Customer service

JPMorgan Chase is bolstering the unit of the bank that serves startup clients as it looks to fill a void left by several regional lenders that collapsed in March and May.

The New York City-based bank this year added close to 200 bankers to its innovation economy division, an area of the firm that caters to technology startups and venture capital backed-businesses, the bank said. The hiring spree comes as JPMorgan claims the unit’s U.S. client portfolio nearly doubled in 2023.

But as the firm invests in the division’s growth, Ashraf Hebela, head of startup banking at JPMorgan’s commercial banking division, emphasized that the bank has always had a mission to serve startups, even before this year’s banking turmoil. 

"This is not a new phenomenon,” said Hebela, who joined JPMorgan from Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed in March. “JPMorgan has always been in the innovation economy business and not just domestically, but globally. I think the March event put it in more of a focus." 

When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, the startup community lost their favorite bank. The 40-year-old Santa Clara, California-based lender fostered close relationships with the emerging tech sector and was known as the go-to bank for venture capital-backed firms. 

But SVB’s implosion, and the subsequent demise of two other startup-friendly regional lenders, meant entrepreneurs were on the hunt for a new bank, and many saw JPMorgan as a safe place to park their funds.

"We have seen an influx of companies come to us in the last two months that are looking for a more stable environment," Melissa Smith, JPMorgan’s co-head of innovation economy and head of specialized industries, told Reuters in May.

During JPMorgan’s investor day in May, Doug Petno, the bank’s CEO of commercial banking, said the market disruption and the “shift in our competitive landscape” substantially heightened the firm’s new client acquisition. 

“[T]o accommodate this growth and rebalance the business and to accelerate our innovation economy banking efforts, we're adding incrementally higher front and middle office support than we have in prior years,” he said.

To help it serve a clientele that was the bread and butter of SVB, JPMorgan has brought on some of the firm’s former executives, including John China, who spent 27 years at the regional bank, most recently as president of SVB Capital. 

JPMorgan installed China as co-head of innovation economy for commercial banking in July, where he serves alongside Smith.

‘Fintech 1.0’ 

As JPMorgan looks to capitalize on a gap left over from a string of bank failures, the firm will need to convince startups it has the culture and customer service that endeared so many entrepreneurs to SVB.

Beta Boom Capital Managing Partner Kimmy Paluch, whose firm became a JPMorgan customer after the bank took over failed First Republic Bank in May, said the transition has so far been positive. 

“Ultimately, the test as to whether JPMorgan can step in to serve this space will be measured by their actions. As of today, it appears the answer is unequivocally, ‘yes,’” she said. “The legacy First Republic Bank platform has been able to leverage these expanded resources to continue to serve its VC partners, and we've been able to take advantage of these as a firm.”

Hebela said startups and VCs can look at JPMorgan’s 224-year history for examples of the bank’s early commitment to emerging tech.

"You could almost argue JPMorgan has been in the business of banking the innovation economy from what I would consider fintech 1.0, which was Alexander Hamilton,” he said, referencing the treasury secretary who co-founded The Manhattan Company, JPMorgan Chase's earliest predecessor.

The Manhattan Company was chartered by the New York state legislature in 1799 to provide drinking water to the city's population. A provision in the charter allowed the company to use its excess capital for banking operations. 

“We've been banking entrepreneurs for the last two centuries,” Hebela said. “I think it's a little bit of an interesting narrative that's out there, that after March, we're all in. When you peel the onion back, you can see the history of what JPMorgan has been doing in the innovation economy. The story starts way before March.”

Strategic advantage

While JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has touted the bank’s investments in serving the venture ecosystem, he has also acknowledged the $3.87 trillion-asset firm has room for improvement.

“We always were there, we always did OK, but I always wanted to do better,” Dimon told Bloomberg TV this month. “We have unbelievable products and services to bring to them — digital, consumer, subscription lines, financing, globality, research — you name it. But we have to deliver it to them in a way they actually like it and they want it, which is what Silicon Valley Bank did.”

JPMorgan faces competition from incumbents and fintechs that are looking to court the startup sector in the wake of this year's banking crisis.

Fintechs Mercury and Brex, which cater to startups, each reported deposit windfalls as SVB clients moved funds out of the troubled bank.

Meanwhile, Raleigh, North Carolina-based First Citizens Bank, which acquired $110 billion of SVB’s assets at the end of March, is rallying in an effort to fill the lender’s shoes. 

“[SVB] was the number-one bank in tech and life sciences for over 30 years and suddenly that went away, so we’ve spent a lot of time trying to give people confidence that we’re in the bank and plan to continue to run the model they were running,” First Citizens President Peter Bristow told the Financial Times in April.

But a key advantage for JPMorgan, Hebela says, is the bank's ability to serve startups throughout their life cycle. 

“It's really dangerous to think about a company as just an archetype of a segment. The job for us is to be active listeners and solution-oriented professionals that are providing what they need at the right time, in the way that they need it. That's what we're building,” he said. "When I look at what we have, it is the full gamut, end-to-end of what an entrepreneur would ever need, from idea generation all the way to post IPO.”

JPMorgan’s capital position also puts it at a strategic advantage, especially in light of federal regulators’ proposals for more stringent capital requirements for banks, said Don Butler, a managing director at Thomvest Ventures, which is not a JPMorgan Chase client. 

“I believe that if these [proposals] move forward, then you’ll see an increase in the regulatory capital needed for banks that invest in and, to a lesser extent, lend money to startups,” he said. “I believe the outcome of this will be that banks’ commitment to the sector will be tested and that those with both a larger deposit base and a strategic focus on the venture sector will emerge as the larger players here. JPMorgan Chase has both, and so I think in that regard it is well-positioned in the sector."

Consumers looking for deals often use coupon finders in their browsers to find promotional offers to apply at checkout. Now, Citi wants to be the preferred intermediary through which its cardholders find online discounts and other rewards through a tool it rolled out in late January called Citi Shop.

The Citi Shop browser extension, which can only be used by Citi credit card holders, searches for coupons on eligible merchant checkout pages and suggests applicable codes to apply at checkout. The program can potentially reduce the amount a customer pays and can also activate cash-back offers that are delivered as credits on credit card statements. It includes roughly 5,000 merchants across 30 product categories. 

“We’re not only making it easier for card members to find savings while shopping online but we’re also addressing that finding time is one of the top barriers for consumers looking for a deal,” Anthony Merola, head of proprietary products at Citi branded cards, told Banking Dive.

Citi partnered with fintech Wildfire Systems, a white-label loyalty platform that works with “dozens” of banks and fintech firms, including Royal Bank of Canada, LendingClub and Acorns, to develop Citi Shop, said Shawn Conahan, the company’s chief revenue officer. Citi Ventures, one of Citi’s three venture investing vehicles, invested an undisclosed amount in Wildfire in 2022.

The goal of Citi Shop, according to the bank, is to enhance card members' relationships and trust with the institution and help them save money. These types of programs also boost revenue when bank fees are under pressure, including efforts to limit late fees and credit card interchange, Conahan said.

Citi did not comment on its monetization model, including whether it earns a percentage of each successful Citi Shop transaction that has a cash-back benefit. However, while not referring to Citi specifically, Conahan said banks and fintechs it works with typically take a cut of merchant-funded cash-back-offer pie, which can be 10% of the price of an item, or higher. 

Offers vary by merchant and are not a fixed amount, he clarified, and the company’s merchant development team works with merchants and negotiates offer rates. A portion of the merchant offer is shared with the consumer.

“We take a little off the top and we get to make a business out of that. We give the rest — the lion's share of it —  [to the partner], and then they share that with the consumer, so everyone wins,” he said. 

An ecosystem of browser extensions

Getting into the retail checkout through browser extensions is a natural fit for banks and financial firms that want to learn more about how consumers shop, said Suzy Davidkhanian, a retail analyst at Insider Intelligence. 

In recent years, banks and fintechs have rolled out browser extensions that offer coupon codes and cash-back offers for e-commerce shoppers. 

These include PayPal, which operates PayPal Honey, a digital coupon and price-tracking platform that the payments company acquired for $4 billion in 2020, and Capital One Shopping, a coupon and cash-back platform that stemmed from the bank’s 2018 acquisition of the fintech Wikibuy for an undisclosed amount. (Wikibuy was later rebranded as Capital One Shopping, which finds coupons and cash-back offers for consumers, including those who aren’t Capital One customers.)

“There's all this data that's sitting in credit card behaviors, and monetizing that ... from a financial institution’s perspective, is important for everybody,” Davidkhanian said. “The brands want to know what their customers and potential customers are doing so that they can target them.”

Trends the bank sees from shopping habits, surveys or direct customer feedback “help us elevate the card member experience and bring more impactful solutions,” Merola said.

Wildfire said its toolset does not allow its partners to monetize the data, and Citi confirmed that it’s not monetizing consumer shopping data insights from Citi Shop.

“We decided that we were not going to be a data company,” Conahan said. “We are a fintech [and] we monetize the transaction. We do not sell data.” 

The data play

Some companies in the digital couponing field might be interested in using consumer shopping data — likely aggregated insights — to help partner retailers pitch offers to consumers.

“Institutions have so much data about people's behaviors. I don't think they're going to ever share [individual transaction data], but I think they’re going to be able to say things like ‘People who live in New York go out on Tuesday or Wednesday, and so, if you need them to come to your local restaurant, maybe this is when you target them with an ad or with a coupon or a gift certificate,’” Davidkhanian said.

John Kim, executive vice president and chief product officer at PayPal, suggested financial companies may use aggregated, anonymized insights garnered from shopping tools to help merchants suggest offers to consumers who may be interested in a particular product or service. Network rules and regulation, he said, prevent banks and financial companies from sharing individual-level transaction data with partners.

For Wildfire’s clients, a key motivation is to keep the customer loyal over time, Conahan said.

“It’s 10 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one, and nothing says I love you like free money,” he said. “What they have realized is that consumers expect these kinds of rewards in exchange for their loyalty.”

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By Glia

Virtually every company that interacts with customers has been operating over the past few years with what’s been called a “channel strategy.” Until recently, a channel-focused strategy was the only strategy a company could operate under, since digital technology and capabilities each evolved separately. But now, with the emergence of Unified Interaction Management (UIM) there is an alternative–one that is much better for both companies AND customers.

Channel Strategy

Question: How can we manage each of the various channels customers use to contact us—including phone, digital, chat, email, social media, etc.?

Most companies first developed their service model based around a nucleus of telephony, because just about all non-brick and mortar interactions were conducted by phone. However, as newer technologies emerged, and as customer preference for digital interactions increased, most companies then began expanding their call centers into “contact centers.” 

That meant staffing different teams of people managing each of the new channels–all of which were piled on top of the volume of incoming telephone calls–hence, a channel strategy.

However, this is now another alternative: One that’s more evolved, one that gives companies a chance to keep up with, or even stay ahead of digital transformation at competitive organizations. With the advent of ChannelLess™ architecture, it is now possible to operate with an “interaction strategy.”

Interaction Strategy

Question: How can we create the best interaction (most efficient, most effective, best experience) for each customer, regardless of which channel they use and which channel they move to during the interaction?

The demand to “meet the customer where they are” has traditionally meant, “to meet them in the channel they chose.”  But here’s the thing: All too often, a customer chooses a channel that isn’t the best fit for their exact need. And who can blame them? How would they know?  

Here are four of the most common examples of bad interactions that are likely happening hour after hour, day after day with your customers:

1. The % of customers who start in digital, but end up having to abandon their digital journey and start again on the phone, creating a high-effort experience.
    
2. The % of customers who call on the phone, but didn’t need to because they could have easily resolved their specific issue without live assistance–resulting in a waste of resources and customer effort.
    
3. The % of customers who interact with a bot that can’t handle their specific issue or need, leading to friction and failure.
    
4. The % of customers who initiate a chat session for an issue or need that can’t be fully resolved in chat, which creates unnecessary customer effort and frustration.

By adopting a Unified Interaction Management (UIM) model–where all elements of the contact center, digital customer service and AI/automation are all unified within a single ChannelLess™  platform–each of the above percentages can be quickly driven down to a level of “practical zero.” In UIM, it doesn’t matter which channel a customer chooses to contact your company, they can be seamlessly transitioned to the “best-fit” interaction type. For some issues, that means virtual assistance. In other cases, live assistance–sometimes through messaging and sometimes through OnScreen Voice interactions. The trick is to match the right interaction type to a customer’s specific need at that moment. 

Bottom line: Until recently, your company had no choice but to operate with a channel-driven strategy. That was the only choice, but evolving to an interaction strategy is now within your grasp. The channel is not the issue, the customer’s issue is the issue. The only thing that matters to each customer who is contacting you, is the interaction they are having right now.

And now…there’s a strategy that can greatly increase the measurable value of getting interactions “right.”  

You can’t be blamed for operating with a channel strategy in the past. There was no other alternative. But now there is–an interaction strategy–and it is your responsibility as a leader to understand the differences, and move your organization in the right direction

Citizens Bank of Edmond CEO Jill Castilla’s latest venture combines two key elements of her professional life: financial services and the military.

For the past several years, the bank executive and military veteran has been building a national digital bank that aims to address some of the banking pain points that Castilla herself encountered when she enlisted in the Army at 19. 

“There's still this deficiency in the market where there's not a focus on that new servicemember coming in,” Castilla said. “They're very targeted from a predatory lending standpoint.”

Through Roger, a digital bank which officially launched on Tuesday, Castilla is hoping to reach entry-level recruits who all too often start basic training without bank accounts.

“They are coming to basic training, 50% or more across every service, without having a banking relationship,” she said. 

The lack of early access to a bank account can delay a new recruit’s first paycheck, or even push back their training start date, Castilla said.

Castilla said Roger aims to work with military recruiters to provide new servicemembers with an instantly available direct deposit form that is compliant with the Department of Defense regulations. The form populates all of the prospective service member’s information, as well as a signature by Castilla as the bank’s CEO.

“All they have to do is either text that, email, or print it out and provide it to either the recruiter or to reception at basic training,” she said.

Roger also allows 17-year-olds that have signed enlistment papers to be able to open an account without a cosigner.

“That’s another big hurdle that we're excited to be able to remove for young people that are serving but may not be 18,” Castilla said.

‘Cracks in the system’

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, U.S. servicemembers are increasingly becoming targets of predatory lending and falling victim to payments app scams. 

The Department of Defense has identified predatory lending and poor financial literacy as serious threats to military readiness, Castilla said.

“It’s recognized, from a mental health standpoint, as well as deployment readiness by the Department of Defense, that financial stability and financial literacy is critical to ensure both the servicemembers and their families are well educated and protected when it comes to their finances,” she said. “We have laws in place to protect service members from exposure to potentially predatory lenders, unfortunately, cracks still exist in the system, that don't fully allow that barrier from someone taking advantage of a service member being deployed.”

One of Roger’s fraud protection features includes “deployment mode” where a servicemember can lock down some of the access to their debit card or enable increased fraud monitoring during a tour.

A common cause

Castilla said a couple hundred users, made up of both military veterans and National Guard members, have been testing the platform ahead of its official launch.

Existing staff at Edmond, Oklahoma-based Citizens Bank of Edmond have been tapped to work on Roger, Castilla said. The firm also added retired Brigadier General Andy Preston as Roger’s director of military banking.

Castilla said “several $100,000 of hard expenses” as well as the equivalent of $1 million in staff time has gone into the launch of Roger.

Roger has a standalone core powered by banking technology firm Nymbus.

Castilla said Nymbus has offered to work with Citizens to make its technology more accessible “all for this common cause to help the servicemembers that typically have been underserved.”

Emily Luk and Channing Allen, two fintech pros who fell in love at a company eventually acquired by Walmart, were on sabbatical. They were traveling the world, and going back and forth on an idea born out of their own shared experience — how do we financially plan for a future together, and can we create an app that answers that question for fellow millennials?

“In moments where we’d think, ‘Let's explore other ideas,’ we’d meet another couple and they’d proactively bring up how complicated it was to manage money together or to figure out how much they needed to plan for a house or kids. We kept getting these signals that there were so many people running into the same problem,” Luk said.

The duo heeded those signals and sketched out different drawings of what the product would look or feel like, if they took a crack at developing it.

Now, parts of those sketches are live in Plenty, a wealth-building app geared to help couples manage and invest their money together.

“The other [couple-focused] products we've seen typically focus on expense splitting, which tends to be a much earlier chapter of someone's relationship,” Luk said. “When people start to use our product, they're like, ‘We actually are in a place where we [share expenses]. We don't care about one-off transactions, we're really rounding things at this point.’”

Plenty users connect their financial accounts to the app and choose which accounts to share with their partner.

From there, they’re able to transfer money into Plenty’s cash management product, a managed portfolio of money market funds custodied by BNY Mellon | Pershing that currently offers a 5.1% annual percentage yield, and earmark certain stashes of money to specific shared goals; or into its investment product, which aims to make investing “as simple as possible” for the end user.

“Ultimately, we want to make it as simple as you pressing [a button] and you can immediately deposit $100 and we will manage everything for you,” Luk said.

Millennials, she said, are still at the point in life where investing or saving just 1% more annually can have a huge payoff when retirement rolls around.

Plenty, which is a Securities and Exchange Commission-registered investment adviser, asks its users a few simple questions: What are your goals? Do you want to buy a house in five years, or are you focused on saving for retirement? Additionally, what are your values?

Most people don’t realize where their current 401(k) is being invested in, Luk said.

“Your retirement account could actually be invested in a payday lender. You would never invest in a payday lender, but [investment management firms] are some of the biggest investors in the payday lending space in America. They're also some of the largest investors in for-profit prisons,” she said.

Plenty users declare their values — for example, saying ‘yes’ to investing in tobacco companies, but ‘no’ to investing in companies that engage in animal testing — and the program creates a customized portfolio to align with those values.

Currently, Plenty is invite-only, and Luk wouldn’t divulge how many users it had. But it will be available to the public in the first half of this year, for at $200 per year per couple or $150 per year for a single user.

Bucking the trend

According to The Future of Fintech, a report released earlier this month by Forrester, the current landscape for business-to-consumer fintechs like Plenty is a challenging one.

“The days of neobanks’ splashy launches, massive hype, and blitzscaling are over. In fact, B2C fintech firms as a whole face more adversity than they have since the dawn of fintech: As one fintech founder quipped, ‘Friends don't let friends make B2C startups,’” Forrester wrote.

Luk — whose product is, of course, B2C — doesn’t disagree.

“Both Channing and I have always been pretty strong first principles thinkers, and if someone’s like, ‘I'm going to start a B2C fintech’, the first thing I would tell them is, ‘No one needs another debit card. No one needs another checking account. And if the product isn't different, I wouldn't do it,’” she said.

“We've made really key decisions from the very beginning [that have made] our product different,” she said. “It serves unique functionality you can't get elsewhere for a demographic that, largely, people have missed – people have missed the fact that there are so many people managing money with another individual,” she said.

She noted that many of the original joint-investment products on the market and even some popular joint credit cards weren’t built for both partners to have equal access to managing those investments.

”We came in from the very beginning knowing that there were a set of key architectural decisions that would be really important to build a multiplayer functionality. That's really different than if you had not planned to build it and now you're trying to build it after the fact,” she said.

November marks a year since OpenAI released ChatGPT into the market, and several large banks are charging ahead to take primacy in harnessing the burgeoning technology.

JPMorgan Chase is walking U.S. regulators through the bank’s first set of generative AI pilot projects to let them see the controls in process, Lori Beer, JPMorgan’s global chief information officer, told Bloomberg.

"It's about helping regulators understand how we build the generative AI models, how we control them, what are the new vectors of risk," she told the wire service. "It's not only what we need to think about, but what they should think about.”

The AI applications JPMorgan is testing include ones that can generate earnings summaries for companies the bank follows, Beer said. The bank is also working on a help-desk service that arms users with problem-solving steps rather than links to related articles, Beer added.

Meanwhile, JPMorgan’s rival, Goldman Sachs, is working on a dozen projects meant to incorporate generative AI into its business practices, George Lee, co-head of the bank's Office of Applied Innovation, told Reuters.

The projects include writing code in English-language commands, and the ability to generate documentation, Lee said, adding that none of the projects are client-facing, out of regulatory concerns.

"We're moving very deliberately, very carefully, very thoughtfully," Lee told Reuters.

Not to be outdone, Morgan Stanley has spent months testing a generative AI bot meant to serve as a virtual assistant for financial advisers who must quickly navigate troves of data. 

While Morgan Stanley chose to develop its tool with OpenAI, JPMorgan Chase went its own way — applying in May to trademark technology it calls IndexGPT, which would use artificial intelligence to select investments for customers.

JPMorgan’s Beer was cautious to note that IndexGPT was just in the application stage and not a product in development. 

"It's not a tomorrow thing, it's one of the spaces in which we've been working, and we want to protect our [intellectual property],” she told Bloomberg.

Beer added she expects it will be at least the first half of 2024 “before we're ready to say anything is in production.”

Goldman’s Lee, meanwhile, said generative AI’s ability to offer responses to financial questions means human financial advisers will need to up their game to earn the fees they charge customers.

"It's a fascinating forcing function for businesses to recognize they need to raise the bar for the services they deliver to clients," Lee told Reuters.

Foteini Agrafioti, chief science officer at the Royal Bank of Canada, told American Banker the technology’s possibilities are “endless in servicing and potentially in advice,” but added it’s “not ready for prime time as much as it would be potentially in other sectors because of the sensitivity of the domain.”

RBC is developing applications with large language models to enable bankers to advise clients while sifting through mountains of policies and procedures. While a proof of concept at this point, the bank plans to deploy the technology later this year, Agrafioti told American Banker, calling it a “good, solid first step toward client servicing because it allows us to have human oversight.”

Regardless of what stage of development various banks label their AI-related projects, one aspect that appears to remain constant is enthusiasm.

In his annual letter to shareholders, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said AI could be integrated into "every single process" of the bank's operations, calling the technology "extraordinary and groundbreaking.”

McKinsey projects that generative AI could deliver up to $340 billion in annual value in the banking industry, including through increased productivity.

But Beer again warned that though it may be easy to “build things quickly” with the technology, “the harder part is the validation and the controls.”

"On this one, you have to see guardrails from regulators to drive the right outcomes," she told Bloomberg.

While Dave, a neobank and personal finance app, has been using artificial intelligence to underwrite its products since the company’s inception in 2017, the fintech’s latest use of generative AI is producing promising results on the platform’s customer service side, said CEO Jason Wilk.

The fintech in December launched DaveGPT, a gen AI-driven chatbot that can respond to customer inquiries in real-time. 

The tool, which replaces its DaveBot, is generating an 89% resolution rate, said Wilk.

“It’s pretty impressive, based on what we used to have with our DaveBot, which was significantly lower,” said Wilk.

DaveBot’s “rules-based model” would generate canned responses, Wilk said, compared to DaveGPT’s “more human, large language model approach.” 

“People really are getting much more to the bottom of what they're looking for,” he said. “On the consumer side, we know that people want real-time responses these days, especially millennials and Gen Z, which is the majority of our audience at this point. They're not wanting to talk to somebody on the phone, they want real-time chat responses if they can get it. And AI is certainly the best way to get a most human-like response with the best accuracy.”

Wilk said Dave used an existing partnership with Aisera, which leverages OpenAI’s capabilities, to access large language models, adjust the content and then come back with the relevant responses. 

Wilk said he envisions a future iteration of the product that involves integrating customers’ financial data in order to offer personalized advice.

“The AI can recommend solutions to your problems, such as, ‘How do I save more money this month?’” he said.

With the rollout of DaveGPT, Dave becomes the latest neobank to fold AI into its offerings. 

Neobank MoneyLion, in May, detailed plans to launch a search feature powered by ChatGPT in order to allow consumers to search for transactions, offers and products on the platform’s finance marketplace.

AI, Wilk said, helps fintechs like Dave serve more customers without staffing up. The technology allows Dave to serve its 9 million customers with only 300 employees, Wilk said.

“We have a lot of operating leverage compared to incumbent banks,” he said. “AI is another lever we have to be able to do more while not growing our headcount in any kind of major way. So that's a really important way that we can scale. We don't need 1,000 more people for customer support. If anything, we can keep our support team the way it is and this allows us to 10x our capabilities.”

Beyond using AI in its customer support, Wilk said the technology has become a critical part of the firm’s operations. 

“DaveGPT is just our customer facing support program, but we're using AI all the way across the company,” he said, adding the fintech uses AI to help underwrite its cash advance product.

“It's really been a critical way for us to improve credit access by giving people access to higher limits, while also keeping our loss rates at a record low,” he said. “The AI can look at thousands of pieces of data from our cash flow-based underwriting that enables us to make better decisions, which again, helps us provide a better experience for credit access with better limits and reduces our loss rates.”

Wilk said he expects gen AI will continue to grow in popularity in the banking and fintech space, both as an underwriting tool and as a means to improve customer satisfaction.

“I think that first and foremost, AI is going to be a game changer for credit,” he said. “And then the customer support stuff will be sort of table stakes which everyone's going to need to keep costs low.”

Novo, a financial solutions platform for small businesses, launched Novo Payroll, which allows any of its customers to run payroll directly from a checking account.

The new solution that rolled out in January is powered by Check, a payroll infrastructure company that developed the product using its payroll application programming interface. Novo Payroll is fully integrated into the fintech’s small business banking platform, streamlining the payroll process in an effort to both save time and ensure regulatory compliance.

“Traditional small business payroll solutions consist of standalone applications characterized by high fees, burdensome cash-on-hand requirements, and either clunky or non-existent integrations between payroll and business bank accounts,” Michael Rangel, founder and CEO of Novo, said in a statement. “In collaboration with Check, we built a payroll solution that simplifies and speeds up the process of paying small business employees.”

Novo Payroll is a brand new product that complements and expands the fintech’s platform, Brad Paterson, EVP of marketing and partnership at Novo, told Banking Dive.

He added that Novo received feedback from its customers, primarily small business owners, that they were worried about complying with several payroll taxes and laws, which vary across the 50 states. They were also paying high fees for the services to process their workers’ payroll.

“There’s a number of payroll options in the market today. Very few are built for small business owners; most are built for more medium-sized businesses and above, which means that they’re charging exorbitant prices,” Paterson said. “We’ve managed to build a product that is streamlined in partnership with Check that does everything a customer needs, allows him to be 100% compliant, but at a fraction of the cost.”

Novo will offer all the essential features of the new product, including tax filing and end of year reports, at $35 per month with an additional fee per worker, the company said.

Through Novo Payroll, small businesses that need additional funds to run a payroll cycle can apply for Novo Funding and, once approved, use the capital immediately.

In August, the Miami-based company received a $125 million facility from Victory Park Capital to provide its customers with working capital through Novo Funding, which gives small businesses a fast and flexible way to access the capital.

Customers using Novo Payroll can contact the support team to get answers to any questions they have about payroll. According to the company, recipients can also receive their paychecks the next day after their payroll is processed at no extra cost.

Novo Payroll, available across 50 states, automates tax filings for small businesses with employees in a single state and multiple states.

“You do still have to file your own business taxes later on; that’s separate, but we do all of the initial withholding and reporting, and that’s what you expect of a payroll company,” Andrew Brown, co-founder and CEO of Check, told Banking Dive. “With Novo [Payroll] powered by Check, you just get the forms directly in the application. You download them, and it’s super simple to then pass those to your business tax filing solution.”

Novo has conducted a beta of the new tool and will make the product available to its customers in the coming weeks. But for now, customers can join the waitlist, which is a way for the company to ensure they get what they need, Paterson clarified.

The launch is also well-timed, he noted, since many small business owners are reassessing their payroll options at the beginning of the year.

“We realized that launching just after peak season was important. There are a number of small business owners making payroll decisions in January and February,” he said. “We have now well over 200,000 small business customers on our platform. Being able to offer it to the right customers at the right time was important, and we needed to move fast as well, [which] we were able to do with Check.”

The year was 2020. Paul Kesserwani’s then-girlfriend (now wife) left their home in San Francisco to be near her family in San Diego. Kesserwani wanted to help her furnish her apartment, but was strapped for cash — he was saving for a ring — so he, for the first time, turned to buy now, pay later.

He financed a mattress through Klarna, a Ring doorbell through Affirm, and a slew of household items through other BNPL providers.

“After three purchases, I was like, ‘I have a computer engineering degree and I have a team of Ph.D.s and I can't for the life of me stay on top of these freaking payments,’” he said. “This is so confusing.”

At the time, Kesserwani was running Cushion, a fintech that had offered automated overdraft fee negotiation since 2016. The venture was successful, refunding millions in overdraft fees up until that point.

Following his first foray into BNPL customership, Kesserwani and his team dove into Cushion’s customer data and found out that customers were leaning heavily on BNPL, not just for large one-time purchases but to finance DoorDash meals, Uber rides and grocery lists.

“[We] realized this was about to get so urgent, and no one was paying attention,” he said of customers’ short-sighted BNPL habits. “So we dropped our thriving first business ... and decided to go all-in on bill pay for the BNPL era.”

The average BNPL customer has four concurrent BNPL loans, according to Bankrate. And, according to data released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in September, many BNPL customers are “financially fragile” — meaning if they had to come up with $2,000 in the next month, they couldn’t do it.

BNPL is a tool used across financial profiles, at least to a point: 14.6% of those surveyed by the Fed with an annual income above $150,000 used BNPL; and 11.6% of people with a credit score above 760 used it.

BNPL take-up rates, however, are notably higher with those whose credit scores are 620 or lower, for those who have been 30 or more days delinquent on a loan in the past year, and for those who have been recently rejected for a credit card. BNPL use goes down, too, when looking at higher income brackets; and when looking at higher levels of education, Fed data shows.

According to Bankrate, more than half of BNPL customers surveyed report having fallen behind on payments.

Switching focus

When Kesserwani and his team had their revelation about BNPL, what Cushion had been focusing on was fighting with banks, rather than addressing the root cause of why their customers were overdrafting in the first place.

By digging through “hundreds of millions of customer transactions,” it became clear what the root cause was: cash flow, or lack thereof. And it became clear that, in the last 20 years, the landscape of consumer bill pay had completely changed.

“Twenty years ago, you had your car payment, your rent, your credit card, and your phone bill, and it was straightforward. Then in the 2010s, subscriptions became a big thing, so now you had to factor in your Netflix, Hulu, Tinder … and that's another five to eight payments you need to make each month,” Kesserwani said.

And in the last three to four years, he noted, the shift was in BNPL: adoptions of the tool completely exploded.

“BNPL is unique in the sense that it's not just a payment you make. It’s a loan with a bunch of characteristics: paying four versus paying six versus paying 12 [installments]; this one has interest, that one doesn't; this is due weekly, that's due monthly. Stacking just two or three BNPL loans by themselves is unmanageable, let alone putting that on top of the tower of subscriptions and other bills,” he said.

“As [bill pay] is getting more complicated, consumers are making more mistakes,” he said. “[We decided to] focus on consumer bill pay — and in that, let’s really focus on a solution for this BNPL era.”

Shifting focus when Cushion was in its prime may have seemed counterintuitive. Kesserwani said it wasn’t easy to let it die and start from scratch, but creating a tool that would help customers get on top of their BNPL loans, along with other monthly account draws, was “urgent,” he thought.

To aggregate a consumer’s bill and subscription payments into Cushion’s feed was easy with Plaid, a popular fintech that gets real-time consumer financial data through contracts with banks and the use of screen scraping.

But aggregating BNPL payments into a feed required engineering on Cushion’s own part.

“These BNPL operators have no [application programming interfaces], and they're very hard to scrape because they don't use username and passwords. They use phone-based authentication,” Kesserwani said. “All of us became BNPL customers to better understand the landscape, and we learned that they email you — they email you, ‘Hey, your order’s confirmed;’ they send you another email, ‘Here's your loan ID;’ then they send you another email and another email. ... So we hired a team of Ph.D.s in machine learning. They figured out a way to reconstruct all of your loans based on just looking at your email inbox.”

Challenges there included a rigorous multi-month audit by Google, to gain access to customer Gmail inboxes; and further, navigating the “sloppiness” of some smaller BNPL operators who might not even send a loan ID via email.

“It turned into a full-time job for a whole team for two years to finally build out the system the way we needed to,” he said.

A revamped Cushion was launched earlier this year.

Credit assistance

Kesserwani explained, with emphasis, that he’s “not anti-BNPL by any means.”

“I use it all the time,” he said. “But consumers do not have enough guardrails around it.”

Most BNPL providers don’t report to the credit bureaus. That means when BNPL providers lend to a consumer, they’re doing so without a complete credit profile.

“Say I get a loan from Affirm for $800. If Affirm doesn't tell the credit bureaus about that, then Klarna goes to underwrite me, and I appear creditworthy to them, but they don't know about my $800 Affirm loan. Then Klarna gives me a $500 loan, [which] they also don’t report to the credit bureaus; and before I know it, I’ve now signed up with seven different BNPL companies, all of which have a limit to how much they’re willing to lend [me] … and all of which underwrote me incorrectly,” he noted.

In addition to its BNPL and bill aggregator, Cushion offers a credit-building virtual payment card. For between $4.99 and $12.99, customers get a virtual payment card number that they can provide to billers and BNPL providers. Cushion reports their payments to the credit bureaus monthly, thus helping customers build credit.

Customers simply must change their preferred payment card within a biller’s system. On the back end, the Cushion card pulls directly from a customer’s bank account or debit card.

When consumers find out their BNPL payments aren’t being reported to the credit bureaus, they think, so-says Kesserwani, “’Well wait a second, I'm taking a loan, and I'm paying it back on time. Why am I not getting credit for doing my end of the bargain here, which is to pay back my loan?’”

“We have a system now set up where we're able to report those payments to Experian, and we're in talks right now with TransUnion and Equifax,” he said.

Regions Bank customers can now have their rent, cell phone and utility payments reported to the three major credit bureaus through a new partnership with credit-building platform Self Financial, the lender announced in November.

The partnership is meant to give consumers a more comprehensive view of their financial health, and allows them to build credit without having to take on new debt, the Birmingham, Alabama-based bank said.

“We were drawn to work with Regions because of our shared commitment to working toward financial inclusion,” Chris LaConte, chief strategy officer at Self Financial, said in a statement. “Working with Regions enables us to support more consumers who either are new to establishing credit, or they’re in need of solutions that reflect how they’re already responsibly managing bills and other payments.”

The fintech’s rent and utility payment reporting service is available to Region’s customers for $6.95 a month.

While millions of Americans rent homes, many are not recognized by the credit bureaus for successfully making those payments, LaConte said.

“Self addresses this problem by enabling consumers to have their payment histories taken into account so they can get the credit they deserve,” he said.

More than 45 million consumers in the U.S. lack sufficient credit history to either generate a credit report or a credit score, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. 

This demographic is more likely to face limited employment options and rely more heavily on high-cost alternative financial products, the Kansas City Fed found.

Acknowledging the gap, bank regulators have encouraged lenders to consider using alternative data to determine creditworthiness.

In a joint statement in 2019, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the National Credit Union Administration noted that using alternative data could help consumers obtain additional products and more favorable pricing and terms.

“The agencies recognize that use of alternative data in a manner consistent with applicable consumer protection laws may improve the speed and accuracy of credit decisions and may help firms evaluate the creditworthiness of consumers who currently may not obtain credit in the mainstream credit system,” the regulators said. 

Meanwhile, lawmakers are pushing legislation that would expand the type of data credit bureaus use in factoring consumers’ credit scores. 

The Credit Access and Inclusion Act, introduced by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-WV, and Tim Scott, R-SC, would permit property owners and utility and telecom providers to report payments data to credit reporting agencies.

For some banks, the decision to operate an expensive and compliance-heavy cannabis banking program has been rewarded with access to cheap deposits. 

With many banks still wary of the risks and compliance burdens associated with serving the sector, firms that choose to bank the industry have been able to justify the high cost and labor by implementing risk-based pricing and non-interest-bearing accounts.

But as more banks and financial institutions are getting into the game, some banks are feeling the pressure to rethink their strategies.

“Risk-based pricing doesn't always work when you’re trying to compete with the bank down the road,” said Chris Call, CEO of Santa Rosa, California-based North Bay Credit Union.

Faced with growing competition, the credit union decided to launch interest-bearing cannabis accounts to differentiate itself from competitors, Call said at the PBC Conference in Washington in September.

“Our credit union is probably one of the few institutions that actually pays interest on cannabis deposits,” Call said. “We sort of have a competitive situation where we need to have that extra edge to offer to our customers out in California.”

North Bay, an early entrant into the cannabis banking space, has been offering accounts for marijuana-related firms since 2017, shortly after the drug was legalized for recreational use in the state in 2016.

The credit union has been offering interest on cannabis accounts for over a year now, Call told Banking Dive. North Bay has about 300 cannabis accounts and pays 2.75% interest on those accounts, Call said.

The credit union’s portfolio of cannabis accounts has grown steadily over the past couple of years, with interest on accounts being one of several factors contributing to the growth, Call said.

“It is certainly much appreciated by our customers and contributes to their loyalty in staying with us in the face of growing competition,” he said.  

In some cases, the interest earnings on the accounts offsets the credit union’s monthly account fee, Call said.

“Our philosophy has always been to treat our [marijuana-related business] accounts as much like any other business account as possible,” he said. “Greenbax Marketplace is our cannabis banking subsidiary, and I think our range of services and the level of customer support we provide are also significant factors in our growth.”

More competition

With the majority of banks’ unwillingness to serve the cannabis sector, the industry’s financial services options have historically been limited. 

But a growing public acceptance of marijuana and lawmakers’ increasing support for legislation that aims to make it easier for banks to serve the sector, have made the space more palatable for institutions looking for new ways to grow deposits. 

According to data from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, 812 banks and credit unions are actively serving cannabis business clients, based on cannabis business-related suspicious activity reports filed in the second quarter of 2023.

FinCEN reports an increase from 807 firms in the first quarter and 773 in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Meanwhile, legislation that would make it easier for banks to serve state-legal cannabis firms is set for a historic vote in front of the Senate Banking Committee. Proponents say the Secure And Fair Enforcement Regulation Banking Act is the solution to the largely cash-based nature of the cannabis industry, as it would encourage more banks to serve the sector.

As more banks become comfortable banking cannabis clients, firms will need to find ways to differentiate their cannabis programs to stay competitive, whether it be offering interest on cannabis accounts, or lowering monthly fees, said Tony Repanich, president and chief operating officer of Shield Compliance.

“We're already seeing that banks are doing a trade-off between service charges and getting deposit accounts. We're seeing softening of fees as the bankers are willing to do that trade-off,” said Repanich, whose Seattle-based firm provides financial institutions with cannabis banking compliance software. 

Repanich said he’s also seeing banks use account analysis on marijuana-related accounts. 

Instead of paying interest, firms are giving their cannabis clients credit toward their service charges, and encouraging them to keep higher balances at the bank to cover monthly fees.

“Bankers have to look at their total deposit strategy,” Repanich said. “If I'm running CD specials at 5% for nine months, but I could instead get that next cannabis company and additional balances, and I only have to pay them 2% – that 3% is a lot.”

As more banks choose to serve cannabis clients, lenders will have to consider strategies for high-balance cannabis accounts if they want to retain those deposits, he said.

“If I'm the owner of a [cannabis] business and I have hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting in the bank, at some point, my board is gonna say, ‘Why aren't we at least earning some interest?’”

Differentiated services

But not all bankers are on board with paying interest on cannabis deposits, arguing the cost of operating a cannabis banking program makes the prospect unfeasible.  

Bank Michigan Senior Vice President Brenda Brandom said she doesn’t foresee her bank offering interest on cannabis deposits unless the entire market adopts the strategy.

“There is too much work involved,” said Brandom, who heads the Brooklyn, Michigan-based bank’s cannabis banking and treasury management programs. “It’s too time consuming and takes too many people doing manual work to get these customers onboarded.” 

Nicole Perry, vice president and senior treasury management officer at Mason, Michigan-based Dart Bank said her institution also does not offer interest on cannabis accounts, a decision the firm made when it first launched the program in 2018.

The bank’s cannabis customers, however, ask for it all the time, she said.

“They want to be treated like a traditional business, but it’s not traditional,” said Perry.

As competition increases in their market, Brandom and Perry said they are leaning on old-fashioned customer service to both attract and retain cannabis clients.

When a prospective client noted that a competitor was offering interest-bearing cannabis deposits and asked if Bank Michigan could do the same, Brandom said she persuaded the client to join her firm after making the argument her bank could provide a better service. 

Perry said her bank is facing competition from new entrants who are undercutting Dart Bank’s cannabis account fees. 

“There are tons of banks coming in the state of Michigan that are direct competitors, and they'll try and charge $50 a month. There's no way that you can manage a [cannabis] account for $50 a month,” she said. “You're not covering your costs. You're losing money in that aspect.”

Despite Dart’s higher fees, Perry said she has had several cannabis clients return to her firm after trying to save money at a competing institution that ultimately didn’t meet their expectations. 

“It's not only based on fees. It's based on the experience that you give your customer and your reputation,” she said. “While fees are an issue, it’s about selling yourself and being confident in your program.”