Ink on the Interview
Q: Eltropy is putting on a great show—those panels this morning were excellent, especially hearing directly from credit unions. It’s always valuable to get that kind of peer insight. So, what’s new in the Glide world?
A: We’re still chugging along. As a quick refresher, Glide is a two-minute account opening product. And so we can help a person who has no relationship with the credit union establish a relationship and get all of its primary accounts, get that account funded, establish the relationship, all in under two minutes. And it can be done completely from the member’s phone. And then now we’re actually launching some products on the loan origination side as well. So very soon, people will be able to not only apply for memberships and deposit accounts, but also auto loans, personal loans, and credit cards all through the platform as well.
Q: Today, Filene Research Institute’s Mark Meyer said, if you’re not onboarding somebody within five minutes, you’re out the window?
A: It was pretty incredible because I think every person on that panel said under five minutes or less. They got some buffer room. Definitely, definitely. You’re doing a great job there.
Q: Can you give us an update on Janusea?
A: We’re still helping credit unions and partners across the industry get connected and doing innovative solutions. They talk here about everything that’s about communication and relationships. We think it’s all about connections. That’s why we’re both here. That’s why we’re working together with 14 different financial institutions, and that’s growing every quarter. And we’re here with Eltropy because we’re growing with Eltropy, too. It’s about this interconnected and people helping each other. It’s really important. And we see that the more connections we have, the more that everyone benefits in our industry.
Q: How are Janusea and Glide working together? How does it work? How does this partnership work?
A: Glide has been a great partner because they took a risk on us early on. They were a young company, we were a young company, and we said, here’s what we’re trying to do in the industry. For us, it was How do we get people connected? How do we make sure that a credit union can find a solution that can open up an account in 90 seconds or in two minutes, and get what they need in those relationships established? But that’s what we’re trying to help them. They needed to get to the industry. And we have a path to get there. If you take a bet on us and we take a bet on you, we think we can do this together. It’s only continued to grow, and look where you are today.
Q: Want to give us your perspective?
A: We tend to talk a lot about member experience and digital experience from the perspective of the members. I think one thing that goes overlooked is the credit union staff member experience, right? If I’m a staff member opening an account at a credit union for a member, and it takes me an hour to do it, which is usually the case, especially in the in-branch process, right? That’s an hour you lose of talking to the member, getting to understand their needs, and recommending relevant financial products. And so I think why this kind of partnership has been great is a lot of that manual work is related to moving the data from the account opening system or the loan origination system into the core in a way that’s kind of seamless and automatic. Currently, that’s a largely manual process. Credit union staff members are actually kind of copy-pasting data from one system to the other. And with platforms like Janusy, we’re able to do all that in real time and allow the staff members to actually just take their hands off the wheel and just let it all happen.
Q: Honestly, we didn’t realize how deeply you’d get into branch operations. At first, we saw this as a digital solution – great for mobile users or after-hours connections. But within a month or two, you had credit unions using it in-branch with that same 90-second experience. We didn’t expect you to move in that direction so quickly. What drove that shift?
A: It’s all about reallocating staff members’ time, right? Doing all these manual chores. Now these staff members, they call up the member, they send them birthday cards, they send handwritten notes to them, they run community events, and business development events. So we try to think about it in terms of like unlocking time for the valuable things to do. And we kind of jest about that, but it’s so, so important to bond. Because all these things that we’re talking about are just the mundane manual tasks that can be totally automated. This allows the member service representative or member of the credit union to spend more time with the member on more important items, rather than what’s my balance type of stuff.
Q: Where are you headed, or if you’re not there already?
A: What fintechs are trying to do today is AI, right? Leveraging AI to make their staff members kind of have an easier time. And a lot of the credit unions are not even quite ready for that step yet. We think the kind of intermediary step in the middle is first, let’s automate all of your workloads using just API integrations, like what Janicy has built out, and platform-level plays. The next step after this is leveraging some kind of AI-type models to make it even faster.
Q: So what’s the next step in this? We want to take advantage of this? Is it AI?
A: Well, you didn’t hear it at the beginning. You take that same convenience that members expect. Take a whole step back. Some of the first credit unions I remember you working with were related to universities. You are not going to get a student to sign up for a new account if they have to fill out pages and pages of forms and go through the process. So that made sense. But it wasn’t, I don’t know, it was beyond the first one or two, and all of a sudden it’s not just those credit unions, it’s every credit union because nobody wants to fill that out.
Q: The next step that’s active right now is lending. Why do I want to fill out a long mortgage, a long consumer, and a long auto loan document?
A: If it can be pulled and done for me in an automated way, why would you not do that? So we see that across various lending platforms. How do we find ways to do convenience? How do we find ways to have integration? How do we take things that take weeks or months and turn them into minutes?
Q: Robotic automation, AI, and fraud prevention are key topics, especially in lending and new account openings, where fraud is a major concern. The more efficient you can be in detecting fraud, the fewer losses there are as credit unions grow. You likely have deeper insights into this. Can you elaborate on that?
A: The only thing I would add there is I think the last piece of it is data, right? We’re capturing so much alternative data, right? As we think about some of the fraud checks we’re doing, we’re actually looking at people’s behavior as they’re going through the flow. We’re actually tracking how quickly they’re going between the pages, and we’re seeing if it’s fast enough to be a human but not too fast to be a robot, right? And then, you know, also we’re looking at all kinds of different personal information checks, and we’re looking at the IP address and doing a bunch of things there. And I think where Janusea comes into the picture here, and what we’re excited about is that we capture all this data. Today, in the credit union’s existing systems, there aren’t a lot of clear and obvious places to put that data, but we do want them to have that data to some extent. We’re trying to do it in a way that’s standard. So you want to do an implementation, and you want to make sure no matter what core they’re on, that they have the same experience and the same benefits. And we want to make sure that the data gets consistently across the various cores. So sometimes it’s easier to find fields and people use their cores differently. But how do we make sure they have access to that is a great point.
Q: How long has this partnership been working?
A: It’s been a year and a half, over a year. These are 14 institutions that have been using the solution. They’ve gone through many iterations of new releases, upgraded options. This is a mature solution that people are taking advantage of right now. But it’s a Fintech, it’s an innovative solution. Let’s say mature, but it continues to evolve and grow.
Q: What’s the big goal here? We do all the buzzwords, efficiency, productivity, accuracy, fraud, that type of stuff. But from your perspective, actually working together for over a year now, has the goal changed, or is it still the same?
A: The big thing that we’re trying to solve we talk about making the member experience better, the staff member experience better. I think a big kind of organizational goal we want to solve for banks and credit unions is drastically reducing the number of different vendors that they need, right? You hear this term in the credit union industry quite a bit, called vendor out, right? It’s essentially you have too many different solutions, and figuring out a way to stitch them all together is an absolute nightmare, right? Even within MySpace, you’re seeing this, right? People purchase a deposit and cap vendor, people purchase an onboarding vendor, people purchase a loan application vendor, and they stitch the three of those together. Glide is one of the first players that does all three of those components under one umbrella. So, you have all these benefits, but you also can just go to a credit union executive and say, Look, you don’t need to run three RFPs. You don’t need to do three different contracting sessions. You don’t need to do three implementation projects. It’s all done under one umbrella. And the product experiences are great, but I think where maybe I’ll hand it off to Kyle is the layer underneath, right? How does that consolidated vendor actually get to all the other systems?
Our interest is to make sure people have access to innovation and access to efficiency. And it’s with partners like Eltropy at this conference, it’s partners with Glide that make those things possible. We’re always one step removed. We don’t always get to be the sexy front end that you guys get to show members and do those things, but we take pride in being a small part of it. It helps enable that. And our good partners push us.
Q: How does a credit union get this rolling for them so they can benefit? Do they call you often?
A: So the first thing is, we have crimes that work directly. I’m trying to give them an easy path to get you. We have crimes that work directly with us. And they look at the partners we work with, and they say, well, what’s Glide do? They do no account opening in 90 seconds or two minutes. And they’re like, what? We’ll go have a conversation with them. So we can start the conversation that way. But from a partnership standpoint, we have the arrangement so that you just sign up with Glide, and we’re their back-end partner, and you don’t have to do additional, you’ve already done all the due diligence on us, we meet all the security requirements, we know the industry, so your paperwork and relationship is just with Glide, and we’re one of the vendors that just helps make it happen.
Yeah, it can really be through there. If they are on one of the slightly older core systems or core processing systems, the relationship generally starts through Janusea because they have a lot of fintechs that want to integrate with them. Rather than figuring out a way to get each fintech into the door separately, they can kind of first work with Janusea, kind of build that platform layer, and then all the fintechs can connect to them easily.
Q: Any final thoughts?
A: Check us out on withglide.com. You can drop a time to chat with me. We always love to talk to credit unions about how we can make their member experience and staff member experience a lot easier. All in two minutes.
Check out Janusea at janusea.com. You can see a list of many of our partners, including Glide. We’re always happy to talk about what we can do to help directly or what we can do to help through one of our partners.
