In this week’s podcast, Alex Habet shares a replay of a panel discussion moderated by Q2’s Katharine Briggs as bank executives Katherine Weislogel from Synovus Bank, Farrukh Aman from Scotiabank, and Shon Cass from Texas Security Bank talk about the role digital plays in their organizations.
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 first, on behalf of the entire podcast crew, I wanted to congratulate you all on making it to the end of 2022. Time sure does fly by sometimes and this year was absolutely no exception. We saw, yet again, a year chock full of surprises along with those surprises, some new challenges, but also some new opportunities, which is something we also like to talk a lot about on the show.
But the impacts of 2022 and going into 2023 will actually be covered in a future episode. So if that's why you were tuning in here today, stay tuned a little bit longer. You will not be disappointed. Today, it's all about winding down the whirlwind of a year. And for our final two episodes, we wanted to share a couple of great moments from the conference we just hosted, BankOnPurpose 2022 in Austin, Texas.
For those of you who have had the privilege to experience this conference in person, it's truly something special. I've said it before on this show, it's remarkable how people coming from a wide variety of banks seem to just stop being rivals even for just a couple of days and share tribes and challenges and really become almost best friends in certain cases. You hear a lot of candid moments, which will remind you that we're all just a bunch of people trying to do our best out there.
On today's episode, we'll rewind to a great panel discussion from the sessions. I'd like to welcome Katharine Briggs to the show to give us a quick intro into the panel she led on November 17th titled, Doing Digital: A Modern Bank's Guide to Thrive. Katharine leads the customer success organization at Q2, and she's a rockstar flat out. I speak from personal experience.
In her panel discussion, Katharine hosted Katherine Weislogel from Synovus, Farrukh Aman from Scotiabank, and Shon Cass from Texas Security Bank as they shared success stories from their banks and how they're dealing with the changes that come with digital banking. And ultimately, the answer to, "Is it all worth it?" Katharine, on behalf of everyone at The Purposeful Banker, welcome back to the show. How are you doing today?
Katharine Briggs
Thank you. Thank you. It's been a long time since I've been on the podcast. So long that back in the day podcasts were just audio. So being on the video is definitely a new twist. Thank you for having me back. I've been with Q2 for over six years, and as you said, I lead the customer success team. That team is charged with delivering measurable and increasing value to all of our customers. Super, super glad to be here.
Alex Habet
Awesome. Awesome. Well, again, thank you. As mentioned in the opening remarks, you did a fantastic job leading this panel discussion. And so, really what we wanted to do here for the audience for the podcast today is to just give your quick, hot take on the perspective. What was it like for you, just being there, the interactions? And really just some things that maybe our audience can listen for as they listen to the replay immediately following this introduction.
Look, the subject was digital transformation. It's still front and center in the industry. Some banks are targeting completing their journey in 2023, so it's only about a year away, but others are still getting started. So why was it important to tackle this subject at BankOnPurpose again this year?
Katharine Briggs
Yeah. Well, first of all, let me start at 30,000 feet. It was awesome to be back in person in Austin, bringing together, as you said, such a diverse group of bankers, credit union executives, really leaders, and decision-makers that are on the same journey with each other. And so, in many ways, as you know, BankOnPurpose is Q2's gift back to this industry, reminding ourselves of this noble purpose, but it was also to create these connections. And so having these three folks on stage, Shon with Texas Security, it's a billion-dollar institution, Katherine with Synovus, 60 billion in assets, and then Farrukh with Scotia over a trillion in assets. We had geographic diversity. We had size diversity. Each one of these leaders at their institutions, they have different technologies that they have prioritized at their institution. So it was a wonderful discussion. I was truly amazed that we were able to have that level of diversity and yet I really felt like the discussion flowed really well. We had terrific questions from the audience as well.
And I'd say, to set up where they are in the journey. I don't know that anybody in that room said that they were going to be done in 2023. And we were very purposeful when we set up that time together, setting the stage for the audience, that we were going to be focusing on the commercial banking transformation. First, I think we only had, I don't know, 45 minutes or an hour on stage, which isn't enough even for a commercial transformation discussion, but certainly talking about the entirety of the bank would've been a near impossibility.
But focusing with those three folks, those three leaders at their financial institutions on commercial was really valuable because commercial is behind the consumer side of the bank. It is easily a decade behind the consumer side of the bank. And so it was important to bring those folks together to be just really honest, "Hey, we're all fairly new in this journey. We've accomplished a lot, but there's still long ways to go." And I really appreciated that they brought different perspectives because technology, digital transformation at these FIs can take lots of different forms. It can be technology that's entirely meant for the account holder or technology that is deployed for the employees of the FI. All of which are meant to really drive success for the account holders and for the financial institution. But just really interesting to hear the different parts of the journey, how they measure success, the challenges, the successes that they've had.
Alex Habet
Yeah, that's awesome. And when you said that commercial is a decade behind, man, that's like, actually, you never sit down and contemplate how big of a change that is that's in front of them. Hopefully, it doesn't even take a decade though because we've learned a lot from the retail side and maybe it'll only take five years to catch up, but that's really awesome. So what were some of the most intriguing parts of the discussion from your perspective?
Katharine Briggs
Well, first, as I said, they're not done with their transformation. Second, I asked a few questions about, are they changing investment given what potentially is a change in the macroeconomic environment? And definitely, I didn't hear any of that at all. They've seen real dividends, real returns on their digital investments. First with account holder experience and then also with employee experience, employee effectiveness, employee efficiency, so they're not done by any stretch. I don't see or they don't foresee a big slowdown at all in their spending. In fact, a lot of their decisions have been made, their roadmap was mapped out two or three years prior, and they are executing against it.
And then I would say, really my biggest takeaway, and a lot of folks in the audience said the same thing as well after the panel wrapped. My biggest takeaway, the most interesting thing that I heard the panelists talk about wasn't so much the technology. They know that they need to make these digital investments in their account holder experience and in the employee experience. Most of the discussion about success or struggle, things go well, or when things aren't quite what they thought they might be, really comes down to the human experience. So I think if we did a word cloud or a timer account, we probably spent 70% of that panel talking about humans, talking about change management, just talking about how to drive adoption. And that's adoption both by the account holders as well as adoption by the employees.
And so I find that first, it was really refreshing given a lot of the other panels that we spoke about. We spoke about talent a lot at BankOnPurpose, and we spoke about the challenges and the rewards and finding your strengths. And so to even hear that brought through the digital transformation panel, that the best technology in the world, if it is not adopted correctly, won't drive the outcomes and the returns that these FIs are looking for. So I found it really encouraging that we have leaders in our industry that are focused on the experience for the employees and the experience for the account holders.
Alex Habet
And that's consistent with what we've also been discussing here. We talk about digital transformation. We've had Dallas on several times talking about a lot of that kind of stuff. So it was really interesting to see that also come out organically through the panel discussion as well. So look, Katharine, thank you again for this incredible setup to the episode. I hope everyone in the audience gets to enjoy it as much as we all did being there in the room. Katharine, any parting words for our audience before we let it rip?
Katharine Briggs
Oh, everybody stay safe out there and put your humans first, wrap them with great technology, and you'll be amazed at the outcomes.
Alex Habet
Awesome.
Katharine Briggs
Thank you for having me.
Alex Habet
Thank you for coming on.
(Session Replay)
Katharine Briggs
Good to see everybody here. Thank you for participating. As you know, we're talking about purpose the past few days. This is really an event for us to learn from each other and for us to build relationships with each other, and for us to get to know folks that are on the same journey that you're on. Because there's not a lot of people that are going on the same journey. This is a great chance to build this network, to learn from each other, to figure out what's working and what's not. So I am thrilled to be joined on stage this morning with Farrukh and Katherine and with Shon. And with that, I'm going to turn it to you, each one of you, if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself, the institution you work with, the size of the institution, and then I think what would be helpful for the audience at a very, very high level, one or two or the largest Q2 solutions you might be using at your FI right now.
Farrukh Aman
Awesome. So good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here representing Scotiabank. So ... Farrukh Aman, I'm the director and lead for business transformation for the commercial bank. We're about 1.2 trillion in assets, 400 billion in commercial assets. We have been on our digital transformation journey for about four years now, and we work very closely with Q2 on the PrecisionLender solution.
Katherine Weislogel
I'm Katherine Weislogel. I head up treasury and payment solutions for Synovus. We're a 59 billion bank based in the Southeast. We started our journey with Q2, gosh, it's probably been about three and a half years ago when we started the RFP process to take two very antiquated platforms into one new commercial platform. And then we also use PrecisionLender on the lending side today.
Shon Cass
Great. Good morning. I would like to say I could see you but I can't.
Katherine Weislogel
I know, the lights.
Shon Cass
Because of the lights. I'm Shon Cass. I'm the executive vice president ... I'm actually one of the founders of Texas Security Bank. We are just over a billion in assets, and we started our journey probably two, two and a half years ago. We made the transition to Q2, and today we obviously use their UX. We have the Innovation Studio. We are PrecisionLender and we are about to roll out Treasury Onboarding any day.
Katharine Briggs
Terrific. Terrific. Well, as I got to know these panelists better over the past few weeks, and one of the things that we realized with 50 minutes to speak to this crowd about, is that talking everything digital was just going to be too much. I'm going to be hard-pressed, I think, to even cover the topics we want to this morning and leave time, of course, for you guys to ask questions of this panel. So we are going to be focusing on commercial digital banking and commercial banking.
And one of the things that you will hear as we go through this discussion is we're going to be talking about the digital journey for account holders and the digital journey for bank employees, for bankers. So I think, occasionally, if we get confused up here, I'll make sure that we're super crisp on whether we're talking about technology that's primary for the account holders or for the employees of the FI. So with that, Katherine, let me start with you. Tell me how Synovus thinks about making decisions. What's the North Star when you started on this commercial digital journey?
Katherine Weislogel
Excuse me. I was brought in three and a half years ago, at the same time the bank strategy changed with the addition of Kevin Blair who came into the organization, or he came as a CFO. He was promoted up into the COO. And in that position, the strategy changed into, "We are going to not just be a community bank anymore. We are going to build out the middle market space and go upstream." He knew that the treasury platform at the time was extremely outdated. There was no way we could compete into the interest-bearing deposits or win the entire relationship, which is rooted into the bank, unless we started over. So he brought me in to essentially to blow everything up.
So I blew up international, commercial card, and treasury, and that started with two old, antiquated... I mean we were on the oldest version of enterprise bank or an ECI if anybody can relate to that. I mean they stopped updating us, it was so bad, or servicing us. And then we had the BeB platform and FIS, which we got through in integration. So six weeks on the job, we integrated a bank, almost double our size, and we had two platforms that just were equally not good. And so, that was really the beginning. I would tell you of the journey, and we started with an RFP process. And the bank at Synovus, we're not about going out and fighting a partner that fits into a box. That's just not who we are, and clearly is not who I am for those that worked with me. I'm always looking for something that has a competitive edge. I'm looking for a partner that has the mentality of growing with us, listening to us, and accommodating. So when we started that journey three and a half years ago, those were built into everything that we started with, and ultimately want Q2 on our business.
Katharine Briggs
Awesome. And Shon, when we think about tradeoffs and priorities, despite the fact that you're running a bank and you have lots of cash, you do have limited investments. So how do you think about the tradeoffs and prioritizing deposit technology or loan technology? Just walk us through that decision-making process.
Shon Cass
Yeah. It's tough because all of you understand, we don't have unlimited resources, and there's a lot of technology today where we could just spend wildly. It really just has to be a strategic approach to number one, always, what does the customer actually need? And that's something that I even struggle with. I look at technology and it's shiny and it's cool, but is the customer really going to benefit from that?
And then we have to prioritize, where's the biggest need that we have? Is it a product that I really need to get out in front of my customer today, or do I need to spend some money on some technology to innovate and build some infrastructure internally to serve the customer? And so we have an internal technology team and that team is made up of department heads from different organizations within the bank, and we collectively work together to decide how are we going to allocate that budget and how are we going to solve those problems. It's not always easy because I want it all. And so I give them a little bit. But it's just really a strategy of trying to determine what's going to have the biggest impact either internally or externally.
Katharine Briggs
And Farrukh, ROI, when we think about return on investment, how does Scotia think about that? The return side? The investment side? And then, there's probably folks out here that think about buy versus build.
Farrukh Aman
Banks will always want to try to look to build in-house. Right? That's something that we inherit from our technology teams. But if you're looking at it from a business perspective, you can be out with a solution like PrecisionLender. In our case, in about five months, if you tried to build that in-house, I don't know where you would go and get the capital expertise, the technology expertise, the vision to try to do something like that. We went through that with pretty much every tool that we deployed. Each time, the SaaS solution came out on top.
ROI is a huge part of our equation when we're putting together a business case, how quickly can we not only get a ROI on our investment that we're making into the tool? But for us, there's a sense of urgency. At our bank, we've almost ... When I took over my role, it almost seemed like we put a concerted effort to make the life of a commercial banker really difficult. And by virtue of that, the life of our customer is a little bit tough along that customer journey. So it was important for us to get out in time, get out early, find the quickest way to make a solution that will make difference in the lives of our customers.
Katharine Briggs
Is the ... And Shon, maybe I'll start with you. As we're heading into ... We've spoken about this a lot this week. It's in the news everywhere. We're definitely heading into something different on the economic front. And so when we think about ROI and you say you talked about tradeoffs and you don't have unlimited funds, and even if you did, you have limited resources, folks that can deploy things inside of your institution, has the focus changed in the last few months on return? Are you focused more on efficiency and moving away from revenue growth? Is it always balancing that? Is it different today than it was say six months prior?
And I'll kind of lead the witness a little bit too. I think about the beginning of the pandemic with the PPP and the FIs that really invested in technology. We're able to grab market share because they got out ahead of that and invested ... At the time, it was probably very scary to invest in technology. But how are you thinking about, if it's efficiency versus revenue growth at this point in the cycle?
Shon Cass
I'm going to backtrack really quick to what Farrukh said, building is not an option in my organization. And so, going out to the market and finding a best-in-class solution is extremely important. But to your point, to your question, no one knows what the future holds. We've had this conversation in our advisory councils. We all think something's coming, but we're not sure. So I don't know that my strategy has changed. I will say that my focus in '23 is efficiency and that's really just from a... It's really been my focus since we started our bank. We're a fairly new bank. We chartered in 2008 during a financial crisis, so efficiency has been key from day one. But I don't see a way to scale my bank without creating efficiency through innovation inside our four walls. And so that's a strategy for me in 2023.
That's difficult because to do that, I've got to give up maybe some other customer-facing technology. But it's a balance. It's always a balance. And as we grow one side of the bank ... And this was a conversation we were having earlier, as we grow one side of the bank, and we're always looking for producers and revenue generation and revenue-generating folks, but we also have to have support staff. And I'll close this point out with my comment at my breakfast table was when I go into a budget meeting and I say, "I've got this FTE request for support." They look at me like I got warts on my face because they're like, "Well, where's the revenue generation?"
"Well, I've got to support those." The way that I continue to keep pace is through innovation inside of the four walls.
Katharine Briggs
And that ROI has got to be difficult to measure for account holder sentiment and satisfaction.
Shon Cass
It's very difficult.
Katharine Briggs
Yeah. How do you put a number on that?
Shon Cass
Yeah. So we have a really good financial team and smart people that don't think like me, and that's good. And so they do help try to quantify that and what do we expect the savings to be over the course of time in FTE, for example? If I bring on a piece of technology, that's infrastructure technology, it's really hard to put that number until you start to think, "OK, can I scale the bank? Can I grow and not have to add the FTE that I thought I was going to have? Maybe I can scale that back." You kind of have to look at it from that standpoint. And at the end of the day, you just have to say, "Is this going to help me serve my customer better?" And if there is, then there's inherent value to that, and I don't know how you get to that number, but there is a lot of value to that.
Katharine Briggs
And Katherine, are you given ... Do you have enough runway to be able to make these long-term investments that Shon describes quarter to quarter?
Katherine Weislogel
We just finished, as many of you probably have our third strategy and budgeting meeting, and knock on wood, we are done. But it was... And to your point, you can't say yes to everything in the bank. I mean, we were sitting around the table and everyone's fighting for their projects. I think the list started at some crazy number for the bank, like 290. And I remember my boss just looked at the list on the first strategy meeting. He was like "Uh-uh." And we got it all the way down to, I think, 10 core projects. Treasury is I think part of four of them in some way because it's so important for... It all leads back to the top three strategic priorities for the company. It's deposit, liquidity, growth. It's deepening of relationships and it's customer satisfaction.
And treasury touches all of them in everything we do. So, fortunately, for our team, we didn't get everything on our list, but we got the biggies because we tied all of our projects back to the three strategic priorities of the bank. But many people got nothing. They didn't get headcount. They didn't get their projects approved. And at some point, that catches up to you. So if you don't keep supporting your functional lines to support your line of businesses, it's going to catch up. So we build-in the functional support into all of our business cases. So my team pays for the functional lines to get the support we need and we gear and we show it out, to ensure that that third strategic priority is covered.
Katharine Briggs
And those strategic priorities don't change through time?
Katherine Weislogel
No. Mm-mm.
Katharine Briggs
Those are North Stars for sure.
Katherine Weislogel
Mm-hmm.
Katharine Briggs
For sure. Farrukh, how about Scotiabank? Any big changes with economic wins, or is it a stay the course...
Farrukh Aman
I think overall bank, yeah, there will be changes. But commercial, we started from really ground zero. We generate 25% of all Canadian bank revenues. We historically only got 2% of any technology investment. So there wasn't a whole lot invested up until three years ago. So when we go in and we put together a business case, when we present a value proposition for, if we do X and it's going to result in Y, there is a really strong NPV. There's a really strong benefit. So this year, despite the headwinds, we didn't get impacted because the value proposition and investing into your platforms, investing into your commercial bank, it's incredibly strong up. I mean I've done business transformation on insurance, retail, credit cards, business banking on the small business side, but these are the strongest numbers I see that get you the best ROI.
Katharine Briggs
I'll stay with you, Farrukh, We've spoken a lot during these sessions about talent, how hard it has been to keep talent, attract talent, do you find when you're speaking to potential candidates, are they evaluating, "Hey, tell me what the technology feel is at your bank. Am I equipped to do my job, or are you going to throw a whole bunch of anchors around me and wish me luck?"
Farrukh Aman
My counterpart, Michelle, and I, talked about this quite a bit. One of our biggest challenges is finding the right talent, attracting that talent. One thing that we've acknowledged is most people don't go to university, come out, and know what the commercial bank is. People know retail, people know the top of the house and investment banking, but that commercial space, unless you're in a bank, you don't know it exists. So much so, we rebranded our external-facing commercial bank as the business bank. So business clients know that there is a place that they can come to Scotiabank and find some help.
But when it goes back to talent, we actively go out and seek talent. So at any given point, I have my bench of people who've come through coffee chats, referrals, folks that I've interacted with in the organization that if a role came up, we'll bring those individuals in, and we've been able to find some great talent.
We've got one of the highest-performing teams that I've ever been a part of. And a big part of it is we moved away from a lot of behavioral interviews and finding typical ways to hire people. We give them a case study. When we were hiring for PrecisionLender, we gave all the potential candidates a case study, "Name a pricing product that you think is not priced well, and what would you do about it?" We gave them no instructions and directions. The really bad ones hit Reply All to the emails and gave me three bullet points. They did not get an interview or a presentation. But the great ones, they created models in Excel and PowerPoint, and came out, knock those presentations out of the park. If they're willing to try that hard to get a job about something that they don't really know a lot about, you can do a lot with those people. And they did. We started January 6th. We rolled out May 2nd. And then they took off from that point on.
Katharine Briggs
Katherine, are you finding that employees' ... talent are looking at the tech stack as they're evaluating different opportunities?
Katherine Weislogel
Yeah. So we're seeing a really interesting trend where my leaders and myself are being brought in to close on potential RM candidates, close on potential IT candidates because they all want to know what they're dealing with. What do you have? And we love to tell our story because we've been able to get a lot done in a relative short period of time, and they all leave like, "Okay, we didn't see this coming today." And we like to share the roadmap too. Our roadmap's done through 2025. We know what we got to get done. And so that helps us a lot into telling that story. But they're asking. They want to see it all.
Katharine Briggs
We also speak about when we have great technology solutions and great services when we see either financial institutions struggle or account holders struggle, it's an adoption issue. That somewhere along the way we haven't done a great job of explaining it to the account holders or to our counterparts of the FIs. Shon, what has your bank done to help with adoption issues by your account holders?
Shon Cass
Done and doing is the key word. And I would agree. I had this conversation about bankers coming out of commercial banking programs. They don't understand a lot of what we are doing it. The key is education. We have to educate our bankers. We have to educate our frontline staff, and we have to educate our clients, that they don't necessarily know what that technology could do for them as well. And so we've got to make sure that we're educating them on how adopting that technology can increase efficiency in their shop. And especially from a commercial standpoint. I've owned and operated several businesses prior to starting this bank, if I had a process and it was working, the thing was, if it's not broke, don't fix it. Right? Let's focus on something else. But getting that client to slow down and take time to understand, "Okay, if I actually put this in place, it's going to create efficiency long term."
The pandemic helped us a lot with that. When all of our clients sent their employees home, their business continued to operate. So they started looking for efficiencies. We've seen a tremendous increase in requests for ERP integrations and accounting system integrations since the pandemic. Because now, that that business owner had that functionality pre-pandemic, but they had a process built in place. And so if it wasn't broke, don't fix it. Now, it broke, they're ready to fix it. So education, marketing, making sure that we're getting the information out through our marketing channels so that we can create awareness about the product.
And I don't want to go long-winded but on the marketplace through the Innovation studio, my initial thoughts on the marketplace were, "I want every single app that comes out, and I want it as fast as I can get it." And I still am kind of that way except Q2 moved a little faster than me. They had seven. Now. They have over a hundred. But the reality is getting the app is only part of the problem. You've got to make sure you're committed to the marketing. You've got to committed that you're committed to the education process or you just have an app out there that no one knows what it does and they're not adopting it.
Katharine Briggs
Yeah. And this is one I actually like for you to go long-winded on, all of you, be really specific. Do you have your bankers literally going onsite with your customers sitting next to them? Is it a white-glove service? Is it, they call in? Is it a chat? And Katherine, I'll ask you the same question in a minute too.
Shon Cass
It's all of the above. And so, to be respectful of others' answers, we haven't done a good job with the frontline staff, our CSR staff, that's a focus. We have a treasury support team that I manage. And so, it is a white-glove service when we onboard a customer. One of my treasury support folks is out there talking to the customer and identifying needs. And so, we continue to strengthen their knowledge about the products. We've also partnered with Q2 to do a marketing project to build a playbook on how to market those marketplace applications. And we've seen a dramatic increase in adoption since we started promoting them more actively on social media email campaigns.
But I still think the key at the end of the day is making sure that whoever is talking to that customer is responsible in your organization for onboarding that customer has a deep knowledge of those products and how they benefit a client. That's the key is how is it going to impact that client's day-to-day life. Not that it's a fancy product, and hey, it's going to do this or that. It's, what's the benefit? What's the benefit to that business owner in adopting that product?
Katharine Briggs
To quote Mikey from yesterday, "Deeply understand the problem." And Katherine, you're on both sides, the account holders and also technology for the employees. How do you be really practical and tactical about...
Katherine Weislogel
If you look at where we are beefing up our headcount next year, it's in two areas on my team, data analytics, and sales enablement because we have found exactly all the things we just talked about. It's a training issue. It's a training issue for our customers. It's a training issue for our employees. Not only just on my team but for all the lines of business that have relationships with our customers as well. We're selling more and more technical solutions, especially as we're going upstream. So the training issue becomes even more critical. They don't understand what some of these things are. They make an assumption that those solutions aren't for their clients when they are. So we recognize we had a very fast-growing issue and it needed to be handled very swiftly. So we're looking at a lot of different options. Some that we're hoping to bring through, our commercial platform for our customers.
We're seeing a big increase in hiring more tech onboarders, technical background-specific onboarders. We've also built out a whole solution strategic consulting team to support online. I mean our frontlines that are all technical-based on all technicality of everything, from an education in the pitch all the way through. We've had to change our model quickly with the solution sets, and since the pandemic, we're really starting to see a shift in our frontline sales folks needing to have a more technical skillset than just a sales skillset.
And I did an interesting exercise with my leaders recently. I showed them where our model was three and a half years ago, and I showed them the job description for the job, the frontline sales. And then I showed them where we are today. And then I said, "Where are we going to be in 2025?" And many of them said, "Oh, it's not going to change." And I'm like, "You're all crazy. It's changing. It's tree changing right in front of your eyes and if you can't see that, you're going to get left behind. You have got to do that." You've got to make the change because the customers and our employees need a skillset training for those that are here. And then what we need to bring in is changing the model and how we're going to market is changing.
And so we have many customers. I think about when we merge the two systems onto... We call it Gateway, our commercial platform. I just looked at the stats the other day. I am shocked by the amount of customers that don't use the mobile app. Shocked. Now granted, our ACI platform didn't have a mobile application. Our FIS one did, but the FIS platform was 10,000 customers compared to a heck of a lot more on the ACI side.
And it's an outreach. It's a communication. It's understanding that we have these capabilities. And I told my team, "This is completely unacceptable. We went to this new digital solution to make doing business with us easier, and a large majority of our new clients on this platform don't even understand that we have this capability." I'm like, "This is a real problem." So this is where the data analytics piece comes in because we start to see where we have trends and issues, and why aren't we having ... So it's identifying the training need for our customers and for our employees.
Katharine Briggs
Which would've been hard ... It would've been hard at any point in time. But then with the amount of employee turnover, I'm certain Synovus has not been immune to that. We've all seen that, so bringing you folks in and getting them up the curve really quickly. And when you engage with your account holders and find out they're not using mobile and you ask the question, is it that they don't know it existed, they don't like to use it?
Katherine Weislogel
Well, it's all of the above. But we're also seeing an interesting trend of Positive Pay. So with the fraud going up, we have an enormous amount of clients that don't utilize Positive Pay, which just blows my mind right now. The old community bank way for Synovus was if you had fraud in your account, we're just going to give it back to you. Well, with the amount of fraud that's happening now, we can't afford to give it all back. So you've got to sell the solutions. And there's some problems with it. So you got to be able to upload a file. If you can't upload a file and your back office can't upload a file, then you're not going to want the solution. So I almost see the whole fraud mitigation solution package is going to need to evolve here too. And we are actively out, talking to partners right now on the fraud mitigation side to help plug some of these holes, both internally for Synovus as a company, but for our customers as well because they get hit. They don't even know it.
And it's not just check fraud that we're seeing. We're seeing business email compromise in large amounts, large wires going out. So it's more than just check fraud that it's a total education, and we'll go down and talk to a market and talk to customers and run webinars, and they'll call us the next week and have fraud. It's like, "We just trained you." So it's continual. It's continual.
Shon Cass
I just want ... First of all, we can talk about Positive Pay for the end of time. Like everyone else, I don't understand why folks don't use Positive Pay. But I wanted to go back to a point about adoption of certain technologies, so the same thing on the mobile application. And part of the problem too is I think as bankers and folks putting this technology in place, we have to make sure that that technology is the best it can be as well. And it's as functional as it can be. And so one example is post-pandemic, I would imagine that most of you during the pandemic raised your limits, deposit limits on mobile capture.
When we rolled out mobile deposit, when we switched to Q2, we instantly took the limits to just under a million dollars for a deposit. Now, some of you're going to go, "Oh my gosh, but we're a commercial bank, it's all commercial clients." But the reason we were having trouble with adoption on mobile capture versus RDC was the limit was too low. So our business owners were saying, "Well, it's great. I'd love to use it, but my checks are over 5,000 or over 10,000." And so we did a risk assessment and we said, "Look, we're going to review those deposits regardless when they come into the bank. We know our customers." And so we raised that limit up to almost whatever the limit is. I think it's 10 cents under a million dollars or $10 under a million.
We had to fight our examiners for that because they were like, "Oh, no. You got to have limits."
"No, we don't." And so part of it... My point is you've got to make sure that that technology that you don't just say, "I have a mobile application but I have a mobile application that actually benefits you when you log in to use it."
Katharine Briggs
Thank you for the background on adoption, and Farrukh, I wanted to ask you as well, because you are primarily interfacing with bank employees. So how do you think about shaping that path, driving the behavior? It's all change management. Right? Beautiful, beautiful technology, all of the risk levels are put in correctly, it's configured perfectly, how do I get the team to use it?
Farrukh Aman
The last couple of years, it's turnover, attrition. RM turnover has been a huge source of challenge for our change management team. Every time we deploy a tool, we kind of have to take a step back and really ask ourselves, "Do we have the foundational knowledge to use this tool?" Right? PL looks beautiful. But if you don't understand pricing, and you don't have the pricing 101 disciplines, it's not going to do much for you. Same goes with the loan origination system. Same goes, "Why are we using a CRM? Why does it matter?" Over the last two years, we saw a 38% turnover in total staff. The big challenge that's coming out of this now is how do you do continuous learning, whether on a quarterly basis or an annual basis that you're going out reminding people of discipline around how to best use the tool, how to best utilize it?
Because ultimately, that's going to make a difference when we go and service our clients. One of our biggest North Star goals in doing this entire digital transformation was to reduce our turnaround time. That's not going to happen if our folks are not using the tools as they're intended. And we're not constantly coming up with ways on how to simplify that overall journey. We put a lot of effort as a product team in going out, talking to bankers, and asking them, "What's a pain point that we can take away that we can simplify for you?" And we get a ton of feedback, often conflicting, and we have to be transparent about it, that half the folks say they want X and half the other folks say, "No, they like just the way it is." But on a quarterly basis we make about 50 to 60 changes.
They're small changes, most of them. But when you make a large change, you have to make a big deal about it, and you have to accredit it to the people that recommend it. So we'll pick five or six people who beat the drum about, "Hey, make change X happen," and we make sure that they get showcased across the board. And that gets us a lot of credibility as a product team, but also it creates that sense that we always go out and preach, "All of this isn't being done to you, it's being done with you." And that makes a huge difference. But where we've got work to do is figuring out what is that cadence that we want to go out, whether it's quarterly or annual base, and retrain people on how to best utilize all of these tools collectively.
Katharine Briggs
Thank you. So obviously, this is ... We're talking about digital technology and transformation, but what we've heard for the past 20 minutes is a lot about people. Right? Beautiful technology. So I don't know how you think about, when you launch a new piece of technology, whether it's Q2 or otherwise, Katherine, how much time or ... Time and I'd actually just say, let's just be honest, dollar investment is, "Here's how much I'm going to have to pay for the software and here's how much is going to be the human cost and investment that I'm going to have to make." How do you think about that?
Katherine Weislogel
That's all built into our business cases. there's a big piece called human capital that is part of business cases, and it's ongoing. So I was just in a situation the other day where we have to add on something. They're like, "Well, that business case is closed so there's no more budget dollars." I'm like, "But it's continual. We need to be looking at this process in a different way." We're getting it right. We just launched this week a whole international platform, and there is a product and operations, and there's a whole human component to it that needs to be trained. Not just our team, not just our customers, but there's other parts of the bank. So to your point, I mean we go out there and launch these sexy solutions and we're all excited about it, and we don't even have people in the company that completely understand it.
I love the word that Adam used. We have to slow down. And I have a lot of runners on my team, so we have to slow down. And even though they're all wearing gym shoes to work now we have to slow down and we have to make sure that all parts of the value chain for what we're selling understand. And we have to get their feedback often. Because sometimes... We found out, it was something with operations the other day, "Well, we can't go live because of this with OFAC and this and this. I'm going to have to do all these new manual processes." And I'm like, "Whoa, halt. We're not going live then because we're not adding more work to you." The whole intent is to make this easier for our teams, not only for our customers but for our own teams. And sometimes we miss that. We go out into the market and give a great ease of doing business with us, but we forget about our own teams and we make it worse for them. So I would tell you that we're still learning big time, big time.
Katharine Briggs
Is there, and it doesn't have to be at Synovus, it could be something you saw or Shon or Farrukh, something that you saw that another competitor did. Is there a bridge too far? Is there a technology that we've pushed for our commercial customers that was just too far and that was insane upon reflection? Is there a horror story you can think about?
Shon Cass
I probably don't have an example. But how I would answer that is there a bridge too far? There can be if your goal is to just put technology out there, but you're not strategically putting out technology that actually a customer needs or your employees need. Then like I said earlier, you get a lot of great technology but no one's using it. And so, it is important to make sure that you are analyzing that technology.
And this example, I want to make sure I get this in because it's been important, is you got to have the long-term view. Adam made the comment about the sequoia trees and I heard him on the podcast when he made that example and it really has just stuck in my mind is that we're building things today that we may never see the fruitfulness of it long-term, but we have to be thinking about what that fruitfulness is long-term not just the gain that we get today or the, hey, the great pat on the back for rolling that out. I've got to know what that's going to do three years from now or five years from now.
Katharine Briggs
I think that goes back to that ROI discussion too. And then I want to be a little provocative here, and we talk about the special sauce with commercial banking is the relationships that your relationship managers have and the treasury officers have. They have great expertise and experience and they're great advocates for their customers. I'll start with you, Katherine. Is there a line? And we also want to talk about self-serve and let our commercial account holders self-serve. Where do you think about that line where we've given too much self-serve? Do we really want them originating loans on their own, pricing loans on their own, opening accounts on their own? Where's the balance between the RM and treasury officer relationship, and letting customers do things on their own?
Katherine Weislogel
I don't think it's an all-or-nothing. I think the whole self-service piece has come up as we've been looking at the online enrollment tool. And there is a segment of our business that wants to self-serve all the time. And their needs are self-serve. I looked at... We put through 8,000 pieces of paper on maintenance this year, 8,000 touches of signatures. It was ridiculous. And I had them do an analysis on all the paper, and I would tell you the majority of it should have been done on a self-serve module. And so their human capital piece... And then they complained it takes too long because it's all manual, it's paper-based. If they could have just gone into a self-service hub and got it done, the satisfaction of our customers would be fantastic.
Katharine Briggs
Sorry to interrupt you. But is there different industries that are more excited to self-serve? Is there a profile of your commercial base that's more excited to self-serve?
Katherine Weislogel
For us, we had a whole discussion about that exact question. I would say a notion that folks think that small business are your self-serve customers because their ROI to the bank is low, so why should we put coverage on them? And there is a notion that there is truth in that from an ROI on a relationship or profitability on a relationship. But at the end of the day, I've got middle-market customers that want to go in and make a quick change on a self-serve module. So when I say it's not an all or nothing, you've got to offer it to all. But also the human capital interaction piece does not go away. I can't tell you how many customers want to see us in person. They're happy to see us in person. The collaboration and the whiteboarding needs to be in person.
I mean we do business process reviews, which are two to three-hour deep dives of their back office in observing what they're doing to provide recommendations. You can't do that on the phone. I mean you've got to get back in person. And when you're getting in person, you find that there are things that could be handled in self-serve. It's another opportunity for us to give out the commercial on what we're doing. So I think it's important that we provide channels for our customers of all segments. But I think the notion that it's only for a small business is a farce. I mean I see it going upstream too.
Katharine Briggs
Yes, it sounds like some of that is your relationship manager and treasure officer getting to know the customer really well and figuring out where they are in that adoption phase.
Katherine Weislogel
I mean you still have to have a calling effort on them. So we have our clients segmented into a, I'll say an A, B, C. I think it's platinum, gold, silver. And there's calling expectations around the clients on profitability, complexity, technology that they have with us. And so there is a mix. You can't just let them all go to a self-service or not go talk to them. There are requirements that are held then in their PPA goals from accountability on how they're touching their customers. So we are trying hard. We are far from perfect in trying to get that mix between the RM touches, the TMC touches, and then the client doing what they need to be doing on their own.
Katharine Briggs
Shon we have ... I'm going to ask the question of all three of the panelists. We have FIs of all different sizes and focus sitting out here, and there are different parts of their digital transformation journey. If you could go back to 2018 and give yourself one piece of advice over what you've learned over the last almost five years now, what would you tell yourself?
Shon Cass
A lot.
Katharine Briggs
You get one piece.
Shon Cass
One. One. I thought a lot about this question and I think what I would've done is in a few instances, I would've moved faster. And I know we talked earlier about faster is not always good. I would've moved a little bit faster. I would've made a few decisions from a technology standpoint a little bit differently. I would've probably just been more methodical and strategic. And if you know me, my normal self is not one to move slow. People will tell me all the time I talk fast, walk fast, make decisions fast, and so would've probably told myself, "Slow down. Take a little bit longer to look at situations and be a little bit more strategic." I believe, Adam said this too, "It's easy to get into a contract. It's a lot harder to get out of it. It's a lot. It's easy to get into a piece of technology or a process. It's very hard to get out of it."
And so today, I'm doing the best I can and surrounding myself too with other people that can help with that decision process to say, "Hey, let's slow down. Let's look at this. Hey, how does that impact this group?" To go back to what Katharine said is that you got to have all the stakeholders in the room because what looks good to me may not look good to my operations team. And so I have to bring those folks and I have to slow down and bring them into the conversation and review how that's going to impact their world. How's that going to impact the service world? And that's not easy for me. As a leader, I want to move fast, and I want to get it done. And then I just want to tell people to make it work. It just doesn't work that way.
Katharine Briggs
Katherine, 2018 Katherine.
Katherine Weislogel
We built a brand around our team called #WildRide. Because I tell my team all the time, "There are great days. There's crappy days. There's twist-turns and you just got to ride through them." And so I would've told myself to buckle in tight because it's going to be crazy because I don't think any of us five years ago saw this coming. None of this. I mean since the pandemic, I've never felt the pressure to move fast as fast as we have to. And it's funny, I just said to one of my employees who was actually here yesterday, I said, "You need to stop and reflect on how far we've come." I said, "We've actually come really far." But he tells me all the time, "We're not moving fast enough." And I said, "But we actually are moving really fast for what we're doing. But you have to stop and reflect and realize it."
And he said, "Katherine, I have done that and we are." But he goes, "I just feel like we got to keep running." We can't be everything to everybody. That's the other thing I tell my team all the time. And I think when I first came in, I was thinking we had to do everything for everybody, but you got to figure out what you're really good at, where you have that right to win. And you have to stay focused on that. Because I tell my team all the time, "We are not change order cooks. We cannot sit there and try to give pieces for everyone." So really being focused-in on what you're good at, that, I've had to learn the hard way in the last few years because I felt like I was just going to spread the peanut butter for that and then just can't do that.
Katharine Briggs
Can't get enough with the rest of it. Right?
Katherine Weislogel
Yeah.
Katharine Briggs
Don't get eliminated for it.
Shon Cass
"Don't let perfect get in the way of good." I think Dallas said that yesterday.
Katharine Briggs
And then Farrukh, I think I knew 2018 Farrukh. What would you have said to yourself? What advice?
Farrukh Aman
Advice would've been, "Good call on moving fast." And then if I had to reflect and what I would change is we started from Word and Excel. And to go with a pricing tool like PL, Salesforce, loan origination system, new risk analyst tool, it's a lot of change for the bankers, a tremendous amount of change. And a lot of folks, there's some folks that are credit heavy, some folks that are sales heavy. You need to have a sense of appreciation for how much change is being thrown their way. And if there's any way that we can ease that pain a little bit by providing them additional education, change support training. That has got nothing to do with the technology and it's really just to do with the foundational aspects of their job. We should prioritize that.
In our business case, we didn't build that foundational knowledge into it. We relied on existing infrastructure to do that. My big recommendation for anyone who's about to embark on that journey is that while you're building, go out, talk to those end users, find out where can we help them scale up so when the tool is ready and it's ready to be deployed, they'll know what to do with it. You'll see a lift in adoption. And we didn't do that the first time. We kind of took a little pause. We went, retrained, and then went start training on the tool.
But this time around, we're really just focused on, "What can we tell you about credit? What are you struggling with? What concepts do we need clarity on?" And are we, for something like pricing, which is changing based on all the turmoil and the economic environment over the last couple of years is, are you aligned to how we actually want you to price? Because if they were brought on to some plea plus years ago, they're likely still doing the same thing. So it's just constantly going out and talking to them and letting them know, "Here's a policy. Here's a strategy. And here's how you want to use the tool."
Katharine Briggs
Terrific. Do we have questions out in the audience? Ask your tough ones, OK?
Audience Member
For Scotia, you guys are a ... It's a massive organization. As you're pushing these products and you're trying to train folks, how are you guys able to scale your training of the users? Because there's so many mouths to feed in your team. How big is your team? 20, I think you said.
Farrukh Aman
Yeah. So, it's a huge group. So one of the things that we did was in every market, we've got a group lead, we've got an associate group lead. We had to be very transparent about the fact that associate group leads your primary function is you provide support on credit and you're effectively a pseudo coach for the team, not for the sales aspect really, but for the operational aspect. We are going to change every single aspect of your job. You need to be the super-user for your team of 12 to 20, however, a larger team is, and you're going to be the first conduit of us delivering any change, and we're going to bring you into the development process so that the second that we build something, they're the first folks that are into our UAT environment testing those things out, providing feedback.
That's been a huge component of our strategy. Where we'd like to see that evolve a little bit more is that we need to get the support people. In every single tool we've deployed, the support team has scaled way faster than the relationship managers. A lot, and then the longer the relationship manager tenure is, the more heavily they rely on that support person and the more efficient and effective that support person is. So we got to pull them into the loop. So that was one strategy. And then the other piece that we really focused on is providing Hypercare. If we make a big audacious change, the first 30 days, Hypercare, POs change, everyone's on there. You want us to walk you through a solution, we'll walk you through an end-to-end live deal. That's how people learn. They want to see it in the context of not the happy path. They want to see it in the context of here's an actual deal, this is the most toughest challenge that I have. Can the dual tool do this?
And if the tool can't do that, at that point in time, you got to really coach those workarounds and then constantly go back and remind them of that. So we invest a lot of time in constantly going back to the end users and talking to them because a lot of times people in any large group, they'll say, "Yeah, I totally know what you're talking about." But then when you pull up a slide and you say, "Is there anything I can help you with?" And then the plethora of questions will come out.
Audience Member
Hi. A question as we go to the digitization of everything, it's gathering the information, the specific data at points and moving them across all of the different applications, and integrating through. So products have SMEs, but how do we get to the level of the global SME who understands the integration pieces to move that data?
Farrukh Aman
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what we're doing at Scotia. So we recently just made a change to create a new org for the broader bank, and that's our data and analytics practice. And within that, we've got four verticals across the bank and we've got the business banking vertical in there as well. What we're doing with them right now is as part of this transformation, a lot of our data used to die on paper, but as they're sort of circulating through the LOS system, the pricing system, we're capturing more and more data. So if there's a field, we're capturing that data.
Now we're working with that analytics team, the larger enterprise analytics team to figure out what can we do with all of this data. So a big part of it is predictive analytics, identifying the needs for our customers before our customers recognize that there's a need. And then pushing that information through our CRM platform to our bankers and letting them know that, "Hey, we're seeing massive deposit activity, we're seeing massive ... We're seeing a number of suppliers on this client's accounts," that also happen to be Scotiabank customers.
In Canada, you got big five banks. On average, we found that an average commercial banker at any one of those banks has four relationships. That's too many relationship for our liking. And part of our goal is to use predictive analytics to reduce that exposure on how many banks that clients is dealing with.
Katharine Briggs
Any other questions?
Audience Member
I'll ask a quick one. I'm over here.
Thinking about just trying to strike the balance between long-term objectives, short-term objectives, and then the fire drills and the crisis, how do you ... So we don't just keep reverting back, how do you kind of balance all of that?
Katherine Weislogel
I can take that one. So we call it BAU and then strategic projects. And so, I think we take for granted how much BAU can really fill up a bucket and then strategic projects. And your team only has so many hours in the day to prioritize. So it does come down to prioritization. And we are constantly making sure that they understand where the prioritization lies so the time is spent. Because crap happens. Systems go down. I mean, I was here three days this week and I had a fire drill every day. Every single day, there was something going on. I had to figure out where the root cause was. Who are we calling? How are we getting it done? At one point, I had two vendors, both claiming they were both not part of the problem when they were both part of the problem. But the amount of time that takes away then from strategic and from BAU projects is too much.
And so, when we're working with our partners, and I like to call them partners. If we've signed up with you, we expect you to be a partner, not a vendor. That relationship on keeping our teams focused on what matters most is got to be a top priority. Because if you're interrupting my team because of a crisis, you've now interrupted our client base too, and our RMs. So you have hit our TMCs, our sales support, our RMs, the client, so everybody's day is wrecked when there is a fire drill.
And so then moving the strategic projects forward or the BAU gets slowed down greatly and mistakes can be made because they're not focused on what needs to happen. We saw it really bad. I'll tell you in the first six months of this year, we've made some changes with a lot of our partners and put in some stricter SLAs and commitments on turnaround to fixes to keep that impact low.
But I mean every time, I cringe when I see IT interruption text come over my phone. Because I'm like, "What is that going to do to our day?" And it tends to always happen on Fridays. I don't know. I mean maybe they're all on vacation. But Fridays seems to be a bad day because systems if there's a blip on a Friday and then we have our team out too, it is a massive fire drill. Especially if you're moving money and it's an ACH or a wire, you grew up against deadlines. So everyone starts scrambling and it's not healthy in the environment and your teams can only take so much. Your clients can only take so much. There is a balance, but there also is an accountability component.
Audience Member
I've got a question over here. Wait, over here in the corner. Hey, y'all. So just sticking with the talent topic. So I don't know how I'd put a number to it, but I have the sense that if we take one click back from the frontline that there just isn't enough of the sort of senior specialty skillset. So I'm thinking of senior credit officers or specialty underwriters, those senior operations people who seem to know how everything is wired together but it's not written down anywhere. The kinds of roles where it's just like they've accumulated lots and lots of experience, lots of turns of the sun so to speak.
And so it's not that there's none, it's just not enough industrywide. I'm thinking about everybody in this room is looking for something like how to ... But the bottom's not growing fast enough for a variety of reasons maybe they're not growing in those roles. So if you think I'm wrong, I'd love to hear that because I'd like... I just want to know how to think about this issue. But also, what are some creative ways that you either have seen or are thinking about addressing those kinds of senior specialty skills in your organizations?
Katharine Briggs
And I think that was somewhat related to the question in the middle like, "Who can understand the entirety?" And we don't end up with siloed behaviors too. right?
Audience Member
There's this one aspect of the sort of broad scope, but I'm thinking about the senior credit officer who does energy deals all day long, and they just have this ability to discern exactly. So that'd be an example. There's lots of example of those kinds of roles and they're hard to grow because you have to have people that prefer those kinds of roles, that have the right kinds of experience, etc.
Katherine Weislogel
Oh, I can give you, from a treasury perspective, I just saw a stat the other day. There are 57% increase in posted positions for treasury roles. Not treasury line, but anything related to treasuries, treasury ops, IT, sales support, 57% increase. 52% increase on additional new product roles out there related into banks. Those are heavy numbers. And you start looking at your staffs. And to your point, we have some or we we have one person that has all the knowledge. I just had one resign last week. She's retiring. We knew it was coming but you got it all up here. And so there's some panic going on. And I told my team, "We will never be put in this type of situation again. We need to start building up some of these roles and we need to get scalable. We can't rely on everything in people's heads. We got to have it in our systems to move."
Some of it's technology. Some of it is really understanding what you have. You can't have that single-knowledge person because when they leave you're... I mean, we've seen it in our company because we're growing so fast. We had a lot of single people and now a lot of those people are retiring. But then if you got to go out and replace them, you're paying double. And that's the reality of it. And so now you're paying... I mean, I'm seeing what I'm having to pay for our data analytic posting positions and what they're asking for, or for a liquidity specialist. All these specialist roles are now right in their own paychecks. And we just want the budgets for those kind of things.
It's a real problem. So we're having to train up. So it gets back to the whole comments about training, the need around training, and making sure that our line partners are trained as well because we can't do it all of ourselves. So we're looking at very specific small-bite TikTok type trainings for our lines of business on a variety of topics to help us be ambassadors of the business. We're looking at it within our operations team, our IT team, because we can't do it all on our own. We can't have single specialists. We have to build broader specialists and it's only going to be done through training where we're meeting them where they are.
Farrukh Aman
Yeah. No. I couldn't agree with you more. I think there's a huge problem in that funnel that's coming in and filling up that senior credit officer role and those specialty ops role. I think one of the biggest disservice that banks do themselves is writing those required qualifications. I most recently had a coffee chat with someone who was exploring opportunities in risk. This person has a master's in astrophysics and I had to convince them that they're overqualified for this job and they'll figure it out. But I think we also have to take that leap of faith with bringing that talent on, providing that training to them. They can figure out astrophysics. I'm pretty sure they'll figure out what LGD is. Right.
Shon Cass
All right. I do want to add to this, and we have been out of time.
Katharine Briggs
Yeah, we got time.
Shon Cass
I don't want you guys to get up and run off just yet. So again, a different perspective. I can't today quite fathom what these guys are dealing with on scale, but as a smaller institution, we have a lot of those people in our organization. And so the key is identify it, be mindful of it, identify who those people are, and then start building a plan of, "How do I compensate for that? Is it better process documentation?" I think the question was the integration. We're in a process now of trying to map out those integrations and put them down on paper so people can see them. I don't know if anyone's done that.
It's amazing, when you start looking at all the systems and all the connectivity, it's like this big spider web. And that's just in my little organization. I can't even imagine on a scale what that looks like. But you have to identify it and you have to address it and you have to make a plan for it. And if not, then we will find ourselves waking up one day with that employee who's been with you for 15, 20 years that says, "I'm leaving." And then you're scrambling at that point to try to make it up. So for me it's just identifying it and then making sure that I'm building a plan around it.
The last thing I'll say is even at my level of organization is I'm having to rethink those positions. And I'm glad you said it, job descriptions today are not the same as they were five years ago. They're not the same as they were a year ago. And so when we go out to post for a position and we don't get any posting, we don't get the right people posting, it's because all of this is new in the market as well. And so we're not ever going to find that right person. And so we're taking a strategy of, "Let's grow some people internally." So even on my team as a small bank, I've got some folks that I'm putting into project management training. I'm putting them into IT training. They're not IT. We have an IT department, but to help them better understand the things that we're trying to accomplish is just having to think different on how we manage those resources.
