Hello, I'm Scarlett Seber with Money 2020, and I have a great guest today.
We have Shruti Patel, who is executive vice president, Chief Product Officer at US Bank.
So, One of the things that makes us so great, Shruti, is that actually US Bank won the Grand Prix last year, not in the banking category in this case, but in the partnerships category with the partnership with Green Light, which is so exciting.
But can you tell us a little bit more about why US Bank chose to partner with Green Light and, and tell me a bit more about the partnership?
Well, first, Of all, thank you for recognizing us for the Grand Prix Award for partnerships.
Our teams were thrilled.
Partnership has been a huge element of how we bring products faster to market, and we over the years have been partnering with very innovative FinTechs in this space.
Green Light was one such partner.
They were solving a very important problem for our consumer bank customers, which is how do we help our consumer bank parents population raise socially responsible children.
By helping them manage their spend and budgeting needs effectively, Green Light was able to get that much faster to market, and we could deploy it at scale to a large, broad audience within our consumer bank.
And so we were delighted to partner with them.
We're seeing really good momentum coming out of that partnership.
A lot of parents and children are already engaging and monitoring their spend very effectively.
That's amazing.
And as a mother of a 2 and 5 year old boy, I early days, but you can already start to understand the importance of financial literacy and education and kind of building the next generation of uh Of, of people here when it comes to that financial literacy.
So, let's talk about the banking category in specific.
You get to see a lot that's going on.
Money 2020 has always kind of sat at the hearts of payments and, and banking.
From your perspective, Shruti, where are you seeing the biggest trends as it relates to banking in particular?
So many, uh, you know, I, it would be amiss if I didn't mention AI.
I think we are, you know, noticing that AI is no longer an emerging trend.
It's a fully established trend.
We are beginning to see a lot of AI use cases, specifically in banking.
It's helping us deploy at scale, solving.
Of our underwriting, our fraud detection capabilities, how do we get access to capital in a very frictionless but in a very accelerated manner to some of the small businesses as well as consumers who bank with us.
Another one is customer operations, you know, 24 hour banking, helping our customers support transcription with transcription, with synthesis of the customer relationship data.
So when a customer calls into our operations, we are able to help them in a much faster and efficient manner.
The second one I would say stablecoins and tokenized deposits.
We are really looking forward to seeing some great innovation coming out of the fintechs and the tech companies right now.
How can we realistically deploy some of this at scale and solve true customer needs?
I love that.
So many great things there.
The fraud piece that you talked about, we've certainly seen a lot from our side looking at this globally.
People are thinking about how to utilize AI specifically to solve some things for fraud, and then, then there's companies who are coming to solve because the, the new advancements with AI and the problems with fraud with that.
So, great examples there.
So, let's talk about maybe, you know, a little bit of advice for those who would be, who are going to be applying and submitting for the banking category.
What, when you're thinking as the president, what type of entries are you looking for?
Like what are you gonna get excited about?
Uh, I think the jury and I will be looking for, uh, a lot of companies which are solving true customer needs, but can able, but are able to deploy the technology at scale.
Uh, a lot of the companies, uh, are able to come up with very differentiated and innovative use cases, but deploying it at scale or meeting true customer needs sometimes is a challenge.
And so everybody in the fintech, banking issuer or network industry, if you have a great idea, a great innovation, which is solving a true customer needs and can be easily deployed, please submit for the awards because you're waiting for it.
So let's talk about customers' needs for a second.
We had your lovely CEO Gunjan Kitia, who uh keynoted at Money 2020 Vegas back in October, and she was really talking about the transformative work that US Bank.
Has done in in your lens, in your view, when you think about the business banking in particular, what problems, what customer needs are you really focusing on to help the business banking world especially solve?
So that's a great question.
Um, I think we're solving for a lot of bundling needs, and what I mean by that is we are finding a lot of our small businesses are really beginning to rely on their banks for a one-stop shop across banking, their payment solutions and software.
Uh, we partnered with a lot of really good fintechs over the last couple of years.
We launched with Melio.
We launched with Gusto, embedded bill pay, embedded payroll capabilities, and this is really because our customers are not only looking to bank with us on simple operating accounts or saving accounts, but they're looking for money movement capabilities.
They're looking for real-time.
Uh, Transfers, uh, but in addition they want to be, uh, using some of the sophisticated account payables, accounts receivables, or payroll capabilities all free within our online banking.
Uh, our small businesses constantly complain about the cost that they're incurring on standalone software and so we're trying to bundle a lot of our offerings within the banking framework.
The second one I would say our small businesses need access to capital and so anything and everything we can do in terms of fraud detection, in terms of lending faster to our small businesses as they're setting up their businesses or growing their established practices, we want to make sure that access to capital is really easy for them.
And so.
Super focused on bundling, uh, whether that's through banking and payments or also software applications as well as access to capital.
It's so interesting the concept of bundling back because when you think about the first wave of FinTech, it was all about unbundling the bank and now actually, especially for your small business customers, it's about making it easier and accessible in one place.
Um.
Which is really interesting.
So, Mary Ellen Iskandarian, who's the CEO of Women's World Bank, uh, banking is one of the presidents as well.
So we were talking a lot about inclusion and financial inclusion.
I'm curious from, from your lens, Shruti, when you're thinking about this from a business owner's perspective in business banking, where do you see opportunities as it relates to financial empowerment and financial access?
Again, a great question.
When we do product development at US Bank, inclusivity is one of the top anchors we go after.
So we want our products to be inclusive.
We want our processes to be inclusive.
And then we follow a very digital plus human centric approach, and what I mean by that is we have a huge team of business access advisers who work in our footprint markets.
They work directly with businesses on financial literacy, business literacy, uh, essentially educating them on tools and services.
It's all free and it's not only for our small business customers, it's for any small business who needs our.
Help, we also recently partnered with Next Street and we launched a business resource central hub.
It's a free online portal which small businesses can access, and we have multiple courses, part of the curriculum which small businesses can essentially think about how to manage their books, how do they think about ledger, how do they think about access to capital or setting up an online website, and so.
Uh, that portal, or rather the business resource hub has been a great success story.
We see a lot of businesses engaging with the hub, uh, and again, it's not just for US bank customers, it's for everyone.
And so the idea is, along with our human centric approach of business access advisors who can help all of these businesses in the market, we also have access to online capabilities which they can as well use for their businesses.
One of the things that's most resonated is listening to your feedback on these questions is, is how proactive US Bank has been on partnerships and, and leveraging, you know, best in class capabilities across the board.
Well, with that, that is all, Shruti.
Thank you so much.
Again, we have Shruti Patel, who is the EVP and CPO of US Bank, and you can meet Shruti, the rest of the team, go ahead and submit those entries for the banking category.
We'll see what happens.
In the meantime, back over to you.
