[Music]

Allan Greer 
Hello and welcome to Bank Marketing Today by Vya. I'm Allan Greer and I'll be interviewing bank marketing leaders about current trends, new marketing technologies, branding and the overall state of the banking industry. I'll be joined from time to time by additional cohosts and experts. So let's get to it. We hope this episode of Bank Marketing Today helps simplify your marketing tomorrow. 

[Music] 

Allan Greer 
Hello, I'm Allan Greer and I'm truly excited to be talking with Francesco Lagutaine, Chief Marketing Communication Officer for M&T Bank. Welcome to the Bank Marketing Today Podcast, Francesco.

Francesco Lagutaine 
Hi, Allan, thanks very much for having me.

Allan Greer 
Absolutely, I’m very excited. It’s the first time I've been to Buffalo. As I told you earlier, when I came in, I kind of came in with the rain and the fog and I saw the big M&T Bank coming through the fog as I pulled in. So I saw M&T Bank everywhere. So that's neat and I wanted to start off too because I kind of feel Cincinnati and Buffalo are kinda like Sister cities with the situation with Damar Hamlin last year. And when he and T. Higgins collided it was such a scary moment, and I think it seems like our two cities really kind of came together. It is like, now I'm a Bills fan. Except when they're playing the Bengals, but maybe if you could just start with where you've been and how you got into banking.

Francesco Lagutaine 
I'm a big believer along with my friend Steve Cody of the importance of humor at work. So I always like to describe my background is I had the Forrest Gump approach to economic prosperity. I went to law school in Italy. And the one thing I learned in law school is that I didn't want to be a lawyer, partly because in Italy, lawyers are a little bit like forensic doctors. So they come in, they try and fix something that has gone wrong. And I got really excited about building things. I want to build business, I want to create new ideas and participate in creating something new and lawyers would come in and fix something that hadn't been built properly. At least that is how it worked in Italy.  So I went off and looked for a job. And at the time, I thought I had to go to Germany because it was the European locomotive. And so I went to Germany, I didn't speak a word of German, the only industry that thought I was so crazy that I was probably interesting was advertising. And I got into advertising in Germany. And there was the beginning of my first love, love story. I always talk about it, the first part of my career. After that the place where you learn the job was the UK. So I moved to London, I started this career in advertising, where I was working on the blue chip businesses in highly creative workshops. And it was an incredible job. And I was kind of like the translator between the corporate structure and the creative freedom. And I've always enjoyed that role of matching business results in business structure, business acumen, together with the freedom that you have, that you need, when you're creating, when you're breaking new ground, where you're thinking of that crazy idea that people hadn't thought before. And so, you know, the natural progression was all of the excitement and the action was out in California at the beginning of 2007. At the end of 1999, I moved to San Francisco, and I worked there for a few years, and learned a ton. And then at about 2004, I moved to New York, and was working on financial businesses. At the same time, I was coming to the end of my advertising days, and I realized I went into advertising, one is because it was a great business. It was fun. And they offered me a job. But also the great part of advertising at the time was that advertising was really core to brand building and company strategy. It was you know, the positioning was the most important thing when you thought about a company's strategy and company long term trajectory.  That would web 1.0 and then the beginning of web 2.0 is where I sort of put the beginning of the experience economy and brands. And even the big-time strategies are now influenced by thousands of micro interactions is no longer what you say, in a Super Bowl ad. It is how you pay your bills online, how the teller responds to a query, how quickly your check gets deposited or not as well as communication as well as how you responded to me in a crisis, etc, etc. So I realized that the excitement and all the drive was on the client side. And I was approached by Citibank at the time and they were doing a similar thing. They realized that because they needed this, all of this sort of marketing and creative thinking in an industry that hadn't had it. They were reaching out to look for individuals that didn't come from the financial industry, but we're bringing in new fresh thinking that was customer centric. And that's where I joined Citi. And then the world stopped 2009. I was joked that sometime in the fall of 2009, I finished the internet because we would get to work and we would read and read and read, trying to understand what was happening in the world. But there wasn't much work happening because banks were frozen, rightly at that point. And so it was the time for me to look for a new adventure. And Citibank was recruiting for a head of marketing CMO. And at the time, which was really interesting, I had CMO and service in Asia for Asia Pacific, and I moved to Singapore. And I had a phenomenal career burst in Singapore. I did seven years in Singapore. And then I moved company, and I went to Hong Kong.  Asia was just an incredible environment. I didn't think I wanted to go to Asia. And I was dumb. I just turned 40 Before I moved to Asia, and I was like, why didn't I ever want to come here. It's like, even as a tourist or as a backpacker, it's just such an incredible place. But as a professional, especially those 10 years where it was like all of the growth was in Asia, all of the innovation was in Asia, a lot of high potential talent moved from the West, especially in the financial industry, where things had slowed down, moved there because the business was booming. And so I worked with some of the most incredible individuals of my career, and did a ton of incredible and crazy things. And we had an incredible success. I had a son going into high school. So with my wife, we wanted to move back to the US. And I landed at M&T and it was I was the first COVID hire, the bank is a great bank, it's got a wonderful people. I love the mission. I love it. I love the passion. And everyone in the interviews were sort of displaying it. And so I moved, I had never been to Buffalo. But what I found back to the economic prosperity and sort of like riding that curve of what's next, I do believe that Super Regional Banks are what's next. And I love this segment where we're big enough to make a difference when it comes to what our customers need. But we're also small enough to make a difference when it comes to what our customers want, which is that more intimate connection, that greater commitment to communities, and to customers, that means that we're going to stay and help making Buffalo and Baltimore and Bridgeport and Boston successful. When you're in a big bank, and it was at Citi, and I love Citi. But the way you run business there is you sort of like think of shareholders first, second, third. And here are probably our biggest stakeholder is the communities we inhabit.

Allan Greer  
Going back to Asia, I was watching an interview from 2019 and you talked about the three most important things. Your first one is listening and my wife will probably be listening to this. So if we could move that down to number three, I would appreciate that. The second one you had said you can never simplify enough and the third was humans still rule. Do you still feel this way?

Francesco Lagutaine  
Totally and if anything, I feel even more strongly. You know, I think the business we're in sometimes, the listening part is probably the part that's most forgotten. Oftentimes, even research is used to figure out a better way to say what we want to say, as opposed to truly listen, to understand what people need  and want, how they want to be spoken to how they want to be engaged with. And so sometimes we have an idea of something that we want to do, and we just listen, how do we position it best to get it through, as opposed to sort of like more open minded listening? Often, you go into a conversation, you say nothing. And the result of that conversation is that some people trust you, because you gave them the opportunity, then you created the context in which they were able to tell you what really mattered to them. And then once you have that mindset, and you've done that listening, then the companies that do it best are the companies that deliver exactly what's needed, and nothing more, because anything that's more than what's needed just gets in the way of what you want to do. There's oftentimes, and again, it's been a trend that goes back to, since I started this, we do so much that we're proud of we're going to tell everybody what we do, and we're going to put it all in front of everyone. And in reality is if you have one thing to do, and someone gives you the perfect tool, it's so much easier to do it and to be given an array of every possible tool in the world even though it's quite impressive to be able to have every possible tool in the world. But it's going to take me so much effort to figure out what tool I need and to me that's the notion of simplification. How do we put something in front of people, that's just what they need? COVID was a big time of acceleration for digital capabilities. A lot of the banks that were perhaps a little further behind because their customers maybe weren't showing as much need, even though they probably did it, but they couldn't get by, everyone had to develop digital capabilities. But I think what was interesting there is that because of the time crunch, we went to the heart of what was needed. The two most game changing innovations that were all out during COVID were digital signature of contracts. Okay, which is an off the shelf product but we made it possible. And people were able to sign documents and paperwork from the comfort of their own home and appointment setting, digital appointment settings, because we couldn't have people come in and wait, we had people pick their slot. What came from there is people pick their slot, which was convenient. They told us what they were coming in for, we were able to tell them, Oh, if you're coming in for that, make sure you have a mortgage statement, your driver's license, etc, etc. I'm prepared, yeah, come prepared, and the banker was prepared. So the banker didn't waste time trying to understand it, they would go and look at the record. And so the conversation happened was so much better than if we hadn't done it. You know, those are innovation that take all of the noise out, we didn't create an AI generated, we just created the simplest way to get the task done. People respond to people, digital is convenient. But apps don't give hugs. It’s back to that listening and that understanding is that showing empathy. That's the part where humans can make a big difference. And an app does not yet respond, maybe one day, and I don't know whether that's going to be good anyway. But maybe one day the app will detect anxiety and change the way a conversation is going because they detected the person asking the question has to have a little bit more time to think through stuff. People still crave people contact and still like to do business with people. Nobody wants to have to drive 20 minutes to deposit a check. But if we have to make an investment decision, absolutely, we'll still benefit from talking to people. 

Allan Greer 
In regards to listening, you have 962 Bank locations and around 22,000 employees, as of the time of the podcast. With so many people in the organization, what are some of the tools you use to listen to your customers?

Francesco Lagutaine  
Listening is an attitude not a technique. And so I go back to the most important thing about listening is wanting to listen and taking action on the listening, not listen or take action if you know what I mean. Right? And then there are many techniques for listening which we have and we use many of them. Obviously all our front liners are incredible, wonderful listeners. And we've given them a voice. And actually the app is called My Voice and we get feedback directly from them on an app, obviously, feedback in our regular meetings. And that's sort of like the more organic listening, we have NPs that we use, both at the interaction level. And then at the strategic level, we use all sorts of other techniques, from focus groups to one on ones to all of these things, depending on what's appropriate. But as I say, it's kind of like, to me the most important part is the attitude. Techniques will you know, tomorrow, there's gonna be better technique.

Allan Greer 
Yeah, I think some of that's actually kind of hard to teach. I mean, you have to have some of that intrinsically, in yours in your personality, wanting to talk to people and enjoying that, and having fun and all those kinds of things. So I get it totally. But coming back to the international experience. I know we talked a little bit previously. But you know, I am very curious about what you've learned in the international market that you brought back to the United States.

Francesco Lagutaine
I had probably one of the most prolific and exciting decade of my career. So you know, you learn a lot, you grow a lot as an individual. And a lot has to do with that context. But I would say one of the things, if I think about one of the things that was pretty unique about Asia was that enthusiasm and that entrepreneur mindset, you know, there's a world of growth ahead of us. And it's just a question of the one who moves the fastest is often the most successful. When I looked at how we work, for example, with a lot of our counterparts in the US and why, during that decade, we were driving a lot of innovation out of Asia, that then we export to the US was that sense of the greater confidence in risk taking, well thought through risk with a small r, by the way. It was sort of like trying something new, without having to model to infinity, what are all the possible consequences of doing something new? And that comes from that sense that, you know, when you're growing 10% year over year is it like you grew 9.5 or 10.5? You know what I mean? It's kind of like there's always sense of progress. There was a lot more scarcity of resources. So we all had to do more with less and I think that sort of created that sense of like we've done, what we you know, back to simplicity, we've done what we had to do now it's time to make a decision. And if we don't make a decision, we will lose bigger of an opportunity.

Allan Greer
Was it from a technology point of view or financial? When you say less people?

Francesco Lagutaine 
People, we just we just had smaller teams. And in many ways that worked in our favor. In the US my sense is that, partly because of the challenges of maybe markets aren't growing as efficiently or as enthusiastically, partly culture, partly the size of our teams, we tend to spend a lot of time in considering in really thinking through all the what ifs of things that could happen. We use oftentimes, that notion of analysis paralysis, there's always the sense of like, have we thought about everything? Can we think about this some more? Can we model it some more? And sometimes you have to think about, what are you going to use truly as information to make a decision, or the core of the decision is often more simple, even though less scary than all of the data information that the modeling gives you. But there's a little bit more of that sense of like, we have fewer opportunities, and therefore we have to make sure they're there. They're great. And so in order to do this, we kind of create bigger and bigger and bigger departments that are designed to answer all these volume and depth of questions. And so it becomes much harder to run truly agile horizontal teams that can connect the dots more effectively, they can communicate more effectively, they can see opportunities in the crossroads between teams, because you have this sort of monolithic, I've always envied from my US colleagues, and now I have the benefit of but when I was in Asia, I've always envied from my US colleagues the depth of expertise that they had available. But only when I came here, realize that there's a silver lining or the opposite, but to a depth of expertise, there's a little bit that Oh, my God, I get, you know, maybe that's a little too much.

[Break]
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Allan Greer
I think it's interesting from your agency background as well, what kind of influence that you have brought into banking? I'm just kind of curious for people that may be marketers out there that are listening. But how do you think that transformed into your bank marketing? And what kind of advice would you give to somebody who's coming into bank marketing and or wants to get to the level of a CMO position within a bank? What kind of advice can you give them?

Francesco Lagutaine
Well, the first thing is, you have to be lucky. You have to get some breaks. Aside from that, I would say a few things. First of all, I've always considered myself a marketer. To the bank, I bring marketing, I bring the understanding of how people make purchases, which is listening, observing how people come to make decisions, which is sort of somewhat independent from the product you're selling. All marketers need to become product experts. But we have product experts that are there to design product capabilities, we need to be customer experts. That's the role that a marketer has, in an organization from an agency role. I think, probably the greatest asset that I brought with me is the collaboration, and is the ability to learn new things, connect different people, manage stakeholders, because from an agency you are used to work across many industries across many clients in a much more unstructured way. I think as the world is going Agile, you know, the agency was agile, before agile was a thing because you had to be when I started, I was working for a while I had two clients, butter and computers. The mental gymnastics that you had to do to be exact, to be two different, you know, these are two completely different rhythms, two complete different set of challenges to complete it. And so that ability to sort of like bring a craft, but displayed in many different ways, is what I think if I'm coming from an agency looking at becoming a marketer in a corporation, that's what I would bank on. And then the other thing is, it's a little bit of a philosophy of management, but lean on your strengths. You know, I came from an agency and as I say I had that at vantage of doing the blue chips. I've always loved this intersection of art and science of corporate and creative, etc, etc. When I came to a bank, it was like I have, you know, you kind of had to just behave a little bit like you would do when you change schools or whatever, but you lean on your strengths. And your you know, for me it was enthusiasm, creativity, don't try and be the cliche CMO, be yourself and always think about what is the value in that? Or you have to, there’s certain things that are all you have to do. But in doing those things, what are your unique strengths that you can bring to the role to make the way you do that role a real asset for the organization you're doing it for?

Allan Greer
The question I wanted to ask in that is, and I'm sure you're asked this all the time, but I'd love your opinion on where you think bank marketing is going and banking in general.  There are so many changes, with AI, with crypto, all those kinds of things. Where do you think the industry is headed?

Francesco Lagutaine
Wow, if I knew I probably wouldn't be here.

Allan Greer  
What's your educated guess?

Francesco Lagutaine
So let me let me answer it this way. I don't know where it's going. I think if someone tells you they do, they're probably a little overconfident. Let's put it that way. What I love is that we are in a place where we can influence to where we want to go. And so I would say a few things. I think that in banking, because of how the industry has evolved, the role of marketing is still not fully consistent and the importance of marketing in the way an organization like a bank is run is not fully consistent. There are  organizations that do it very well. Organizations do it differently in the product teams still has generally a huge say and they should, but I think that not having very strong consistent marketing organization with very clear expectations of how it's an equal at the table of the CEO, it's a miss because that means the customer is not there. The other thing is we need to become much more structured in how we develop marketing capabilities and talent inside an organization. Historically, we haven't had that role for marketing. Banks become enamored by the shiny object. Marketing was at one point where what it was all about ads that made a bank sort of popular in the marketplace. Then we started getting enamored with Fintech. And so it was all about digital capabilities, then it actually came up and we said, oh, we all have it, we have to be all about CX. And those are all things that we do have to do. But we have to do them, they don't become the most important thing, until the next most important thing happens. I think there's a consolidation of those, in a way the humanistic right? Back at Citibank, we used to call it customer franchise, because they're all the capabilities that actually start from the customer backwards. There are synergies between that and we need to create a repeatable structural discipline with expectations that are the same year over year in that space. And that, to me, is the most important part for success for financial organizations, when I think about where marketing is going, and then when you talk about AI, when you talk about crypto, those are just context that we operate in.  You know, AI is going to influence financial services just as pretty much the rest of the economy. And it's not just marketing, it is going to be everything. Right? And so we will all need to think through collectively, how does it work? How do we lean into it? It is the same for crypto, those are all things that are becoming harder and harder as we go through just because things are becoming more complex, but goes back to that point of like, we need to set more structural expectations from Marketing, and make sure that we have an understanding of marketing with you know, in the broadest possible notion of marketing. What is the accountability of that in the organization? Make sure we hold marketing accountable, but don't change it year over year?

Allan Greer
Absolutely. What are some of the things that keeps you up at night as a marketer?

Francesco Lagutaine 
All right, we probably touched upon it, you know, I always say I enjoy my sleep and value it. And I'm a big fan of work life balance. And I think my brain recharges during the night. And I like to let my brain wander but if I do, you know, talent is probably the one thing that would keep me up at night, not because I'm concerned, but because the most important role for a senior leader is how do I develop a talent? It's becoming harder and harder. The world is changing quicker and quicker. How do you enable people to have valuable careers to stay positive and motivated and learning and creating opportunities for people to shine? Those are all things that in my mind are possibly the most critical component of what I do for an organization. 

Allan Greer 
Where do you go to learn?

Francesco Lagutaine
I don't know that I'm like structured and planned. I'm curious and I lead and again, this is not advice by the way. So this disclaimer is that this is what works for me. And some people might even argue that it doesn't work for me.  But how I approached this is curiosity. I am blessed to be in a role that whilst it's both technical and creative. So there are certain things that I need to be curious about techniques and keep myself up to speed. And for that I go to colleagues I value a lot, some of these smaller meetings that some of our partners organize, where there's one or two themes, and they bring a group of similar, you know, other CMOS, for example to the table. And there's some industry experts and people to see how things are done. And they talk about some of the challenges they have.  There’s a really good moment to think about techniques and ask questions of how a colleague might have used it in similar places. But I also read a lot just for curiosity, I read a lot of history. And you know, I read about science, I'm reading a book right now, that is about materials. And it's an expert on materials, who's just talking about his favorite materials. And so I was reading about why he likes steel. And last night, I just started a chapter on why he liked paper. And it's like, you never know what, when that's gonna come valuable, but that those are the connections that our brain eventually makes. And those are where the creative ideas generally come from.

Allan Greer
I am kind of the same. I have a lot of curiosity about things. And I'm kind of a history buff, too. Because I think we can learn a lot from history. Definitely, we really can and see where things began. And we’ve get a lot to learn. So I have something I would like to start with you, it is kind of quick questions. I'm going to call it the Vya lightning round. And this is why you're awesome, not why I'm awesome, but why you're awesome. Are you ready?

Francesco Lagutaine
I don’t know if I am ever ready for this, but let's go. 

Allan Greer
What's your favorite day of the week? 

Francesco Lagutaine 
Friday.

Allan Greer 
Cake or Pie?

Francesco Lagutaine 
Cake.

Allan Greer  
If you could travel back in time where would you go?

Francesco Lagutaine
Ooh, this is a difficult one. If I don't think about all the hygiene challenges, probably Renaissance Italy.

Allan Greer
Oh, interesting. Interesting. Have you ever worn socks with sandals? 

Francesco Lagutaine
No, no.  I am Italian.

Allan Greer
This is my last question. This is the most important. Would you do a happy dance if the Bills ever beat the Bengals?

Francesco Lagutaine
Oh my god. I would do a happy dance if the Bills or the Ravens beat the bengals.  

Allan Greer
I did  a little background and actually the last 34 games it's 17-17.

Francesco Lagutaine
I like the Bengals.  I love cats and orange. I do like the Bengals and you know maybe as both a fan of the Ravens and the Bills that’s sort of like not nice. I should have a different attitude. But I do like the Bengals and Burrow was one of my favorite player players in college. And I think he's an incredible, incredible talent. But I'm glad we have Lamar and Josh and I think we're set on that front. I hope the Bills and the Ravens win the Super Bowl this year. 

Allan Greer 
We'll see how it goes. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today and I wish you all the best and continued success at M&T Bank.

Francesco Lagutaine
Thank you so much. It was awesome. Thank you for having me.

Allan Greer 
Thanks to our listeners for joining; love to connect on LinkedIn, you can find me there. Also, be sure to subscribe and give us a review. We'd love to hear from you. If you have any ideas for topics or questions you'd like us to cover in the future. Just email us at marketing at vyasystems.com And that's V Y A systems with an s.com. Thank you so much.

Please note:  Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.