Allan Greer: Hey Martha, there's a rumor going around at Vya that you've a team in the basement working on a special -- some kind of special project.

Martha France: Oh Alan, you know that's not true. Vya doesn't even have a basement.

Allan: Well, that's true. But today's guest told us a great story about a basement team driving innovation at a bank, and I am really excited to get into this and learn more about it.

Allan: In today's episode, we're going to be talking with Dorian Hansen. She is the Chief Marketing Officer, Head of Operations and Digital Transformation for Investors Bank.

Martha: Yeah with so many banks undergoing transformation today, I think there's a lot that we can all learn from Dorian, and how she's driving transformation at Investors Bank by emphasizing the importance of Customer First, Mobile First, bringing focus to innovation, and being nimble. So let's get to it. We hope this episode of Bank Marketing Today helps simplify your marketing tomorrow.

[Music Playing]

Martha: Hello, I am Martha France, and I am joined today by my co-host, Allan Greer. We are truly excited to be talking with Dorian Hansen, Chief Marketing Officer, Head of Operations and Digital Transformation at Investors Bank. Welcome to the Bank Marketing Today podcast Dorian.

Dorian Hansen: Hello, thank you.

Martha: Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background?

Dorian: I've actually been with Investors Bank just under three years. I've been in the financial services industry my entire career. I actually started as a life insurance agent, believe it or not in Brooklyn. I did many, many jobs at MetLife, from selling insurance, training people how to sell insurance, and I had the opportunity to actually be on a team that would do the product development, otherwise known as make the sausage. I've always sold the sausage at this point in my career. It's at that point where I crossed over, I became very passionate about product management. So I learned a lot about product, so that's sort of what started my passion around product management and product development and I crossed over. I left the insurance business and I went into banking, was hired by Legacy Wachovia, who imploded during financial Armageddon, unfortunately. And I was responsible for all the banking products, both on the cash side and on the credit side.

Wachovia imploded, but fortunately, Wells Fargo stepped in, I was responsible for all those products that were offered to clients of financial advisors in the wealth management space. I did that for many, many years. It's something I care very much about. And when I was hired by Investors Bank, I actually was hired as the Chief Marketing Officer, you know, and there's a lot of synergy between the products that you develop, you offer to your clients, and then how those products are marketed. But my passion has always been product, but I assumed responsibility for marketing. And fortunately for me, I have some pretty smart people around me, because that was actually a learning opportunity for me about branding and sponsorships.

We are the official bank of the New York Giants and we're also the official bank of the New Jersey Devils. That was a great learning experience for me. Over the years in my career, you know, having been in insurance and wealth management, financial services, banking, you know, I feel like I have a really nice perspective about what resonates with customers, and haven't actually sold insurance, which is not easy to do, because insurance is an intangible, you can't wear it, you can’t eat it, you can’t drive it, and you are really -- when you're buying insurance, you're buying insurance because you love somebody more than you love yourself. So it's a very different type of way to sell. But I think that that has served me very well in all the roles I've had because I really bring a customer centric approach and thinking about what is the right thing for our customer.

Allan: It's great information, we really appreciate that. One thing I wanted to kind of get into is, I think you have a very unique title.

Dorian: Yeah, my title is long.

Allan: It's very unique. That’s great.

Dorian: Yeah, thank you. You know, when I joined the bank, we were really, I would say that I was an accelerant on the digital transformation of the bank. When I came to the bank, we were, you know, a lot of good products on the shelf, but I would say that we were a little behind in digitizing our offering. Again, I came in as the Chief Marketing Officer, I have a very strong relationship with my bosses, our President and CEO. I went into their office one day and I said, “I’ve got to tell you, I think the customer experience here is broken. And I think that we are behind. It's an arms race, in banking, around being able to bring everything to the phone, and we don't have a mobile first mindset here and we're going to get left in the dust.”

Allan: I bet they love hearing that right? How did that go?

Dorian: Nobody ever wants to tell somebody their baby's ugly.

Allan: Right.

Dorian: They're terrific people and, you know, they heard me. And they said, “Oh my gosh, you know, you're right.” And I said, “I think we’ve got to really start thinking about the customer.” And they said, “Okay, tag you’re it.” So I brought together a bunch of people from around the bank, and I named this group, The NICE Team -- Now Improving the Customer Experience. I have the saying, “Who cares what we think; it's what the customer thinks.” So we brought this group of people together, and we basically inventoried everything that we felt was broken at the bank, or that could be better. We had NICE 1.0, NICE 2.0, and right now we're doing NICE 3.0. We do it like a sprint. I stay on the team, like a founding member of this team, people rotate in and out, because we want people to stay really energized and have that sense of urgency. So we have one team, second team, now we're on our third team, and it's a sprint and we are very, very aggressive in how we tackle our problems.

I assumed responsibility for our call center. We renamed that The NICE Center. Our call associates, they are the face of the bank in many cases. You know, we take 500,000 calls a year in the call center, and looking at that whole model, and we said, you know, we think there are things that we can do to transform our call center and really, really, really focus on how do we deliver an outstanding experience when somebody calls us, because that is a channel. As I've evolved in my career here, at Investors Bank, it's sort of morphed into marketing and product, and customer experience. I hired a customer experience leader, and we brought in a company that helps us do all our surveying. So we're very, very focused on the Net Promoter Score, and the overall satisfaction of a interaction that a customer has with us, regardless of the channel. Whether it be the ATM machine, whether it be in branch, whether it be our mobile app, whether it be our desktop, and we know how somebody is interacting with us and we measure that experience.

You wanted to figure out how things are broken or not working, you know, just talk to your customers, just listen to your customers. So we’ve -- really have evolved this whole mindset around customer first, and then of course, mobile first. I went to Dominic and Kevin and I said, “We have these product managers who are really focused on what we put on the shelf. But as the industry is digitizing, we really need platform managers. We need people that are always thinking about the UX, or the user experience.” I have a team of folks, I have platform managers and product managers. And the platform managers are responsible for keeping everything stable, in many ways, keeping it Amazon like; meaning easy, user friendly. And the product managers are the people that put their stuff on those platforms.

So I have a consumer and a small business platform owner, and I have a commercial banking platform owner. This is going to sound a little harsh, but if you're a product manager or a product owner, you're a platform owner, it's the one throat to choke. They own the platform, they own the product. And as a result of that, they are responsible for making sure that everything is ticked and tied. So if product comes to market, they have to make sure that they're working with legal, compliance, risk, operations, learning and development, you know, the retail branch teams. And while they don't have responsibility for those different areas of the bank, they have ownership to ensure that those areas are working well. And if they're not, they have to raise their hand, and they have to work closely with that stakeholder to make sure that we get back on track.

Martha: Is that where the CX and the UX comes from?

Dorian: Correct.

Martha: Talk about that coming together so the UX are the platform people and the CX are the product managers. Is that what that’s all about?

Dorian: That's exactly right, marrying them together. And the natural friction that happens is, you know, the platform managers, because banking is really digitizing very quickly. The speed of which the change is occurring is amazing. And you can't have one without the other. And I do have a customer experience leader and this individual reports directly to me. He advocates for the customer. Unfortunately, at times, companies can lose their north star around the customer, because everybody's got sort of a dog in the fight. So legal says, “Oh, I need seven signatures.” You know, compliance says, “Well, we need all these forms.” Operations may say, “Well, you know, we don't want to book business past four o'clock.” You know, learning and development will say, “Well, you know, we don't have time to build out good training on this, go to a vendor.”

Everybody is getting what they need, but nobody's at the table saying, “What about the customer?” So we turned it upside down and yes, legal, you may want seven signatures, but we're going to give you two because it's not great for a customer to sign something seven times. Everything we're doing now is, what would you want to see? How would you feel if you were having to sign something seven times? And people get it. And it's been really working well. Since we last spoke, Newsweek, coincidentally, named us, the best big bank in New Jersey and one of the best banks in United States. It's very exciting. And it's a testament to the team here and investors, everybody, you know, aligned on this concept of customer first, in a very, very competitive marketplace. And when people say to me, “Who's your competition?” I say “Who isn't?” We're in a tough market.

And banking can be highly commoditized. So why do people bank with Investors? Well they bank with us because it's a good experience. They feel good when they come into a branch and our people know their name, that our mobile app works well and is stable. You know, they call our call center, we have terrific people in the NICE center, we treat our customers with respect and we're grateful that they choose to bank with us.

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Allan: I think it's amazing, I'm getting the theme that you've built this kind of amazing internal culture, which transcends to the customer organically. I am very interested in hearing about the innovation station. Can you tell us more about that?

Dorian: About 2.5 years ago, we launched an online bank, it was a miss, a huge miss for us. And the reason we launched an online bank is that we wanted to attract deposits outside of our footprint. And when we built this online experience, it was not customer friendly, to say the least. So the UX was broken, there's one thing to have somebody complain about you, you know, hanging over the backyard fence. But there's another thing for a customer or prospect to complain about you in the World Wide Web. And it's out there in the public domain.

So we started getting some negative feedback about the experience. And it was very unnerving. And I had only been with the bank at this point for about six months. And again, I went into Kevin and Dominic's office, and I said, “We got to shut this thing down; we are putting our brand at risk. It's not a good experience. People are saying a lot of negative things about us. And we need to bring it all down.” And this was two years’ worth of work. So we were online for about six weeks, seven weeks, and then we took the whole thing down. I would call that a fast fail. It was very hard, it was upsetting. People took it personally, you know, but I kind of began to understand is that it was a part time job for people.

So we didn't really have people that understood UX or maybe people underestimated the importance of it. Everybody was doing it part time. So it was one of these things that sort of got the short end of the stick. You know, I kind of had this “ah-ha” moment and I said, “Well, if this is really where we want the bank to go, we've got to have a bunch of smart, curious people – thought leaders in the room, thinking about this all the time.” And I had gone to a conference and I heard somebody talk about something called the innovation station. I was like, “Oh, I love that.”

So I came back. And I went back to Dominic and Kevin and I said, “I want to bring together a bunch of people who are only going to do this, this is all they're going to do. There's no other job for them. And they're going to think about how they're going to help transform the bank. And we’ve got to do it fast, because we were already behind.” I said to Dominic, “Look, I want a special space for them. I want to put them somewhere where they're not caught up in the day-to-day fray, because people were always trying to pull them back into their prior responsibility.” We had space in South Jersey, which was very inconvenient for a bunch of folks.

And I didn't want people driving two and a half hours a day when I could get two and a half hours more of their good thinking. So I hid them in a training center in one of our buildings. And I said to the team, “You have got to give me a little bit of time on this. You know, I'm pretty confident that Dominic will come around and agree that we should be closer to the mother ship, the home office, but he's not there yet. So I just need you all to hang tight and to stay in the cellar, you know, there'll be sunlight someday.” So unbeknownst to me, Dominic decides to go to the Springfield office, the training center. And I don't know this and I see him the next day. He's like, “Hey, how are things going?” I said, “Fine.” He was like, “I was over in Springfield.” I said, “Oh, no.”

Allan: You are so busted.

Dorian: I was so busted. You know, I have a very strong working relationship with Dominic and we have a lot of trust. He's like, “Why didn't you tell me?” I'm like, “Well, the timing was never right.” I said, “Please let us have these people closer to the home office. And I don't want them driving.” So he, I said, “I think there's some branches that have office space upstairs, you know, why don't we take one of our branches and let them use the space upstairs.” And I kind of wore him down on it and he's like, “Fine.” So we started the innovation station. And that this is the team that really leads the charge on how we're going to transform the bank. And when you think about strategy, you know, many times people make the mistake of, it’s us looking out and I think that's a big mistake.

And when you do strategy, and you do it well, you're on the outside looking in. So again, how does the customer see us? How do they view who we are, what we do, how well or how poorly we do it? So I'm very proud of the team. They're really good people, they've been stretched. And a lot of the people that came onto the team had no background in this space. I just said, “Look, you're smart, you're hard working, the space is so dynamic, in six months, you'll be an expert.” And that's exactly what happened, customer satisfaction at our bank is very high, I would put our digital offering up against any major bank in the United States. But we are absolutely on par. And in some instances, we're actually a little ahead because we can be nimble, we are like the little engine next door.

Martha: That is a great example of leadership skills, right, because so often you have ideas, but then actually bringing them to life is the challenge and especially in that scenario. So you talked about the challenges as far as the physical space. But I imagine a real challenge too, would be like pulling those resources in an environment where you're a lean organization. How were you able to secure the ability to get those resources dedicated to that when they had day jobs already?

Dorian: Yes-.

Allan: She would just go in and tell them what she's going to do, obviously.

Dorian: Yeah. Make them think it's their idea.

Allan: Right.

Dorian: I have a lot of advocacy with, our President and our CEO. You know, it was like the obvious thing that the bank had to do. I was able to articulate what the problem was, and what the opportunity at hand was – what was in front of us, but what's also at stake, that if we didn't start transforming ourselves, we would be left behind. And again, this is a very competitive marketplace.

So there was a period of time, where there was some internal – you know, I'm going to use the word friction, but I'm going to use it, like with a lower case f, because this happens to be a very collaborative bank, good people, there's not a lot of politics, it's a flat organization. It was hard, because you're right, you know, we don't have unlimited resources. When I worked at bigger banks, you know, you could argue with the cast of 1000s. Wells Fargo has 283,000 employees, and Investors bank had 1900. So we got to be able to do the same thing that Wells does, and do it better, and do it with a fraction of the people. So this is a team of people that we cannot work any harder, we have to be really clever, and figure out ways to work smarter.

Martha: Yeah I think the situation is so challenging, and the fact that you have that relationship with the other executives to get those things done that that just goes miles for you. So I noticed the online brand. And you talked about the experience of bringing that up, and the challenges that you encountered there. So it is branded differently, but still part of the Investors umbrella. And so I know in the market today you see a wide range of how institutions are branding, the online products, what went into the decision for the brand name that you have in place today?

Dorian: We have Investors bank, and our online bank was eAccess Investors bank. And that was a platform and product offering that was only available outside of our footprint. And we were very deliberate about that. And it really had a lot to do with the value proposition online, versus the value proposition of in branch. And, you know, given that we had no brick and mortar, in 48 states that we bank, it was all a digital offering, a very competitive offering because in the online space when it's completely virtual, you take out the cost associated with brick and mortar, right so it's a different client experience.

And there are people that prefer that. But when you come in footprint, that experience is more around choice. You know, I want to bank in person, I want to bank on my phone, I want to call a call center, I want to utilize an IVR. So we were very deliberate in creating that demarcation between in footprint in-market versus out of New York and New Jersey. We just launched in-market the ability for customers to open up checking accounts online in our original offering; it was CDs and money market outside of our footprint.

Now we are adding to our offering the ability for customers to open up checking accounts online, and it's actually going extremely well. So if you're out of footprint, right, the offering is a little different, because we will not be able to service your account in branch. If you are in New York and New Jersey, the offering is very robust, but it gives the person the ability to open up an account online, but also be serviced by a branch. So again that’s a choice. So when I think about the next real horizon for us, you know, the next hill for this bank to climb is really refining the omni-channel experience, that consistency, that regardless of the door that a customer opens, that experience is going to be consistent, customer friendly, intuitive and right now that's the thing that we're going to be knitting together.

We talked about my title, another ah-ha moment in discussions with the executive committee is that we did all this great work on the front of the house. Right, we digitized mobile, online banking, in the commercial banking space; we've done a lot of great work around our platform, bringing commercial customers the ability to bank on their phone, which is amazing, a lot of other great work we've done on the commercial side also. But we all recognized is that the speed at which we did all this change on the front of the house, where we really needed to catch up was, you know, in the back of the house operation. So I have responsibility now for operation. So we are in the process of building out our roadmap on how we're going to digitize the back office. So we had a lot of processes that are still, you know, quite frankly paper. Not optimizing all this great technology that we now have. What can we do to transform the back office, so it supports the bank we are and the bank we want to be versus the bank that we were yesterday.

Martha: Yeah and I would think having that extended realm of responsibility although it's never easy, it makes it a little bit easier to connect those two.

Dorian: You're exactly right, you're so spot on because, you know, when you have all this change happening in one area, and in fairness to the folks that are in the support roles, you know, they didn't get the memo. You know, they were not necessarily being brought along. And it was actually harder for them to do their job in supporting all the change that was occurring in the front of the house. So now I like to say, “Hey, we're going to put sunlight on the back office, and we're going to help these people do their jobs more easily. Because if somebody internally is having difficulty doing their job, that will telegraph out to a customer, if it's not easy for us to do our job to support the customer, then it won't be easy for the customer to do business with us.” You know, I've been focused on the back office now for about actually only about six weeks. And I am so excited and they're so excited, but you know, there's a lot of opportunity here to transform the way that people that support the front of the house, are doing their job, do it faster, better. And you know what, actually have them focusing on things that are more impactful than doing some repetitive tasks that I can automate.

Allan: Is the innovation station also a part of that or is that more externally focused?

Dorian: They are in the planning discussions, because the amount of change that we've done to the customer experience from a digital perspective, I need them in the room, because we’ve got to connect some dots. So there are things that are being done in the back office that I would argue they could probably stop doing, but nobody told them to. Later today, I'm having another working session with folks at the bank, who are really good at strategy, people in operations, the platform owners, and some product people in the room to make sure that we're taking a holistic view of this, and we're not operating in silos. I see my role is to eliminate any roadblocks and let these folks run as fast as they can.

Allan: Just curious, how does the data factor into your -- with your customer and your user experience? And then are the variations in how you handle that, depending on your customer's profile?

Dorian: Such a good question and such an important topic currently at the bank, it's very timely. You know, again, we are a bank of many other banks. So we have legacy banks, smaller banks. And when you do that, and you acquire banks over time, you don't always have a good sense of who your customers are. We know a lot about some of our customers, but we don't know enough about everybody. I call it strive for five, getting some basic information about each customer using our NICE Center. When customers call us I've asked the call center associates to fill in the blanks and verify things like your birthday.

“Oh, I see, we don't have an email address on file for you. Do you have a mobile phone number?” That's a scenario that we have a challenge with. As we think about data enrichment and filling in the blanks, that is work that has been going on. But I think we're going to now accelerate, because we have a lot of stuff in good order, our house is in good order. With the online account opening experience that we built, we can force the behavior that we want.

So when an account is opened in branch, there can be a lot of variability about the information that you collect about a customer, because you're reliant on a person. You know, maybe somebody catches the cell phone number, maybe they don't. But in the online experience that we have built, you can't move forward. And, you know, we want as much information as we can gather about that customer because it allows us to communicate with that customer, by email or by text, SMS, and then it also allows us to build a profile around that customer for what I'm going to call next best offer or next best action. But what is the thing that we should be talking to the customer about? Historically, a lot of marketing is – I call it carpet bombing, you do a campaign, and you start talking about a product or a service, when you want to start talking about it. It may not be the right thing for the customer, but this is what we want to do. And when you can become more deliberate about life events for customers then you're serving up a solution to a customer when it makes sense for them.

And that's the huge shift that's going on at the bank. We're in the process of onboarding a marketing automation system, which will allow us to really build customer journeys. And we have done all our persona work around who are our best customers and now we're like, “Okay, let's go out and find more customers like that.” We recently hired a woman to join us as the Marketing Officer of the bank, again, not my strong suit. Historically, that's not where I spent my time.

And we have our Chief Technology Officer, he's a CIO, our Chief Information Officer has a very strong background in data, we're in the process of building our data lake. And the way that we're going to be storing our data, using our data, decentralizing data so that it can be closer to the lines of business. So that is another transformation that's happening at the bank. When you think about customers, we want to be the primary financial institution. If we're not the primary financial institution I like to say that means our customers are dating others and I don't like that. And I want our customers to use us as their primary bank and that's really where the profitability is.

Onboarding a customer is expensive, new client acquisition is expensive. And if you're only getting some of their wallet, so to speak, the math won't work. And, you know, we are building profiles and we can understand who is using us as their main bank. Their paycheck, is it being deposited into this account? If it's a business, are we getting their inflows? So a lot of the work we're doing now is to really understand how our customers are using our services, why they are, and why aren't they, and making sure that people know that we have this very robust offering. And we really just have built this thing out in the last, three years, and let's not let it be the best kept secret at the bank or in the industry.

Allan: How do you empower your employees when it comes to interacting with your customers and how do you measure that?

Dorian: So we have two types of surveys that we do. We do a relationship survey, and then a transactional survey. So the relationship survey is robust. It could probably take a customer, you know, seven to 10 minutes to complete. And it's everything about them and everything about how they think about us. Those are invaluable, because it's the roadmap. You want to know the answer, just talk to your customer. And that has a lot to do with the strategy. We start thinking about, “Okay, so here's how the customer sees us. Here's what's working well, here's what's not working well.” And that holistic approach to the customer experience.

Transactional surveys are those surveys that are done in the moment. A customer comes into a branch; they make a deposit. We don't survey everybody every time, because we don't want people to fatigue. So we're very strategic about when we ask that question, “You called our NICE Center, how did it go? How was our associate? Did we answer your question? Did we solve your problem?” We survey a customer who goes to one of our ATM machines, “How did that go for you?” Customers will tell us, “You know, I don't like the lighting in the lobby. You need to make your lighting brighter. I don't feel safe.”

That's something I can action on, it's easy. “You know, I went to one of your ATMs and I don't like the fact that you give me 50s when I want 20s.” So now we're all about bill select. So letting the customer pick the denominations of what they want when they take money out of the ATM. So every Wednesday night, believe it or not, we just did it last night, from 5:00 to 6:30 my product team and the platform team, the customer experience leader, and the marketing folks we meet through Microsoft Teams now and we go through every single detractor comment about the bank. It can take an hour and a half, it can take two hours, sometimes it's gone three hours.

And these are tough conversations. Because I am looking again, with that enterprise mindset, is there a problem with a policy at the bank, that’s a silly policy that's negatively impacting the customer. Is the product off the mark? Is it difficult for the customer to understand? Are our fees not competitive? Right, so it's the process, it's the product, the policy and the people. Did somebody have an experience with one of our associates at the bank that left them not feeling great?

So we literally go through every detractor comment and we look at how they were remediated by either, somebody in the lending area or residential mortgage. It could be somebody in branch, it could be an online experience. “Oh, I had difficulty resetting my password.” Well, that's the problem for the platform owner to fix. Because if people cannot self-serve a password reset and they have to call the NICE Center, that's a problem. So each person has a vested interest and I do not assign the detractor comments, everybody reads them all, because some of the solutions, or the fix can be very layered. You can see four or five things that are not right, just by one comment from a customer.

So I think of all the things I do with the bank and you know, I'm so fortunate to have – you know, I have a wonderful job, I work with terrific people, I adore my bosses, the most important thing I do is read all those detractor comments. I actually started doing this in the pandemic. So at the height of the pandemic, we were very, very concerned that the quality of the customer experience would be degraded. Closing down branches, you know, all the things that we all experienced, and how are we going to be there for our customers in some of the most extraordinary and uncertain times in the last 100 years?

So I started reading them all and I was like, “Oh my goodness, this is amazing.” And we all started reading them. And, you know, we fared very well through the pandemic. I will say we kept our branches open. Now, it had to be by appointment, we kept our drive-through open and we did not close our branches down. Yes, we did shorten our hours in certain instances, you know, we kept our -- we wanted to keep our branch associates safe, our NICE Team, and the call center safe. And we were able to do that, and we kept the lights on and we were there for our customers.

There was some pain. So for example, there would be longer lines at the drive-through. Right, people are now banking through drive-through, they don't feel comfortable coming into a lobby. There are people that are fine coming into a lobby and we're like, “Okay, you can do that, but you’ve got to go online and book an appointment.” So we were very mindful of how many people would be in the branch at any given time. So we started thinking about, “Okay, well, people are frustrated that they're waiting in a line at a drive-through.”

So then we came up with what I thought was pretty clever, we created these buck slips that said, “We love that we got to see you today, but you probably could have done this on your phone.” So when the person was at the line, we would give them the bucks slip and say, “You made this deposit at the branch. But you could have done this on your phone. You don't have our mobile app on your phone? Well, please, let's download it.” And we did two campaigns through the pandemic that were very, very successful.

We actually gave customers $5, a check, to download on their mobile app. So if you took the time to download our mobile app, we would pay you five bucks to put a check in your account. It's a good new story and it's really driven our mobile adoption, that people are now really embracing and adopting mobile and remote banking.

Martha: Dorian, what other trends do you see in the banking industry? Where do you see the bank industry going in general, and certainly coming out of the times that we've been experiencing?

Dorian: I think that the big change that's going to occur in this space is really around payments and the speed at which money will move, you know, real time, everything is going real time. I can send you money instantaneously. That's what people expect. But it’s equally important that, is the security, or safety of that transaction. Account takeovers, fraud, what keeps me up at night is trying to stay one step ahead of the bad actors.

So we do a lot of education around security and safety. Don't ever give your password to somebody, nobody at our bank will ever ask you for your username, or your password. So the speed at which money is moving in real time, it leaves your account, it's gone. So that I see as the next transformation in the industry. And as I see banking, I don't believe brick and mortar banking will go away. I do believe the size of a bank will – a branch will continue to get smaller and smaller.

There'll be branches, but it will be really when a person needs to have a conversation with somebody in person, that they will be very customer focused, they will not be – a lot of the automation and a lot of the work that we're doing is to make it so that branches really don't have much to do in the branch, that we can do a lot of straight through processing and the way that we take our cash in checks that the branches don't have to be involved in things like reconciliation, filling the ATM machine with cash, and that when they're in the branch, their job is to be in front of a customer and the administrative tasks that occur in a branch, go away.

Allan: Where do you go to expand your knowledge? Where do you go to learn?

Dorian: Well, I read everything. The New York Times, The Daily is one of my favorite podcasts, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. I love podcasts because it's like somebody telling you a story. So right now on my phone, I have NPR up first, The Daily by The New York Times, Freakonomics, Planet Money, NPR Politics Podcast, Modern Love by New York Times, TED Talks of the month, This American Life, Radio Lab, which is WNYC Studios, Revisionist History, The Righteous Voice by the New Yorker, Love It or Leave It, Wait, Wait Don't tell me NPR. I drive a lot so I try to listen to a story at least one every day. I like to go once or twice a year to some sort of conference in the banking industry. Fiserv, who is our core provider, they do an extraordinary conference.

Actually, it's in Las Vegas every year, obviously, not this year. And I just want to thank you all for the opportunity to share what I'm very passionate about. My husband always says, “Good grief, I thought banking was so boring.” I’m like, “No. It’s so exciting.” You know, again, I feel very fortunate. I also feel that all the things I've done in my life, whether it be selling life insurance, working at Wachovia or Wells Fargo, has brought me to this moment in time. And I say that to my teams, that for whatever reason, we are all together at this moment in time, through a pandemic. 10, 15, 20 years from now we're going to look back, and we're going to remember this time, that we were together, we got some stuff done, and we made a difference.

Allan: That's great. We certainly thank you, both Martha and I really appreciate you speaking with us today and we wish you all the best and continued success. And I think we'll take you up on that conversation down the road, see where things stand.

Dorian: Wow, that would be terrific.

Allan: Yeah, It sounds like you have an amazing culture there and we really appreciate all the information you shared.

Dorian: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

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Allan: So as Dorian said, she's now working to transform the back office to better support the customer facing transformation. We really hope we'll have the opportunity to follow-up with her in future and hear the rest of the story. It's also great to hear about the recent recognition from Newsweek. That was very exciting. We'll have a link to that in our show notes as well.

Martha: Well, this has been great, but I need to head back to the basement now. I mean, I mean back to my office now.

Allan: That’s right. Don’t get lost. Thanks to our listeners for joining us. Check us out for more episodes at vyasystems.com, be sure to subscribe. And Vya is V-Y-A, systems with an ‘s’ dot com. Thank you so much.

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