The Age of Volatility

Cheryl Brown

In this episode of The Purposeful Banker, Alex Habet and the "Deal Doctor" Tony Hernandez break down ways financial institutions can empower their commercial relationship teams for strategic growth.

 

  

 

Transcript

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 welcome back for another show.

Over here, we just wrapped up our annual conference BankOnPurpose last week, so I was very excited to come back on and just share a little bit about that. It was the first BankOnPurpose since before the pandemic. I don't plan on going into it too much. We were actually planning on doing a recap episode on this show very soon, so stay tuned for that. But the reason I wanted to bring it up so soon after we've been back from the conference is because something wonderful happens in these things and we're still basking in the glow or the aftermath of it.

As someone who has previously sat on both sides of that conference, and actually I should probably say three sides formally as a prospect, then as a client, and then now as an employee part of the hosting team, you just cannot beat the perspectives that you hear from all those who are attending, both Q2 employees, for example, but also from the banks and credit unions that join us in person there. It was a great time in Austin. People are very open as far as what are the challenges that they're dealing with day in and day out.

And so there's been a lot of camaraderie and a lot of similarities and, I think, a lot of connections that have been made last week. It's really great. It creates these bonds in these moments that are truly wonderful, but it also becomes abundantly clear as you're sitting there and listening to these perspectives that there's people that work day in and day out to make their institutions better.

And so we wanted to dedicate this particular show around broadly some best practices that we've observed over the last few years in helping these institutions figure out how to navigate not only what's going on out there from a macro perspective, from a business perspective, but also how to deal with a lot of the institutional changes. Predominantly what we tend to talk about, of course, is technology transformation, but without a doubt we're looking to always listen and then provide what we've heard works the best across all the institutions and try to create one place, a good place, for everyone to start if they have no idea where to start from. We've talked a lot about it on the show.

The guest who I'm about to introduce has been on the show before talking about some of these things. None of that has changed. We're still in an era of unprecedented convergence of macroeconomic and disruptive forces. In some ways it seems to be accelerating. In other areas, it's perhaps decelerating a little bit. But if you look from the economics perspective between the rising rates and the combination of the low unemployment and the inflation supply chain stuff that's also there—from the geopolitical side, the war in Europe is still raging on, which is of course impacting said supply chain disruptions—there's a lot more stuff around climate that is starting to really become problematic and frankly difficult to ignore. There's U.S.-China relations. The two biggest economies are certainly fraying in certain aspects of their relations, so who knows where that goes long term? And by and large, shaky democracies as a whole still continue to be concerning.

And of course, the systemic stuff mentioned briefly with technology transformation. It's not just also about the technology stuff. There's also a lot of fraud that banks are having to deal with. There's ESG and a whole bunch of other suds. When we were in our conference last week and we were meeting with our advisory group, we basically put that as the backdrop and we said, well, welcome to the age of volatility, because I think everyone in the room unanimously agreed that it's never been this complicated before. It's a big deal, but it always comes back to something fundamental, and we wanted to bring it into this show into this episode as well.

Personalized banking—it's a buzzword that you hear a lot, especially on the retail side, but it's just now starting to gain a little bit of steam on the commercial side. You're starting to actually see how personalization is making its way onto the commercial, certainly in the small business, and we talk a lot about that. The small businesses, they're the beneficiaries of a lot of this stuff because of its close proximity to the retail side.

But when we're starting to move up mark and starting to talk about more complex organizations and how they work with their banks, that personalization, it really still just makes its way through in the form of the relationship that they'll have with their bankers. And one thing is abundantly clear is in traditional commercial banking and corporate banking, etc., it used to be who you know. It's now becoming a lot less of who you now, and it's becoming clearly more about what you know and more precisely, what do you know about my company and how can you help me figure out how I should manage my investments or how I should invest in capital expenditures, whatever it is. And the old model simply just isn't good enough, especially when you think about all these challenges that were outlined a few minutes ago.

With that in mind, I want to welcome back a special guest on this show. This individual's been on many times already on this show, but one of the cool things about getting his perspective here is that he works day in and day out with some of the biggest institutions that we do business with. And so he has a very interesting perspective to bring into this conversation as well. I'd like to welcome the Deal Doctor back to the show. Tony Hernandez, welcome back man. Thanks for coming and talking about where we're at now.

Tony Hernandez

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Alex. And as always, very happy to be here. Two quick things, everything that you just mentioned really raises the stakes for the task that the relationship managers are faced with and why empowerment is key. The overall shift in the operating model and client expectations will continue to challenge strategy. And again, really how the bankers, which are the face of the bank, interact with our clients, is totally evolving. The pandemic is not that far away. And that started, I think, this need to evolve and change. And then the other thing, I was conflicted, so I couldn't go to BankOnPurpose, but already some of the soundbites that I've started to get about just the camaraderie and the value that our clients got from being there, so just wanted to pass that note along.

Alex Habet

Sorry we missed you, but it really was a great experience. Hopefully next year we can make it work with your conflict there. But would you mind just at least when you're having these conversations, just share what are the stakes here typically when we're trying to just level set, table set? Forget about the forces that we mentioned a minute ago, but what are the stakes specifically here?

Tony Hernandez

Let's talk about our pie effectively, and our partners at BCG estimate that in the U.S., at least, banks capture about 70% of the potential share of wallet and lose about 10% of their clients annually just to attrition. Now, both of those figures are actually staggering because one, we see the huge potential that our clients have with their existing relationships, but also just the need to double down and defend that existing relationship. We know that it is a disproportionate cost to onboard a new client versus defending one. And if you're losing 10% of your client base on an annual basis, that's staggering. Empowerment, like we mentioned earlier, is really key to not only be able to ensure that we're executing on a privacy or client 360-degree view of how we go to market, but also defending the existing business and bringing that same value proposition to those clients and making sure that they don't feel forgotten or feel like a second-class citizen.

Alex Habet

Alright. With that in mind, what tends to be the more pressing issues that you're hearing about? What are the core challenges that you're getting the pants-on-fire vibe from your banks?

Tony Hernandez

Yeah, there are several factors at play here that really require them to be nimble in how they execute on strategy. For starters, this year's been interesting because bank earnings overall have been strong. Loan demand and overall credit quality have also followed suit on that. But as you are well aware, there's always a lag effect. Banks are cyclical, and it takes a little bit of time for what's going on in the economy to filter their way through our bank's P&Ls. Some of these challenges that we hear stem from the change in deposit, the supply imbalance and the ongoing margin pressure.

Let's start with deposits. The deposits are falling, driving up loan-to-deposit ratios, and forcing banks' rate deposit betas. This brings funding sources back into the strategic mix after a long period of excess liquidity. And I'll come back to that in a minute. And followed by that is while net interest margin is rising with rates, the contractual spreads are narrowing. This goes, again, back to the basic of risk-based pricing continues to be pivotal and something that we need to be keenly aware of. The need to further diversify revenue sources and generate fee income, again, needs to be on page one of your playbook.

Overall, if we stay on that trajectory, the headwinds are going to be there and potentially put downward pressure on earnings. Like you mentioned, there's a strange combination of dynamic creating a weird competitive environment, strategic crosswinds, and all of our clients are right in the middle of that vortex.

Alex Habet

Let's take a step back for a moment here and think about the sometimes-conflicting needs when you talk about if you were a bank or if you're a banker within the bank, the needs of your clients, which you outlined some of those issues that are really pressing right now. And then you have the bank's needs. The visual here is basically two towering lists of needs coming and crushing the banker in the mug because they have to find the right balance and can't make everyone happy all the time. Talk to me about how do you get up in the morning and feel motivated to do the job? What's one piece of advice I guess you'd give to a banker in that scenario?

Tony Hernandez

I'll take a quick sidestep and then I'll get right into it. But I went from having almost zero interest in motor sports, like F1, but the more time that I spend in banking, the more that I'm attracted to that sport. And interestingly enough, I know that the team at BankOnPurpose shared a quote from a famous racer there. His name is Aryton Senna, where he says that "You cannot overtake 15 cars in sunny weather, but you can when it's raining." And again, like you mentioned, those two behemoths of what's at play here and how do we go about passing those 15 cars in crummy weather? I think it's all about the framework and at the center of having that framework is going to be culture. We follow it by playbook, the data and analytics alongside the tools that we use to procure insights, the overall workflow, and then lastly, performance optimization. Just making sure that we don't just do it once and walk away, but it's making sure that we go through the flywheel as many times as we can.

Alex Habet

That's a lovely quote. I loved it when I saw it up on the screen, and it's true. These racers have gotten so good at running these tracks that they pretty much come within milliseconds of their time at each lap, which is why it becomes notoriously difficult if you're in fifth or sixth place to catch up on a clear day. But when it's a rainy day, that creates a lot of margin of error. Some skidding happens, which can slow you down. You might be a little bit less speed friendly in certain scenarios. And that creates the opening for those who are willing to take the risks, which is exactly the scenario that we find ourselves in banking today. The framework approach, you tell a banker, an everyday banker, a relationship manager, "Hey, you got to put a framework," this is not about the banker actually. This is about the institution that's insulating the banker in this framework. It would take a superhuman to be able to manage all these conflicting things between the bank and the client flawlessly and profitably.

But as soon as a bank or a credit union, you identify the opportunity, the tried-and-true methodology to actually succeeding all lies in the framework. You can't just say, "Hey, we're going to raise deposit rates because we want to be competitive XYZ." You wave your wand and then everyone just moves in lockstep. That never happens. The way it does happen is through the framework. You started with culture. That always seems the hardest thing to do. People are busy. They're doing their jobs day in and day out. I used to remember when you and I and our old bank used to talk to bankers, they'd be like, "Why are you talking? I'm busy. I'm working on this client request." Institutional habits are hard to break, but I don't know if necessarily that applies here. How do you talk about culture in the context of the framework?

Tony Hernandez

Yeah, and I 100% agree with you that culture can be the hardest to get or execute on. And I'm glad that you mentioned that little snippet of some of the things that we were challenged when we're going through change management or trying to improve the overall state of the commercial bank. And I remember in the early days when we were doing that, I was like, oh wow, this whole culture thing is moving a mountain and you don't move a mountain overnight, but what you can do ... Shoot, you may not even fully move it at all, but what you can do if you want to make changes is one pebble at a time, one stone. What are the things that really need addressing so that we can get to the other side of this mountain? I think it's almost that the classic game here of doing the groundwork of what's the feedback that our team is providing us and getting in front of as many bankers as we can, so long as they're willing and get that valuable information.

And once we listen, we then need to turn that into actual information and influence and ensuring that our teams felt heard once we're ready to execute based on what we've heard. When it comes to culture, it pays off to have a long-term view of where we're going, focus on the client experience, because that's why we're really all here, and to continue to be nimble and listen to the team so that we're able to adapt to the changing environment and responding to those elements of friction, whether they're internal or external. And with that listening, sometimes we might hear things that we don't like. Don't be overly defensive or be too transactional-focused and take a solid approach of, well, my team or my product is going to be doing this irrespective of what my next-door neighbor might be doing, whether that's a neighboring team or the neighboring product. At the end of the day, we're all serving the same client, so let's make sure that we're again going toward the same finish line.

Alex Habet

I'm going to go on a little bit of a tangent. I talked about on the show in past episodes around the common occurrence where there's an implementation of some fancy new technology. It impacts a wide population within the bank, let's say every relationship manager, credit officer, whatever. But it turns out that the tool itself, well, it was designed to help them do the job, but the way it was implemented was to police them or perhaps to make it very burdensome to actually do their jobs. The most common example I hear day in day out—and this is no knock on the company, I think Salesforce is a wonderful solution—but the range of how it's deployed is staggering. You have on the one hand, institutions that have figured out how to leverage it in a way where it doesn't really disrupt the workflow necessarily of the sales team.
It actually enriches ... it gives them the insight or whatever to have that enriching experience with the clients.

But then, honestly, the majority of what I see is the opposite of that, where, for example, the institution wants to track call logs and stuff and it takes 15 clicks plus four pages to track a simple meeting and some of the takeaways. And now if you take that, you apply that scale, it's a mess. I've actually heard a lot of people refer to it when it's implemented that way as "back-office force" because really, ultimately, it's just to help back office understand. Anyways, again, no knock on Salesforce. They're wonderful. But this is part and parcel what we're talking about because it all comes down to you have to talk to the employees. There's just no way around it. You can't approach these transformations from an ivory tower.

Actually, I don't have the statistics. We're going to put it in the clip show from BankOnPurpose. But actually funny enough from Salesforce, Tiffani Bova was one of the speakers. And I really wish I had the stats in front of me right now, but the punchline here was that if you were to ask managers how good their technology stack is, and you would ask the employees on the ground how good their technology stack is, you will hear two vastly different stories. You will hear from the people on the ground that the technology's terrible, it's clunky, it doesn't help me do my job, and it's a poor employee experience. And then from the management side, which obviously it's not a mystery, they probably made a lot of those decisions to implement some of these technologies. They think it's all great. And one of the reasons they think it's all great is because there just isn't enough dialogue going and they're not hearing the heat back enough.

A lot of these things can be fixed through, "Hey, let's change our configuration a little bit here and there," and you might be able to make a huge difference. But anyways, we're belaboring this point on culture. This is probably the most tangible example that I point to. It's just if you don't know where to start, just talk to the bankers. Ask them, "Hey, what does a perfect client conversation look like from a client's perspective, from the bank's perspective?" And work backwards from that. Don't just implement something and then expect wonderful results without that ground game.

Tony Hernandez

Absolutely. Absolutely. And not to belabor the point, but we can spend hours talking about this, but when it comes to digital transformation change and technology, it's not a substitute for good workflow or process. And there are a couple of other things that I want to get into before we talk a little bit more on workflow, but it's a lot of times it almost feels like it's a forgotten stepchild or item that needs to be part of our culture. And to some of the things that you were speaking about there is what's your playbook? And again, another topic that we can spend a lot of time on, but your playbook might mean a lot of different things. But to me, in this conversation, Alex, is taking everything that we heard from the cultural perspective and the feedback and making it real, putting it in writing so that we can execute against it.
What is our sales methodology? How are we positioning our product? How are we setting our we targets, revenue targets, etc.?

And right alongside that, we need to make technology approachable. Make it easy to get answers, not make it the 15 steps or tasks that you need to do whatever. And for that, we need to have an elevated awareness of what information is presented in real time. What does a client like this in an industry like this need? And deliver that information to the person that actually needs it when they need it.

Alex Habet

Right. Cut out the other noise. This is all that matters right now. Check this out. It only takes a click to get to. And even then you're still not going to get full perfect adoption. Not everyone's going to row in the same direction, but you know what? You've cut out a huge amount of noise in the system by taking that approach. You're getting that one step closer of really fulfilling the need of what your solution is to provide. I use that Salesforce example. We actually have that same issue with our own software sometimes where it's just being put in as a police state versus something that can help execute on the playbook, as you said, whether that playbook is to grow your balances or to hedge against some sort of risk that you're seeing coming in the future. Whatever it is, cut out the noise, put what's most important, and check to make sure that it's working. And if it's not, figure out what to do next.

Tony Hernandez

Exactly.

Alex Habet

Sorry.

Tony Hernandez

And again, you'll remember this when we were going through that behemoth task of digital transformation in our prior worlds, but it was the need to ruthlessly prioritize and execute on that and making sure that we were executing on that playbook. And if something else try to get in there, we need to ask ourselves, did we miss this? Or is it that important? Or is that outside of scope for what we're trying to do here? Again, to your point, minimize that noise.

Alex Habet

Yeah. And also just one last point on a playbook: A playbook can be simple or it could be complex, but I always advocate for starting simple. You got to get to that very simple thing to start to get the workforce acclimated to how you are going to help them do their job on the simple use cases. Because if you start with something complex, you're just starting at a disadvantage that way. Iterate your way there, test tested out, talk to the bankers, talk to management, whatever it is you need to do to figure out what's most important in that moment, in that interaction, and start small and just relentlessly improve on it bit by bit by bit.

Tony Hernandez

Well said.

Alex Habet

We talked about culture, we talked about how we weave in a playbook and then against the backdrop of the culture. How can we make that playbook really come to life? Let's talk about some of the more tactical things as part of the rest of the framework around how to get that done. You mentioned data and analytics, the digital tools broadly speaking. How should institutions be thinking about that in a productive way in this day and age?

Tony Hernandez

Yeah, and what a great conversation we had earlier about process, because data and analytics and all those digital tools, it can be a slippery slope at times because the challenge flips on its head. We go from having no insights, very outdated tools to far too much of it. And it becomes overwhelming to the point of what's noise versus what's important? When it comes to this, we need to make sure that everything is purpose-driven with the tools and the insights that we put in front of the bankers. And the goal here should be to enhance the human experience rather than replace. What does Tony Hernandez or Alex Habet my banker need for that pre-call? What do they need when they're actually putting terms in front of a client? And more broadly as part of the overall portfolio health, thinking about banker dashboards here that would empower us to know how we're doing, give us that pulse that we so desperately need.

Alex, imagine on our end being able to view and visualize risk and growth signals and metrics, think legal issues, bankruptcy, merger and acquisition activity, credit rating changes, climate events like you mentioned earlier, in the context of their own portfolios in real time. Going back to one of the very first things that we mentioned here on, it's not who you know, it's what you know. And I know that it almost becomes that cliche where our bankers were becoming that trusted advisor. It's through purposeful deployment of information and technology that I think we empower that individual to get there.

Alex Habet

You just said it beautifully. Purposeful deployment of technology and information. Without a question these FIs, financial institutions, are full of remarkably talented individuals. Some of the smartest people I've ever met are ...

Tony Hernandez

Without a doubt.

Alex Habet

... who we're speaking about here. It seems silly to almost say, "Well this is ways ..." But again, it just comes back to they're human and the really awesome bankers are probably investing a lot of their own energy to be awesome. And you want them to continue to be awesome, but you want them to be awesome through richer interactions through more clients. And one way you can do that is by really purposefully curating what information and technology are deploying to them. I think it's something like 30 to 40% of the time, possibly even more, of a "good banker" spent just on administrative, trying to find information in the bank. Hopefully in 20, 30 years that'll be a thing for the history books and it'll just be automatic.

And we're basically trying to put a playbook here how, not to use the word playbook again, but we're basically putting a vision of how that can ultimately come to fruition. You're going to have to put frameworks like these, but you're going to have to repeat this framework for different use case applications. Regardless, what you said, that purposeful deployment is what this is really ultimately about.

Tell me about, from a workflow perspective then, because that to me seems like another often overlooked thing, when you're talking about a technology deployment, things like that, you don't always hear there's an associated change to the who does what or the standard procedures to optimize. And it's important not to lose sight of that. Do you have any comments on workflow?

Tony Hernandez

And I know that we already covered this a little bit earlier, but to bring it back, workflow can be really the iceberg that sinks our ship. We could have made the cultural commitment, we gather the feedback, we sifted through all that good information. We got the playbook. We know the right tools. We got the insight to make everything real, but then process. If we don't also give the same attention to process and if process is slow and full of friction and full of inconsistencies, manual steps, repetitive tasks like you're mentioning, then our teams end up spending a disproportionate amount of time on the wrong activities. And at worse, it causes people to fall off the momentum that we are building here through digital innovation. And that derails everything that we have built. In short, how the stack is organized can make or break everything. And I think that we can't let bad process get in the way of something excellent. And just making sure that we're giving it the same amount of love and attention is I think what I would say there.

Alex Habet

Frankly, this workflow notion was probably where I spent in the prior life the most amount of time trying to win consensus because we were onboarding brand-new technology that was designed to optimize the life of people who aren't currently using that capability within the bank. And so going to a large population of employees and saying, "Hey, we think you should take on this added task that you didn't use to have to do before because we think it'll help you," that's a ground game type of approach. You're going to have to go meet all 60 market executive heads and talk to them about this so that they can understand ...

Tony Hernandez

It's moving that mountain.

Alex Habet

Yep, moving that mountain. That's exactly right. And workflow is the stickiest one because that's where you have that more institutional ... you can switch technology off if you want, but people are still thinking about that workflow in the same old-school way and it's a hard habit to break. And I would know because Habet is my last name, just saying.

Tony Hernandez

We love puns, right?

Alex Habet

Yeah, That's right. That's right.

Tony Hernandez

Well, hey man, I think that the last thing in this framework is optimization. And again, how many times can you go through that flywheel? And when it comes to workflow, it's really about building the right muscle memory and repetition makes perfect. I think that when we have everything that we've discussed, we've brought the workflow in this journey along and asked the questions, is this task, is this thing, does it belong to this person? Or is it better served somewhere else? And also ask the question, can technology do this task better? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And that's OK.

But part of this is that, again, we're all human and let's not forget that we will do the things that we're ultimately incented to do. That could be the ultimate driver of behavior. But in lieu of that, we need to be judicious with our tracking and it cannot be an afterthought. We need to benchmark everything and improve as we go. If there was a desired outcome, whether it's the change in ownership of a specific task, are there quality metrics that go along with that? Do we have a baseline to know, and I famously said this. We need to snap that chalk. Where are we today and where are we going? And again, continue to measure that because in a way that creates that same feedback loop that we mentioned at the very start when we're talking about culture. If we don't create those natural feedback loops to supplement what we hear, then I think we become our own worst enemy in that sense.

Alex Habet

Yeah. And one other thing I would add on the whole performance optimization, more times you go through this cycle, the better you get at it. But the track is really just how you validate it. But also you're not going to run out of ideas of things you want to add to this. You're going to come up with new data and analytics all the time that you want to push out, insights you want to push out. You're going to come up with new coaching methodologies, whatever it is, that's never going to stop. The performance optimization aspect also pushes a requirement for the stuff that you already deployed to continue to earn its place among all the stuff you're throwing at your workforce.

And so we've certainly seen this coming from large enterprise institutions. Think about how many of those weekly, monthly reports you used to get in your inbox and you never clicked on it. And then you would wonder, "Wow, I wonder how many other people are just never clicking on this." But then you start to wonder, "Well I wonder how much time and energy was spent producing this." You don't even know if it's even getting clicked on anymore. And it might have been really useful three years ago, but it's not useful anymore. That's that performance optimization can never stop because things have to continue to earn their air time, so to speak. And if they don't earn it anymore, that's OK. Time to retire, make room for something more again.

You have a very limited bandwidth or window of clarity, let's call it, to communicate with your bankers. And if you're a banker, if you're hearing this and you're a banker, you're not getting this kind of attention from your institution, it's not rare. That's pretty common, actually. But I would raise it. I would speak up. Talk to your peers, talk to your managers. "Hey, this is not serving me," or "this is not serving the team," or "this is not serving my clients. What would serve me is X, Y, and Z."

And trust me that your management teams, they need this information. They want to hear from you, but they think everything's hunky dory if they're not hearing anything. Unless they're proactive enough to go and seek that feedback, which again is another thing that seems to be a little bit rarer, speak up, tell people what you need. And then frameworks like the one we're discussing now is ultimately how it just, again, becomes a reality. And just at the end of the day, it's all about making everyone's life easier. I think everyone can get behind that. Right, Tony?

Tony Hernandez

Absolutely. And I think one of the things that you often hear us say is to not let perfect get in the way of something great. Iterate, iterate, iterate.

Alex Habet

Yeah. I feel like we got a little bit of a sneak peek here with what it's like to work with you when you're working with the banks that you cover. Is that an accurate assessment?

Tony Hernandez

Yeah, absolutely. It's all about striving for success. It's in my title, and really understanding all the things that are important to our clients. It's the sharing of best practices, conversations not too dissimilar from this, sometimes just listening. But at the end of the day, it's not too dissimilar from how we're talking about aligning our teams or our playbook. It's making sure that we understand what your finish line might be so that we can execute to together. Truly privileged, Alex, that I get to do this for a living. I think I've in the past compared this to having your favorite board game. For me, it's Monopoly. I've played it hundreds of times, but every time it's a new challenge, new players involved, and it's the gift that keeps on giving. It's awesome.

Alex Habet

Yeah, man. Well, look, I really appreciate some of the behind-the-scenes view around what are some of the things you talk about. And certainly we love talking about this stuff. This stuff doesn't have to just apply to what we do directly as Q2 or PrecisionLender representatives of these solutions broadly. This is just more institutional stuff. And frankly, we didn't invent any of this. We're not taking any credit whatsoever. This is just giving back what we've heard works. This stuff works. One institution didn't figure this whole thing out, either. You take a piece from this one and a piece from that one and you start to put it all together. And this is the framework that really starts to become clear. And so that's why we wanted to just make sure that we give it some airtime.

It's really hard work. It really is. But just because it's hard doesn't mean you don't do it. This is how you push through. In the age of volatility, it's never been more important to get it right than it is right now. Give us a call. If you're out there and you're struggling with any of this or you have a new perspective, we'll bring you on the show and share a new perspective. Happy to do that. But again, we, as an organization, we're always here to help you. And certainly the Deal Doctor is available. You can find him on LinkedIn. I know he gets a lot of people reaching out to him after appearing on this show. Please don't be shy. Make sure you bomb his profile and drop him a lot of messages and stuff like that.

Alright, Tony, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you again for joining yet another episode of The Purposeful Banker. Do you have anything you'd like to plug here today or give any kudos to anyone out there?

Tony Hernandez

No, just the entire team at BankOnPurpose. Again, I've gotten such great positive feedback that to everyone involved, everyone that attended, thank you. And Alex, always such a pleasure getting to spend time with you.

Alex Habet

Likewise, sir. Guess we'll see you back here on the show not too long. For now, that's the Deal Doctor. For everyone out there, don't forget Deal Doctor. That's his new name, not Tony Hernandez. Deal Doctor. That's how you refer to him. Thanks again, Tony.

And that's it for this week's episode of The Purposeful Banker. If you want to catch more episodes, please subscribe to the show wherever you like to listen to podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and iHeartRadio. And if you have a minute spare, let us know what you think in the comments. You can also head over to q2.com to learn more about the company behind the content. Until next time, this is Alex Habet, and you've been listening to The Purposeful Banker.

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