driving that kind of change in an organization, it's very easy for the company to get out of lockstep. Fortunately, we did it. We did it because we were very collaborative and very tactical and purposeful in all of our communications. So let's, on the tactical side.
On the broader side, it's don't wake up to discover you've been disrupted. The business model is still changing. It's subtle, it's quiet, but it's still changing. So I spent four years in the publishing and media industry and the speed at which the economic model changed would make your head spin. It was unbelievable how fast. Fortunately, we're regulated. Changes will come slow, but changes will come. This industry more than any I've ever been in can kind of get comfortable. We're not comfortable right now, but to me, the model is still being subtly rewired. You've got a lot of smart money dinking and dunking, trying to find better ways to disrupt us. And my concern for all of us is if there's a credit event and if our heads go deep in the balance sheet for two, three years, what's it going to look like when we pull our head back out of the balance sheet? The last time that happened was '07, '08, we came out of that and customer expectations for mobility had totally changed then when we went into the crisis. So it's changing a lot faster than we probably give it credit.
Katharine Briggs
Yeah. The development of the iPhone and the great financial crisis within quarters of each other, what a transformation for this industry and the way that we all live and work. Kirk, your proudest moment?
Kirk Coleman
My proudest moment. Oh boy, there's a lot.
Katharine Briggs
How about professionally?
Kirk Coleman
Yeah, right. I was going to say, I got three sons and all that.
Katharine Briggs
Professional.
Kirk Coleman
There's a lot to talk about there. So I guess professionally, one of the things I was probably most pleased about is, I'll use a recent one. So just like all of your businesses is changing, Q2's business continues to change as well. And over the past year and a half, we've had really hunker down in terms of what's our product strategy, what's our corporate strategy, where are we focusing our time, money and efforts, our talents, our attention? We talk a lot about return on management attention in terms of the things that we focus on. It should matter and it should move the needle and it should make a difference for our people and for our customers. And so that's a muscle we've had to really exercise pretty hard over the last 18 months. And so I'll just anchor right there. I've just been so proud of being part of this organization that's been willing to face whatever circumstances we're in with optimism and clear eyes about what the truth is and be willing to try new things as we move forward trying to serve all of you better.
Katharine Briggs
Yeah. Kind of that brutal honesty while maintaining optimism, right?
Kirk Coleman
Yeah, yep.
Katharine Briggs
Other than the core conversion, your proudest moment?
Chris Craver
So this is a difficult one for me to answer. And for me, the proud moments come from when we help a customer who struggles with something or there's an issue that we have in our platform, and we're able to fix that and make it something that's meaningful to them. And there's a lot of little examples like that any given day. But I think you heard me talk about our deposit origination platform. And so the most recent example of that is, so at Valley, before I came, there really wasn't a digital department. And so I've only been there, not been there yet three years. And so for us to come in, hire a team in and be able to deliver this impactful capability both to our customers, to our internal associates and to the balance sheet for the bank is something that we all on the team are particularly proud of.
Katharine Briggs
Jeff?
Jeff Lee
Well, proud of all the growth over the 10 and a half years that I've been there, but there's one particular moment that really stands out when I felt like our whole bank connected with what we had done. So in two years in a row, I think it was '19, no, it was '18 and '19, we were the fastest-growing bank in America and we were among the top 30 fastest-growing publicly traded companies in the U.S. And so the first year we won that, first, we were shocked because our heads have been down, just execute, drive, grow, grow, grow and you pull back and you can see.
I got the opportunity to reveal that to all of our employees on an all-hands call. And I did a little reveal where I went through the top five fastest-growing publicly traded companies. And it was Amazon and it was Facebook and it was Google. And I went down to 23 and I said, "And there's Seacoast." And the look on our people's face was unbelievable. And they finally connected with the fact that, you know what, you may be from a small town in Florida, you may be with an old-school community bank, but look what you've done. You can do incredibly special things. That's a moment I'll carry with me forever. They did it.
Katharine Briggs
That's wonderful. That's wonderful. I think everybody in this room is type A. We're overachievers. We hold ourselves to a really high standard and we should. We're probably not as great about celebrating as we are about criticizing what can we do better and let, let's add that metric so that we don't do that ever again. Let's finish on a forward-looking. What do you think, and I'll start with you, Kirk, we'll just keep going in this order, what's the biggest threat? What's the biggest threat? I mean, 500 basis points, interest rate increase, we've got the chance of capital going up, we've got, as I said, loan loss reserves, commercial real estate. Other than that, the biggest threat to this industry?
Kirk Coleman
Yeah. What is the line from Miracle, "Greatness is born of great opportunity," and I think that's where we are as an industry. Someone asked me not long ago, what keeps you up at night? And I think I said, "I don't worry that we'll be fine or good. We probably will be. I worry about missing our shot at great." And so if I think about the future, I kind of worry about that as an industry as well as we kind of let the sort of tide carry us along in whichever direction it's going, whether that's because of economics or geopolitical or regulatory or what's going on in Washington, and we forget that we have a substantial amount of control over our own future and view that future with optimism.
So I see a vision for the industry that transforms, that takes advantage of this, whatever economic circumstances we're in and how we have to focus and things like that. And it gives us the courage to retrench and rethink and see our future with optimism and really kind of structure the way that we move forward differently. Because why not? It's not very fun just to be carried along in this current environment. So we might as well take those steps and be bold in doing so.
Katharine Briggs
Yeah. Don't let a good crisis go to waste.
Kirk Coleman
That's right.
Katharine Briggs
We don't wish any of this upon us, but it is a clarifying moment, right?
Kirk Coleman
Yep.
Katharine Briggs
Biggest risk?
Chris Craver
Yeah, and this is one that's been out there for a bit after the last financial crisis, but in creating the too big to fail organizations, have we unwittingly created too small to succeed? And now even just with this last crisis where we've seen what the government's done to consolidate, are we moving towards a top 10 type of environment that's too big to fail? And then what does that mean for all the rest of the community banks and organizations in this country? So to me, that's a big concern.
Katharine Briggs
Yeah, our industry, we have an entire conference called Acquire or be Acquired. That's the reality of what we live in, right? And you?
Jeff Lee
I think the biggest risk or threat is a loss of confidence in communities and customers. So you go back to the '07, '08, and we took a shot there, and we came on the other side. There was a big question mark about smaller banks and technology. "Love you guys, but your technology's terrible." OK, we've addressed that. We're very much in the game and happy with the hand we've got. Now it's a different battle, it's financial stability and confidence. And we're very stable. But if there are other issues that manifest themselves, what seeps into the mind of customers and could go back to that situation where, "I really love you, but I don't feel safe with you, so I've got to move my money over here." So I think a lack of confidence, biggest thing we've got to keep our eye on.
Katharine Briggs
And I find it interesting because we spoke about it on some of our prep calls, generative AI, not that that's a threat, but that we somehow didn't cover it today. How's Valley thinking about using generative AI?
Chris Craver
Yeah. So we are thinking about it. I think the biggest thing for us is we don't necessarily see it replacing people yet. And so the human interaction with our customers is still an important part. So how do we look at new AI technologies to help improve the human digital experience? So are they things that can help our associates and branches to help serve customers better? Our bankers that are out with customers, even our customers online and helping them through something like an onboarding or a service type process. But it's more of an augmentation than a replacement strategy, for sure.
Katharine Briggs
Got it. Got it. Kirk, fraud, AI?
Kirk Coleman
Let's not put those two together quite yet. On AI, let's build Iron Man suits, not Terminators. That's kind of how we think about how we can put this technology. This technology is going to connect with a lot of things that we already do and it's going to really, I think, give us a way of moving forward in a way that maybe we couldn't imagine entirely a year ago even. That's how fast it's happened. So we knew some of the building blocks. We maybe knew what was coming, but not with maybe the speed of adoption that we've seen.
There's lots of questions. We need to handle all those questions responsibly in the positions that we're in, in the kind of work that we do, the industry that we're in. But I do think it will be a transformative technology for all of us. And it's going to allow our best people to do the things that they're very, very good at in a way that is easier and less burdensome from a manual or kind of more administrative task and things like that. Someone described it as the best intern that's ever worked for you. It could do anything. It can go fetch everything. But doesn't know everything, you can't trust it with everything. So we'll handle that responsibly. But I'm very bullish on AI.
On fraud, I'll just say on behalf of all of us, I think that fraud is so frothy right now and it changes so fast. And the fact of the matter is that as a space, both operationally and from a technology perspective, it's a very fragmented space. This is how the fraudsters make their living, is by exploiting kind of the cracks between departments, between technologies, between all of the things a bank has to do every day to run its business. I think there's a very big opportunity there. It's hard exactly to see how that's all going to come together. But again, I think as an industry, we need to be stepping very firmly into that because it's something that everyone's doing.
