Welcome to the fourth edition of Accrued: After Hours 🎙️! This weekly newsletter will provide you a short recap and the main takeaways of each episode from LoanPro’s Accrued podcast series on Fintech Confidential.
Hosted by Tedd Huff and LoanPro’s CMO, Colton Pond, Accrued explores fintech through the lens of lending with insightful conversations from experts and leaders across the industry.
Listen to the Accrued episodes on the following platforms:
Today’s newsletter will cover season 1, episode 4: Pulling Threads, Pushing Boundaries! The Core Switch Catalyst at Mascoma Bank w/ Sam Pause and Rafael Reznek.
In this episode, Tedd and Colton talk with Sam Pause, Chief Innovation and Brand Officer, and Raphael Reznek, Chief Technology Officer, from Mascoma Bank about how they’re putting their customers and community first through innovative technology that brings a personal touch to banking.
Here’s what went down👂
Personal Journey into Banking
Raphael and Sam come from different professional backgrounds, but they’re a powerhouse when they work together. Tedd and Colton start off this episode with learning about Raphael and Sam’s journey into banking.
For Raphael, he’d been working primarily in the tech industry for a number of years before coming to Mascoma. Mascoma was his introduction into the banking world. For Sam, she’s a veteran at Mascoma, having held a variety of different positions at the bank for 30+ years. Her years of experience and growth with Mascoma has given her a holistic lens of the bank. Collectively, Raphael’s tech expertise and Sam’s extensive banking experience paves the way for iteration on innovative strategies for Mascoma.Â
Modernizing the Bank
In Mascoma’s journey towards modernization, it all started with a question by Sam about the bank’s ability to perform a certain function for a customer. Raphael began looking into it from a technological standpoint and describes the experience as “pulling a thread” that led to a realization that they were working on a “monolithic” system.
Ultimately, they wanted to make a change that would give them a choice that would positively impact their team members and customers in the community. When they finally “pulled the string”, they built a platform that would give them the decision making capability they need to provide their customers with the best experience.
Customer Experience
“As a bank, if we truly want to make an impact on our customers and communities—where can we make the biggest impact? It’s on their financial well being and their financial health.”
Sam Pause
Sam expresses that financial services need to be more proactive in using technology that allows them to interact deeply with customers. Amazon and the like are achieving this rapidly, and financial services will be left behind if they can’t keep up.
Mascoma’s B Corp Certification is something that is helping them connect deeply with their customers. It’s allowed the culture of the bank to flourish, while also keeping them accountable to their commitments. With this certification, the path to enhancing customer’s financial wellness is clear and Mascoma’s This certification puts Mascoma in a unique category, with only a few traditional banks making the list for B Corp banks.Â
Banking and Lending Technology
One of the biggest pain points of lending technology that Mascoma has experienced is the complexity that comes with the lending industry. As they began their modernization journey, Raphael and Sam found that the rigidity of their platform was hindering them from providing the best lending experience. At the end of the day, they needed a platform that gave them a choice.
With CoreSwitch, a platform built by Mascoma, the bank is able to manage accounts and service customers in real-time. This experience for customers comes from Mascoma’s ability to use their data to paint a holistic picture of the customer. With a clear picture of who they’re helping, the team is able to help the customer in the moment, at the right time.
What can we take away from these experts? đź§
📱 Infuse technologists into your teams. After listening to the episode, you can tell that Sam and Raphael have built some incredible things together at Mascoma. They attribute their success to having teams at Mascoma that have a variety of experts from compliance, banking, risk, and technology. To facilitate financial innovation, it’s important to involve technologists into these teams. Like Raphael, a background in banking isn’t entirely necessary to create banking technology. Coupling a technologist with another banking expert can unlock financial potential.Â
🤝 Turn data into insights AND relationships. It’s no secret that financial data should be used for providing insights to produce personalized recommendations. Mascoma’s approach, however, teaches us that customer data opens the doors to building and maintaining strong relationships with the people that you serve that can make an impact on their financial well being.Â
🚀 Your platform should give you a choice. The rigidity of a legacy platform limits your choices in what you can accomplish as a bank. It was an essential part of Mascoma’s modernization journey to find a platform that allowed them to ask and answer questions that would open the doors to innovation. Your platform shouldn’t make you stagnate—it should be the vehicle that takes you anywhere you want, always driving you forward.Â
