Piper | Sandler Bank FinTech Showcase Interview – Digital Delivery in Banking

Robert Albertson
Joining us today is founder and CEO Mike Sanchez, accompanied by an active client, Ganesh Kumar, COO of OFG Bancorp. Mike, we interviewed you before on Finxact, but for those who haven’t seen it give us a little background on your history in FinTech and what led you to build Savana.

Michael Sanchez
Sure, and thank you for inviting me to this event, Robert. I am a second-generation career FinTech core banking software guy. Back in the early 70s, my dad wrote one of the first real time banking systems in the country. In 1979, I started a company called Sanchez Computer Associates, with my dad and my brother Frank. We built a real time core banking system which became very popular with hundreds of banks around the world. In 2004 we merged with FIS, one of the large core banking providers here in the United States. I started their international division and grew it substantially.

In the meantime, I was an investor at another company that had a very exciting technology for business process and workflow automation. That company ended up becoming Savana. We’ll go into more detail on what that does. I ended up acquiring the software assets of that company, and then began building solutions around financial services. Then about six years ago, we started a company called Finxact. My brother and I were the founders of that company. That company’s goal was to build a next generation core banking system using modern API-first and cloud technology, to really upgrade what we started building in the 1980s. That company ended up being acquired by Fiserv, and now is a Fiserv product. So that’s my history in financial services technology.

RA
Tell us more broadly about Savana and the organization you have assembled to deliver it. Give us an overview if you would, please. How many people do you have at Savana?

MS
Savana was originally built as a process automation technology company that wasn’t industry specific. When I acquired it we made it specific to financial services. We ended up building a lot of expertise in retail banking, commercial banking, mortgage, and payments. Our purpose was to automate processes for those types of products.

Our earlier software serves about 5,000 banks around the world. It is used for things like credit card disputes, call center automation, back-office services and so on. Through that process we became experts in many areas of banking automation. When we started Finxact, we saw an opportunity because of the whole new kind of open banking standards that were coming out of Europe and API banking that was being touted around the world, to really take advantage of our expertise and build a whole new platform. This became the Savana digital delivery platform. That’s a bit of background, but we’ve been around for a while. We have very strong process automation capabilities, specifically as it relates to banking.

We have about 200 people at Savana now and we’re growing. This year, we’re almost doubling in size. It looks like that growth is continuing over the next year as well, even with the economy the way it is. We see a lot of need for automation in banking, specifically for banks to compete with FinTechs. We allow banks to do that with a new digital delivery platform, and that is what we built.

RA
What is a digital delivery platform exactly?

MS
It’s a technology that orchestrates a bank’s process between cores and banking channel. So basically, it deals with customer engagement, customer requests for services and banks’ regulatory and internal processes. This includes customer onboarding, account origination, customer servicing, and regulatory processes that need to be complied with by the banks. The software orchestrates all processes, regardless of whether it’s a process that has to have multiple systems talk to each other or people that get involved in fulfillment.

The technology orchestrates an end-to-end process, and the program doesn’t care about which channel the customer comes in; it could be a mobile consumer self-directed channel, it could be through a call center, it could be through a branch, it could be the bankers themselves doing processes on behalf of customers. The technology must orchestrate the entire process end-to-end. That’s how it becomes a digital delivery platform versus what would be considered a manual system where a lot of banks basically have manual processes that aren’t captured by technology.

It’s very hard to deliver to a customer a consistent service without having technology orchestrate the entire process end-to-end. What we’ve done is taken that away from the channels themselves. This means the call center doesn’t have its own processes, the branch doesn’t have its own processes, consumer self-service apps don’t have their own processes. Savana put all these processes into a library for the bank. At that point it’s really the institution’s processes that can be delivered seamlessly to all channels. The customer ends up getting a very consistent service, regardless of how they do business with a bank. It’s essentially wrapping a core, a product engine, with an orchestration platform and operationalizing that core so it can be delivered through any channel for any product to customers.

RA
So the customers really see the difference.

MS
Customers absolutely see the difference because they’re handled consistently, regardless of how they do business with an institution. Even if they started a process – say they started a process on their mobile device, and then they got stuck. They could then call the call center and the call center would have a record of what they did. An employee could then just take that process forward and help the customer through it. So it’s a very consistent, frictionless way for a customer to be serviced by a bank for all products and channels.

RA
How does it help banks compete with other digital brands?

MS
Well, it essentially makes them a digital brand. They can compete because they’re on a level technology playing field. We also support some digital brands that are non-bank FinTechs using our technology. Most customers are banks that need to compete with FinTechs and need to be able to deliver anything, any of their products to customers regardless of how they want to bank or when they want to bank. That’s what digital delivery is, the ability for people to choose how they want to bank and then get fulfilled in a consistent fashion through technology. It really gives the bank the same capabilities as a brand new FinTech, even if they don’t have all their tech, their legacy technology upgraded.

RA
I guess a broader question would be how does Savana help legacy banks compete as well?

MS
We help legacy banks compete through the ability to put this technology not only on a new core, like the Finxact core, we can also put this technology on legacy cores as well. That allows us to free that core up so it can deliver in a digital fashion to the customers.

Many of the cores were written “monolithic”, making everything around them purpose built for that core. They were built for an age of branch banking, and everything else is a struggle for those cores because they don’t have the capability to deliver services right to your mobile phone, for instance. We actually API-enable a legacy core, so that you can use new tools around it, you can use new technology, and you can deliver everything seamlessly to customers. That’s how we can help a legacy bank with legacy core systems.

RA
Go into the meaning and details of API Banking, please, what does it ultimately do?

MS
APIs, which stands for application programming interface, allows dissimilar systems or computer applications to access data and services through a defined protocol or language. The API is just a way of describing the way to talk to an application. It might be a wealth management app that wants to be able to import the last month’s transactions. You can call the bank API, and say, “give me the last month transactions,” and the API would bring those into the wealth management application. The wealth management application would then do its own work with that data.

It’s not just data, some of these APIs are for services. There could be a service that calculates the payoff of a loan X days in the future. That’s a calculation that the bank can do. Another application can call the loan payoff API to request the payoff amount for a loan on a chosen date. The API would return that information to the other application that’s looking for it.

APIs are a way to integrate dissimilar software to each other. Banks used to try to do this through middleware and proprietary interfaces, but it’s a lot easier to do with APIs. This is because it doesn’t have any dependencies except for proper syntax, it’s an atomic function. You can just call the API at any time, and it gives you the information if you’re authorized. All that authorization is embedded in the technology that allows banks to share their data with third parties. API banking really opens the banking system to richer applications. That’s been a trend and it’s going to continue.

RA
So would I sum it up correctly by saying, Savana basically enables API capability within legacy core systems?

MS
That is correct. We can help legacy cores by connecting them to the digital delivery platform. It automatically generates all the APIs that are required at that point for other applications to be able to share that data. Again, there’s a lot of security around it, it’s very technically complex as far as authentication, entitlements, and things like that. Once all that is locked down, then there’s the ability for even legacy cores to share their data and services in a modern API-based infrastructure.

RA
Tell us a little bit about the customer experience then, both consumer and commercial, once Savana has been deployed in a bank.

MS
There are a whole bunch of vendors out there that have been selling banks consumer direct solutions, mostly for mobile phones. They’ve been building packaged applications. What we’ve done at Savana is a little different. We’ve taken the bank’s processes and expose them as APIs. A bank can leverage these services to quickly build its own unique user experience and process flows for their customers. That’s a whole new game changer.

Banks want to control the experience their customers have with their brand, their own flow, look and feel and patterns. The Savana solution allows a bank to basically hire a marketing company. That marketing company can do their own consumer studies to determine how they want to interact with customers based on the needs of their unique target demographics and product offering. We had a customer that’s going live build a consumer mobile banking application in under two weeks by leveraging Savana’s APIs. These things typically take years because the mobile apps that are out there have a lot of embedded banking processes that must otherwise be written into the app itself. We’ve separated the experience and flow from the process by exposing the processes APIs so that you can create the experience quickly.

RA
Tell us a little bit about the actual deployment of Savana. How long does it take to get a bank up and running?

MS
That depends on what they’re doing. If they’re connecting Savana to an old core that we haven’t integrated with there’s some work to do the integration to the core. If we’ve done something before with a core like Finxact, we basically have an out of the box configuration that a bank can use as fast as they want to use it. The bank will need to go through their own testing and configuration process, but there’s not a lot of coding involved to launch an initiative in a new bank.

If there’s a conversion involved, that takes some planning. In those cases, you must convert the core data to a new core that’s enabled by Savana. There is work involved in doing the data mapping from the old core to the new core. So it can take anywhere from three months for a new launch to six to twelve months for a full conversion.

RA
You are a co-founder of Finxact’s next generation core. How does Savana help banks get the most out of both the new and legacy cores? What’s the difference?

MS
The core is the System of Record for banking products. It is the system that defines product behavior, processes customer transactions, stores balances, and calculates interest and fees. The two main differences between legacy cores and new cores is the ability to generate new products and the ability to co-exist seamlessly in the new 24X7 digitally connected world. What Savana does for both old cores and new cores is to allow them to operate seamlessly and efficiently in the digital world. For those banks looking to differentiate themselves based upon product innovation, moving to a new core is highly advantageous.

So you can think about it as Amazon Prime as an analogy. They don’t build the product, but they get it to your door quickly and efficiently. That’s what Savana does for banking product. We get that product to your door, in a virtual sense, to whatever door you prefer to use to bank. The new cores will allow you to innovate product. We automatically expose and deliver the capabilities of new product to customers any way they want to bank. With an old core, we can get their existing products out into a digital world and at the same time help position for an easier transition to a new core in the future.

RA
Let’s talk about a new core. How does Savana help banks go through this digital transformation journey into Generation 3 systems?

MS
That’s an important part of the value Savana provides. If you put Savana’s digital delivery platform on an older core you’ve now meaningfully upgraded the delivery of products and services to your customers. Your legacy systems, your call centers, your mobile app, everything is now delivered under a new architecture. And the platform is designed to support more than one core simultaneously to support homogenous servicing of customer accounts that are in different cores. For example, a customer might have a checking account, a mortgage and a credit card in different cores. Our architecture allows them to be serviced simultaneously in the same session either for bank assisted servicing or on a consumers mobile banking app.

This multi-core servicing capability can enable a seamless transition from an old core to a new core. You can connect the old core at the same time as you connect the new core. This might be done initially as a sidecar to deliver innovative new products without having to convert all the customer existing accounts to the new core. And then when it’s time to convert you’re moving data between cores that are already connected to customers, bankers and back-end systems.

A traditional conversion process ends up upsetting and disrupting the whole bank and its customers. One of the reasons core conversions are so complex is that there are too many changes required at once. The call center has all new procedures, the branches have all new procedures, the back-office has all new processes, the customers might have a whole new mobile app. All these changes are occurring while you’re trying to change the core. It is very risky and can be chaotic.

By putting in a modern delivery system on top of an old core it becomes a much easier problem to solve. You’re basically just moving data from an old core to a new core after testing it over several monthly cycles to ensure everything behaves properly. Then when everything works as expected and everything balances, you just turn the switch and move the data. It’s been one of the biggest problems to solve in the industry, the whole legacy transformation issue. Savana really helps because we’ve taken a lot of complexity and variables out of that that equation. So now it’s just one variable because everything that affects customers, or the banks personnel, is already in place and doesn’t change with the conversion.

RA
If one deploys Savana on a legacy core what is the advantage of going to a Generation 3 core, what’s added?

MS
You get the product innovation capabilities with Gen 3 cores. You get to invent new products for customers. That’s very important. As all banks are competing in the virtual world their differentiation is not their physical location anymore. Banks must start competing on a product level, a price level and on an experience level.

The product level is especially important. One new thing that FinTechs have offered recently called savings pockets is a great example. These really are multiple accounts that look like one account. Each account could have separate goals, separate funding mechanisms, separate interest rates, but it’s under a single savings plan. They call them pockets. You’re saving money for college, saving money for a car, you’re saving money for whatever. You assign those goals to different pockets, and they behave differently. This can’t be done in an old core. You need a new core that enables concepts like positions under an account.

You could even have a single account which has a deposit and a loan in the same account. Basically, when the balance flips below zero, it becomes a loan, when it goes above zero it becomes a deposit. You don’t have to move it around between a deposit and loan accounts, or overdraft protection. There are all kinds of things that a new core can do to innovate products once you can manipulate the behavior of a product without coding. I think that’ll be very important in the future, to give you the technology (or weapon) to compete against anybody. If you have the Savana digital delivery platform, deploying these new innovative products becomes very easy through any banking channel.

RA
How many customers do you have on Savana at the moment?

MS
Aside from historical customers on our previous generation of software we have about ten client banks and FinTechs using Savana’s new Digital Delivery platform right now in production. There are a number of other entities going live between now and the end of this year. Things are picking up quite a bit. There are also a lot of prospects, mostly among the banks. The more recent banks are regionals like Ganesh’s bank, from $10B to $500B+ in assets.

RA
Let’s bring Ganesh into the discussion here. Ganesh, tell us a little bit about your bank first.

Ganesh Kumar
Sure, thank you. OFG Bancorp’s main subsidiary is Oriental Bank. The bank is about $11 billion in assets, operating in Puerto Rico and stateside for commercial lending business. We look at our digital journey from two different perspectives. One is what we call the “digital transformation” of the legacy bank. Our other angle is to try to pursue a path of innovation to come up with new business models that would mimic FinTechs and enable the bank to level the playing field with a very specific offering and value proposition to the customer base that we serve.

One thing that we saw in common was that banks need to own the brain. Meaning banks need to control the logic of business processes and what value we bring. Oftentimes, that’s the problem with banks. What they do is they want to do something good for customers, but they are held captive by legacy vendors who sell legacy core banking. When we say core banking, it’s not just a ledger or a bunch of ledgers maintaining customer accounts. The systems that we buy are a hodgepodge of application logic encoded.

When Mike talks about inability to create innovative products, it’s not the core banking ledger itself that prevents banks. More often it is the logic that they built and our inability to tap into it. We realize that in order for us to reinvent ourselves on those perspectives that I talked about is to have this logic, and build out according to how we want to treat our customers and how we want to go to the market and encode that. If I just follow what is provided in a legacy platform, that business logic is going to be available to thousands of bank customers. Therefore, there is not going to be any differentiation that we can hang our coat from and go to the market.

In realizing this we wanted to build our own logic. We cannot do this on our own on a day one to day two basis. We already invested a lot of dollars, and not many of our initiatives are greenfield initiatives. We have to live with the investments that we’ve already sunk into this business. What we can do is pursue the transformation in a very incremental, iterated fashion. So that it changes the culture of the organization from a very static dull organization to one that realizes what’s needed and what could be done and pursues those changes on a continuous basis.

In order to make this happen, there are a couple of things that need to happen on the technology side. At the end of the day this industry is very much enabled by technology. Technology, until now, had been the primary hurdle for banks to pursue some of these things. With Savana we are moving forward. If and when we move to a new core, we cannot move everything in one shot. It’s a huge disruption for the organization. You don’t want to put the customers and employees into a quantum change like that.

Where Savana comes into play is to help create this logical business via a logic layer. That’s what Mike refers to as the orchestration layer. In a very gradual manner, we can hook it back to the cores – whether it be modern or the legacy core that we have. We then also hook it to the various platforms on which the customers normally interface. We’ve gone one step further in our bank in the sense that we are even replacing the banker facing systems using the same orchestration layer.

So, what’s the advantage? The logic that we have created is very unique to the way we want to deal with our customers. The same logic that’s customer facing is also visible to the banker. The steps that you go through are exactly the same whether you interact with the banker, call center or through a cell service application. That is the primary advantage that we have in owning this brain. I think that’s where Savana plays a key role for me. Savana not only brings the common normal things that Mike’s talking about in the sense that the building blocks and the foundational blocks are already there. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. On top of it I can build my own orchestration of different processes that make us unique in the market. For instance, we are trying to build in onboarding in a very different way. We could do that, but we don’t have to build it from scratch because Savana has already done parts of it that we can reassemble.

I think there is a common thread towards transformation. Transformation is not migration from brick- and-mortar setup to a digital platform. That’s not what we are talking about. We are transforming our business model and going to market. That’s exactly what we want to do with our digital presence too. I think the customer experience we can provide through Savana is a huge advantage the system provides.

RA
That’s a very interesting explanation. Can you take it one step further? How has Savana allowed OFG to differentiate? What competitive changes have occurred between you and the rest?

GK
Everybody has found religion now. They’ve been talking about digital transformation for quite a while. For us, digital transformation is not an IT project, it’s not technology alone. It is largely technology enabled, but you have to reinvent the way that you’re going to market.

Therefore, it has some benefits in terms of customer experience. We’re not overly focused on traditional things like net promoter scores and patting ourselves on the back saying it went from 60.5 to 62.4. I think that’s where Puerto Rico gets a little interesting, this market is very well contained. We know by deploying this technology we have achieved differentiation in terms of customer acquisition and market share growth. That’s a quantitative measure that we have. You can see that in our public presentations and things like that. From the thought leadership perspective in the market, we were the first to say we are actively moving away from a brick and mortar and moving towards a very digitally enabled bank. This transition predated the hurricane we had in 2017 as well the pandemic. We’ve had capabilities in place that took us through a couple of different crises, and we didn’t miss a beat in terms of our ability to serve customers on a continuous basis.

The proof is in the pudding. In a market where there are three banks, we were able to differentiate ourselves. It’s not playing simple anymore, Goldilocks, Mama Bear, Papa Bear and Baby Bear strategy, it’s something different. We were on top of it, and we were able to improve our customer experience and satisfaction. These improvements have led to very tangible market share growth. We could have achieved differentiation in a much different way, but we chose to go the route of adopting digital technologies. Savana allowed us to implement our process in the way we wanted to and allowed us to delve into digital banking without an undue amount of friction.

RA
Can you see clear market share gain attributable to Savana?

GK
I think we have tried and tested our digital transformation with other vendors, we’ve relied on other vendors. We have come to rely on Savana as our primary vendor for our digital efforts. In fact, we are actively looking into eliminating the other business process automation vendors in play because we don’t see the need for other solutions to augment Savana. Mike can speak to the fact that we have engagements going on with Savana where they are able to come and work with us and fill that gap. At the end of the day, it’s the organization’s or the software vendor’s openness to work with the client in order to make sure that some of their unique value proposition and needs are met. That’s why we like working with Mike and Mike’s team.

RA
What was initially going through your mind and how did you come upon Savana? Were there or are there alternatives to Savana?

GK
Mike and I met long ago when I was consulting with a bank in Thailand. It was the first core that Mike and Mike’s brother had built and were implementing in Thailand. That was my first introduction to the online real time banking that Mike was talking about. We’ve been longtime FIS customers. We had experience with predecessors of Savana, which was the mortgage origination software. In the last two years or so we have come to rely on Savana. Going forward Savana would be the key vendor or base for our ongoing digital venture.

What have we used in the past? In the past, legacy vendors locked down into their business logic. The only way we had pursued was to build pretty front-end interfaces. That was the approach. Quickly, you realize that the user experience, user interface layer, is not just the one that’s doing the trick because it is only scratching the surface. One quickly realizes that you need the data to be integrated and information to be integrated to be presented and used in a very coherent manner. Then you start looking into the backend technologies to integrate the data. Nevertheless, I think without this orchestration layer that Mike is talking about, you are saddled with the limitations that the legacy vendor brings to you in the form of the business processes. To buy a legacy vendor core banking solution, I have to necessarily conform my organizational processes to the legacy vendor processes. There’s no way to reconfigure them in the way that I want to do. By doing differently I can either gather market differentiation or improve customer satisfaction. I don’t have that luxury to do so because you’re locked in.

I think that’s the biggest thing that I would point out. Whereas with Savana I have seen a focus on enabling banks like us, something I hope Mike continues. Not only bringing the prebuilt technology and processes that he’s talking about, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but giving us the ability to reconfigure these processes in a way that our bank can achieve technology differentiation. We don’t want to be beholden to the logic, and the business logic and process that the vendor is expecting us to do. Savana allows these processes to be our own.

MS
Everything that we provide to Ganesh and other customers is configurable without code. If he wants to eliminate a process, we give him a framework which tells you how you start, how to make this desired change. The bank will look at it and see if they like the change. You don’t have to be a coder. You’re not going into the logic to change it. The logic allows you to change it. You can add processes, steps. For instance, you want somebody to look at something over $5,000, you just say, if this is over $5,000 send it to this group and they’ll approve it. Everything is configurable, versus requiring programmers and technicians to change.

RA
So the simplistic conclusion that I would come to is that Savana is completely customizable?

MS
I would say Savana is completely configurable.

GK
I think the reason why we are trying to make that differentiation is once you go to the path of customized software you’ve got to think in terms of total cost of ownership of the technology and things like that. So, if we have to customize everything we buy from Savana, we might as well write it ourselves. Whereas over here some of the integrations are already there. Some of the base level logic, routine functions are already there. Then you can configure them the way that you want within the organization.

RA
Let me re-ask that question to Mike. Are there alternatives to Savana? Are you unique?

MS
We are unique. I’m not just saying it’s because I run the company, but I’ve been in this business for a long time. There are technologies that replicate parts of what we do. You’d end up buying from about ten different vendors to be able to string together what Savana has done. We’ve created end-to-end operationalization of a bank in one common technology. That’s what makes it very unique. It is seamless, it’s frictionless, that allows you to deal with processes, content, third party orchestration all at the same time in one technology. That’s what hadn’t been done before.

Ganesh said something about banks using best of breed. Now you’re buying six different things to do one process. You’ve got to integrate those things and make them work together. Even though we talked about APIs making it easier, it doesn’t necessarily mean the applications in a servicing process for a bank can just be done by stringing together different technologies. Different technology works different ways. What we’ve done is we’ve got hooks out to third party technology, where it is not wrapping around the core and is just pulling data. When it comes to actually servicing clients, it’s one technology that does it. There’s nobody else that has that. We’re the only ones that have a digital delivery platform, we actually coined the term and wrote a white paper on it. Eventually you end up with competition when you find a sweet spot. I think we found that spot. We’re very proud of what we’ve been able to do with our customers, for our customers.

GK
Let me add to what Mike said. There are other technologies, we’ve used a few of them. I think what we see in Savana over another product’s features and as well as the ability of Savana to work with clients like us. Also, it’s their focus on financial services. The other vendors cover multiple industries and there is a generalization of the processes. For instance, call centers. Savana comes with deep rooted expertise, and experience on financial services and banks our size.

RA
Ganesh, I understand you also had multiple cores that your bank had come to depend on through acquisitions. Was Savana helpful with that? I understand Savana can work with multiple cores.

GK
Yes, I think the idea of going forward, Robert, is not to pursue acquisitions blindly as each come with the core. During the short period that ensues after the M&A closing, banks tried to kind of get into conversion mode. The problem with that is they forget customers during this period of transition, and there’s always a possibility of a run on deposits. What we’ve done for the last two acquisitions is not convert. We basically make sure that the front end is integrated. We find a way to make the cores coexist, and that’s difficult. That’s very challenging technology-wise.

I think that’s where the Savana API approach that Mike’s talking about comes into play. If we can slowly start migrating the business logic. The problem with the legacy cores is that the front end, the business logic layer, and the back end, are siloed. They’re hardwired and siloed. Imagine multiple silos you accumulate after M&A activity. We are no different than any other bank that you talk to of this size. So what happens with that is, one call center will behave one way, for instance, mortgage servicing would behave one way, the auto loan call center will behave the other way, because it’s a different platform and a different core. What we have done is slowly started moving some of these things to the common business rules layer and architecture orchestration layer.

These can be connected to the front end and to the back end. Over a period of time, our customer experience becomes uniform across the different areas. Then you don’t have to subject the customers or the employees to a change on one day. That’s the coexisting logic that we tried to use combined with Savana going forward. Core systems always increase in price as the years go on and new versions come out. If we had progressed really well in integrating the front end and the back end the core becomes a commodity. I can just move data from the one core one day and put it in the other, the customers would be none the wiser. This is the type of conversion we are focusing on going forward. I think Savana plays a key role in that.

RA
Tell us about your digital challenger bank. You’re in the process of launching one as I understand it. How’s this new technology going to help you meet your customer acquisition and retention goals?

GK
With regards to the digital bank, we didn’t want to put a traditional bank with a pretty little interface out there on the top. This is just window dressing the same old bank. We didn’t want to launch without any value proposition. Then the only thing that you can compete on among the cacophony of different digital banks that you have is the price. That’s not going to work out very well, and that’s not what we wanted.

We wanted a true value proposition with a hyper segmentation going into an industry, going into a specific vertical, and creating products and services that extend beyond the value chain of the bank. What banks provide upstream and downstream in terms of various business processes that they have. I don’t want to go into all those things, but I think the ability for creating this platform that’s configurable and a little bit broader than what the banks provide in terms of integrating with other systems or accumulating data or aggregating data and providing different interfaces. That’s the key part of our strategy. That’s what Savana’s current engagement is based in.

RA
What haven’t we covered that either of you think readers should know? Ganesh, you go first.

GK
When people say digital transformation, they have to really be prepared to tinker with the go to market business model. Once they do that, they will realize that re-architecting their business processes is inevitable and that they need to find the technology to do it. That’s where we see Savana come into play. If they need to replace the call center software, there are 10 or 20 other call center solutions. That’s where it has been helpful for us to work with Savana.

MS
I will close my argument by saying that for 30 or 40 years banks lived in the legacy technology world. What we want to do is flip the equation, and really give banks the tools and weaponry they need to digitally transform. Those banks that really think about how to create a new value proposition can win. We give them the tools to win, so the technology doesn’t chase the good people out of a bank because they can’t get anything done. We’re here to make sure banks can get whatever they want to do, done. Let them have a marketing department again and figure out how to compete in this virtual world. This is what we’re enabling against FinTechs and other banks, competition.

RA
This has been an impressive interview on Savana. It is a platform I think is unique in scope for fully digitizing banking. I want to thank you both very much for your time and thoughts. Mike, if a reader would like a demo or ask questions, what’s the best way to reach you?

MS
They can reach me and I’d be happy to take any email at [email protected]. I will direct any questions to the appropriate resources including myself.

RA
Terrific. Thank you both very much.

 

 

 

This report has been prepared and issued by Piper Sandler & Co., a registered broker-dealer and a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. The information contained in this report (except information regarding Piper Sandler & Co. and its affiliates) was obtained from various sources that we believe to be reliable, but we do not guarantee its accuracy or completeness. Additional information is available upon request. The information and opinions contained in this report speak only as of the date of this report and are subject to change without notice. Contact information for Piper Sandler & Co. and the author of this report is available at www.PiperSandler.com

This report has been prepared and circulated for general information only and presents the author’s views of general market and economic conditions and specific industries and/or sectors. This report is not intended to and does not provide a recommendation with respect to any security. This report does not take into account the financial position or particular needs or investment objectives of any individual or entity. The investment strategies, if any, discussed in this report may not be suitable for all investors. Investors must make their own determinations of the appropriateness of an investment strategy and an investment in any particular securities based upon the legal, tax and accounting considerations applicable to such investors and their own investment objective. Investors are cautioned that statements regarding future prospects may not be realized and that past performance is not necessarily indicative of future performance.

This report does not constitute an offer, or a solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments, including any securities mentioned in this report. Nothing in this report constitutes or should be construed to be accounting, tax, investment or legal advice.

Neither this report, nor any portion thereof, may be reproduced or redistributed by any person for any purpose without the written consent of Piper Sandler & Co.

© 2022 Piper Sandler & Co. All rights reserved.