Marquette University’s commercial banking program recently held its inaugural conference, “Bankruption: How Community Banking Can Survive Fintech.” John Waupsh, chief innovation officer at Austin, Texas-based financial services company Kasasa Ltd. and author of “BANKruption,” gave the keynote presentation, which focused on fintech and the future of community banks.
“Is fintech really doing anything at all? Are they really changing the game? Are people really interested in so-called ‘better banking?’ These fintech companies struggle because they don’t have some of the things community banks already have,” such as branch networks and account holders.
“You can serve everyone without targeting everyone. SoFi has done a tremendous job focusing on a segment—they went after Ivy League graduates, specifically millennials.”
“As an industry, we got super lucky, but that luck’s about to run out. Unfortunately, most community banks in our industry have been challenged by other things. But unless we make changes today, it’s going to come back and bite us.”
“If you try to be everything to everyone, you’ll be nothing to no one. Yet every banking conference I go to talks about this idea of a universal banker. To expect a human to know everything about 50 products, or even 10 products, it’s crazy.”
“Is John going to make his third mortgage payment? Predictive analytics can tell you.”
“Marketing is a data sport. There’s no more excuse in marketing, ‘Well, I don’t know what our ROI is.’ You can’t overinvest in data. It’s important to
invest too much in understanding your business and understanding where you’re going.”
