In this special guest episode of the Believe in Banking podcast, Gina and Juliet welcome Andrew Hovet, Managing Director at Curinos, a data and insights company that helps financial institutions make better business decisions through advanced analytics, market intelligence, and customer data. In their dynamic discussion, Andrew, Gina, and Juliet discuss how banks and credit unions can leverage data to make informed decisions about their branch network, including where to locate, consolidate, or expand to optimize market presence and growth potential. They also address the essential role of the branch for banking experiences. Even as total visits decline, branches are places customers rely on for advice and guidance on their financial needs. For financial institutions, branches serve as a key driver of brand awareness and high-quality sales opportunities. And finally, they discuss the need for banks to adapt their branch staffing and operations to focus less on transactional services and more on valuable financial consultation and solutions.
Text Transcription
Intro: This is Believe in Banking, a podcast series for decision makers, influencers and leaders, featuring experts taking on the financial industry’s most pressing issues with insight and empathy. The podcast features information and conversations designed to enlighten and empower.
Gina Bleedorn (00:18): Welcome to our podcast for Believe in Banking. I’m Gina Bleedorn, President and CEO of Adrenaline.
Juliet D’Ambrosio (00:24): And I’m Juliet D’Ambrosio, Chief Experience Officer at Adrenaline.
Gina Bleedorn (00:29): Juliet, thank you for having your deep Stevie Nicks voice with us today, thanks to Covid. But I like it and appreciate you muscling through this particular podcast, especially because we have someone special with us. We are very happy to introduce Andrew Hovet. Andrew is with Curinos. He is, I would call him a savant when it comes to analytics and understanding branch, really everything branch banking. He leads the distribution and sales performance practice at Curinos.
Some of you out there might know Curinos as Novantis. They were formerly Novantis and rebranded as Curinos three years ago. And Curinos and Novantis before them have really been the best in class example of data and branch banking, banking, sales, and network intelligence for many, many years. I’ve been a big fan of them and of Andrew. And Andrew came from the bank side. He was an SVP at Capital One. He was SVP and director of delivery channels for Iberia Bank before it was acquired by First Horizon. We’re thrilled to have you, Andrew. Welcome.
Andrew Hovet (01:52): Thank you so much. I really appreciate it Gina and Juliet. It’s great to be here.
Juliet D’Ambrosio (01:56): Well, first of all, thank you for embracing me in all of my human frailty and going with my rock-on gold dust woman, current voice. I wouldn’t have missed this particular podcast for the world, as a self-identified, really data nerd. And so this is like meeting a rockstar for me. We’ll just go with the rockstar theme. So, we’re embracing it all the way around here. I am so curious to understand you come from the bank side, you moved to the consultant side. I know that Gina, you and Andrew have met. This is not your first meeting on the podcast. I’d love to hear the story of how you know each other. What brought these two luminaries together?
Gina Bleedorn (02:48): Oh, I love being described as luminary. I’m not the luminary that Andrew is, but we met because we began discussions between our organizations between Adrenaline and Curinos, thinking about how can we have a strategic partnership together. And we’ve since now finalized and formalized actually having a strategic alliance with Curinos, because we believe in each other’s worlds so much. And I had always, as I mentioned, look towards Curinos for best in class intelligence. And so I met Andrew on a video call as we were beginning to explore opportunities for a partnership. Is that right, Andrew?
Andrew Hovet (03:30): So, the best part about that is that’s wrong. So we actually first met – though, I don’t necessarily believe that Gina, you would’ve remembered this – we first met at a Future Branches conference about seven years ago, probably you were the keynote speaker. Adrenaline was a major sponsor of the event I had attended, and I actually did have a presentation. It was probably buried at the end of the day, right before drinks and poorly attended at that. But I did have a presentation. I actually at some point during that conference actually introduced myself to you and shook hands. But as you were the star of the event, I’m not at all surprised that you do not recall meeting me.
Gina Bleedorn (04:10): Please accept my apologies for not having that firmly embedded in my memory and likely being at the bar instead of at your speaking session. But at least you got to do your favorite thing just now, which is telling me when I am wrong. So, thank you. Thank you for that, Juliet, what other questions?
Juliet D’Ambrosio (04:32): Oh, there are so many. Where to even begin? Well, I think maybe a great place to start is thinking about the role of the branch in banking, full stop. What is the role of the branch channel and how bullish, bearish are each of you? Where does your perspective lie when we think about the importance of branch banking for the vitality of the banking industry? Andrew, would you like to shed some light on your general perspective?
Gina Bleedorn (05:07): Yeah, I want Andrew to answer that one.
Andrew Hovet (05:09): I’d be happy to, Juliet. So first off, I’ll preface this by stating that I may have been partially responsible for more branch closures over the last eight years in the industry than any one individual. But that said, I still am a strong believer of the power and the importance of the branch. I think what we’re seeing is an evolution of the role of the branch. I think that for most consumers, the branch is still a critical decision point in their banking relationship. They want to bank with a bank with branches even though functionally they don’t actually visit the branch nearly as frequently as they did before. So, it is an important element of the consideration set.
The other thing, though, because they’re not visiting as frequently, we tend to think of this as an evolution of the need to have a network that provides convenience to more of a network that provides access. You want to have locations that are accessible to your consumers, recognizing that many of them will not be coming on a weekly basis they might have had in the past, but it’s something that’s more occasional. And so it needs to be located in a place where they can visit when they need.
The other thing that becomes very important is that as functional need of the branch declines, what we often think of it as the marketing value becomes more and more important. Branches are one of the largest drivers of unaided awareness of an institution, right? It is a massive billboard. It’s a really expensive billboard, frankly, because it’s a building with four walls. But having those branches in market essentially alerts to the populace that, hey, we’re open for business and we’re part of your community and we would like to bank you.
They kind of put you on the map. And so as such, you need to be thoughtful about where you want to place your branches. You want to make sure your branches are located in places where there is a lot of, I’ll call it traffic and I don’t just mean street traffic, but a place where people are going to for their live-work-play patterns in order to be able to see that brand, see that branch in the marketplace. And I would also just kind of echo that it’s not only important to have a branch in a high activity corridor, but also to make sure that it’s backed up with good signage. So you’re getting kind of the bang for the buck, if you will, on the real estate investment of where you place a branch.
So, I think branches are still super important drivers of unaided awareness. They still support some functional needs. The teller transaction needs are less frequent than they used to be. And obviously they’re still a massively important sales channel. While many sales are migrating to digital, as we analyze those sales, the quality, if you will, of the relationships established through the digital channel are still pretty weak. And so your highest quality sales opportunities are still happening through the branch channel. For all of those reasons, I would say the branch is still critical to a traditional banks or credit union success.
Juliet D’Ambrosio (08:05): I’m so surprised by how little daylight I think there is between you and what I imagine Gina’s perspective is on the vitality of the branch channel. There’s one thing I’m picking up on what you initially said is that while the branch channel is really important, we know that most customers, most consumers, are probably not going to use it as frequently as they once did. They want to see that it’s there, they want to know it’s there. It’s a powerful psychological symbol. But Gina, I know we’ve been tracking these trends on branch usage and we’ve uncovered some really surprising insights about how consumers want to use the branch and who those consumers are. What does the data look like?
Gina Bleedorn (08:54): I must a comment about your daylight comment. I think Andrew just said better in two minutes what I typically try to say on stage in many more minutes than that. So, I appreciate that. I especially like the phrasing of the functional need declining and thus the importance of marketing it, leveraging it as a billboard awareness and for high value sales. I really love that. And that speaks to the answer to what you just asked about, which are some of the trends in really cohorts generationally and what we are seeing, and one of the most surprising and absolutely counterintuitive statistics is that younger generations want to go into the branch more than their elder counterparts.
When Covid hit that actually got more Baby Boomers and Silent Generations out of the branches. They learned how to do things on online and mobile that they hadn’t adopted before. Yet, Gen Z is three times more likely to come into a branch than Boomers, which is kind of staggering. Millennials, now the richest generation, are coming in more than Boomers. Gen Z are coming in even more than Millennials. And it is for guidance and advice. Also I think one of my hypotheses for that, we’re still digging into more real data as it unfolds, is that they do not have the legacy assumptions that the Boomers do about what the bank branch is for. They don’t even really know why a checking account is called a checking account because they don’t write checks.
They do know that they need to know more because it is the information age. They’re able to find out whatever they want about anything anytime, anywhere. And when it comes to figuring out the complexity of finances, that information is much harder to find in a way that’s not custom curated for you. So, if you walk yourself into a bank branch and ask a question, they are thinking, Wow, I can actually get help dealing with my money and knowing how to open an account and what account to open. That to me does represent, yes, an opportunity for those high value sales and transactions to occur, but also a risk in case they come in and you are not as a bank ready to deliver that.
Juliet D’Ambrosio (11:30): Yeah, and I’m thinking about part of what you just mentioned is really insightful and it’s taking the data of who is coming into the branch and how often and hypothesizing as to why they’re doing it and then not just what are the motivations, but then so how do banks and credit unions, financial institutions need to respond in kind to be ready to receive a new generation of branch users of customers?
And I am thinking about the just treasure trove of data and insights that Curinos has really when we think about the incredible data that’s available through Curinos, there’s none better, Andrew, our financial institutions able to make actionable moves based on the data that they have access to through Curinos. And how are you seeing banks and credit unions take this data, leverage it and use it to make great decisions with their branching strategy?
Andrew Hovet (12:46): And I’ll probably pick that up from two angles. The first would be to kind of tie back to some of what Gina was saying around what are the needs for which consumers are coming to the branch? And I think that banks are still struggling a little bit with this transition from a kind of transactional environment. And I mean transactional both from a teller perspective, but also from a sales perspective. I think historically, as much as banks and credit unions have tried to do otherwise, they’ve a little bit have been in the order taking game. And as we move to an environment where purchasing is easy and frankly purchasing, now I can buy a product online if I come into the branch, I need to make sure that I’m getting some value add and what is it that the bank is going to bring to me in that interaction other than just kind of fulfillment on an account opening.
And I think a lot of banks are trying to lean into themes around financial wellness and helping people with their both every day and more complex financial needs, but I think they’re struggling to translate into that into what are the face-to-face conversations that need to happen in a branch and how do I equip my workforce in order to be able to have those conversations? We’ve had kind of a hollowing out of the workforce in the branch where we’ve moved from an environment where there were often many branch team members who were quite tenured, invented banking almost as a career. And now most of our frontline staff are relatively young, relatively inexperienced in banking and honestly relatively inexperienced in their own financial lives. How can you advise someone on a home equity loan when you’ve never owned a home? You can be trained to those things, but you haven’t had the lived experience to lean into nor the just years of experience in talking to customers about that.
So, I think that there’s a real challenge for the industry around how do I attract, develop the right talent, and then how do I equip them with the right conversations to meet the needs of clients which are really no longer transactional in nature? So, we do a lot of market research at Curinos to really understand customer drivers. We do a lot of value prop development for financial institutions, essentially helping them to identify what their brand identity needs to be and how do they manifest that through their delivery of services. So I think that that’s one area.
I think then the other area would be around specific to the network optimization. So, how do I think about if I move from a model of convenience to access, how do I essentially think about where I should be placing those branches? And especially as I’m thinking about for banks or credit unions to have a relative amount of density and have the opportunity to be able to reduce the number of physical locations they have. How do I make decisions about which locations to close? And how do I think about where if I were to be relocating or maybe doing two for ones to try and get myself better positioned in the market to take advantage of those kind of billboard value concepts?
I think it’s really important to be able to bring data and analytics to bear in making those decisions. And I think those decisions come from a market opportunity perspective and making sure you understand the demographics as well as the competitive dynamics within your markets. We’ve increasingly been using mobile geoanalytic data to really understand consumer live-work-play patterns, so we understand where they are going in the marketplace so we can understand those kind of hotspot nodes where a branch location might get kind of high visibility or that kind of billboard value effect. And then I think on the other side is also making sure you’re understanding the analytics of network actions. So what happens if I were to close a particular branch? What does that mean to me from an impact perspective?
What we’re seeing over the last decade or two decades is increasingly you don’t really attrite customers when you close a location anymore. So a very small number of customers, as long as there’s some other location that is relatively convenient to them, they will not depart the institution. But what you really do miss out on is future sales activity, right? There are new customers who may no longer select you as their new primary financial institution if you’re no longer located there. Many of them will still choose to join up with you if you will, and fulfill through an ether location. But essentially understanding at a granular level, what are the financial implications of consolidating a branch? Relocating a branch in order to make kind of sound financial decisions, I think is really important. And I think historically there’s been a little bit too much kind of gut instinct on where to go in a marketplace and there has been a little bit of a kind of blasé like, oh, don’t worry about it if I close a branch and not really understanding the downstream multi-year impacts on customer growth from doing that.
Juliet D’Ambrosio (17:32): Yeah, I’ve heard, in other words, Gina has long championed this idea that you can’t close your way to profitability and though network optimization is critical for community banks, for regional banks and credit unions for the big ones, also there is this idea that using a data-driven framework to make the right decisions and to understand the sort of longtail implications of what that decision is, especially like Andrew, what you said is the opportunity cost around potential new customer growth. Gina, talk a little bit about unpack that idea for us that you can’t close your way to profitability and how you find yourself when we are talking with clients managing that core idea.
Gina Bleedorn (18:27): I think it’s best summed up with something Andrew said about even though you don’t lose customers per se or current customers from closing a branch, you are missing out on any future sales unless you are replenishing it with some other move to your network. You are slowly dying away. So, what I will say is you must figure out where to save so you can reinvest it for growth that is no easy feat. Some of the strategies Andrew mentioned about two for ones, maybe relocations, that’s where the mix of art and science I suppose of data and design start to come together. And actually that is why we wanted to partner with Curinos.
We’re trying to help our clients with network strategy and planning and we take it through into actually designing the experience. And in many cases, building the experience. We started doing analytics because we saw so many clients were making ill-informed decisions about how to invest their money. Curinos and Andrew, that is what they do solely is intelligence to drive decisions like this. And so with that greater richness of really understanding what the trends are to right size and realign the investment you spend, that’s why we want to have as many clients as we can doing business in a partnership between us and Curinos to help make those better smarter decisions.
And it’s not easy if you are a financial institution with some real scale. And I imagine it’s especially not easy if you are a smaller institution. And Andrew, I’d love your perspective on why it’s hard to be a smaller financial institution with a smaller branch network where these individual decisions have such great impact. What is the data telling you now about why scale is so critical?
Andrew Hovet (20:44): It goes back to that thing I mentioned earlier, kind of unaided awareness. And so if you are an institution to normalize for market size, I’d say you have 1% or 2% branch share. So, out of every hundred branches, one of them is yours. It is really hard to get people to be aware of who you are as a brand as well as honestly just then having even in a move from convenience to access, you’re still not going to have enough points on the compass, if you will, to be accessible to the full population of a market. And so you’re at a strategic disadvantage relative to banks who have 10% branch share. So literally one in 10 branches in that market has a brand X sign on it. That kind of difference. And what that drives and a difference is unaided awareness, which if you think about it, it’s the top of the purchase funnel. I have to establish awareness and then I have to establish consideration. I’m aware of that brand, I would consider banking with that brand and then ultimately making the decision to purchase or to open an account with that brand.
If you have a limited number of locations, that top of the funnel is very, very narrow. And so if you do have a relatively small network, my argument would be it is even more important for that institution to maximize the billboard value or awareness building aspect of its network. And in some ways actually it could almost increase the justification to do kind of relocations to get into primary nodes, whereas I think the institution with 10% branch share is more likely just going to consolidate its way to greatness. I would take a little bit of a twist on the quote earlier is you can optimize yourself to profitability, to efficiency, but you cannot optimize yourself to growth. And so without the reinvestment, it is almost you will eventually kind of shrink and there’s no fun to shrink yourself in a world where everyone rewards growth.
Juliet D’Ambrosio (22:48): And I think that what I’m hearing from both of you is that there is a need for efficiency, but that need also is balanced by the need for growth and potentially even growth through expansion. I’d love to hear Gina, maybe you talk a little bit about how our clients and how you see the industry hitting the right balance there between efficiency and expansion.
Gina Bleedorn (23:17): Well, as usual, Andrew is trying to say things better than me. I did like what he said about the point you can optimize and be efficient, you can’t do it and grow. And yeah, that’s what we are helping most clients with. And honestly, I can look on less than the fingers on one hand to say the amount of clients who just said make me more efficient, end of sentence, they are all trying to somehow grow or else in many cases wouldn’t be talking to us.
And I actually, Juliet want to throw that question to Andrew specifically around when you are thinking about growth potential when it comes to staying in your current market versus expanding to new, that’s one of the hardest questions for our clients. A lot of them, they’re trying to get to the nodes as you call them, the areas of growth, but is it worth doubling down and maybe increasing my concentration where I am or jumping into a new one and then when I jump into a new one and now I’m 1% branch share, less than 10% branch share, when I jump into a new one and I have a very low branch share, is that worth it or in what period of time will it be worth it? How do you answer those questions of do I concentrate and double down where I am versus jump into new?
Andrew Hovet (24:45): Yeah, I think there’s a lot of conversation in the industry right now about this because everybody has seen Chase essentially make the investments in new markets where they have a branch in all 50 states, which is something they weren’t even close to a few years ago. And so people are saying, well, Chase is building branches. Building branches must be kind of the mode. I mean, I think what I would first say is Chase has strategic advantages that almost every other financial institution doesn’t have. And then I would also say that on a net basis over the last year, Chase has still closed more branches than they opened. So, they are truly optimizing. They are reducing density in certain markets and then they’re reinvesting into new markets for growth, but where they’re reinvesting, they’re building themselves up to a 4% or 5% branch share.
They’re actually a stat, they’re not just building one branch in that new community, but they’re building kind of scale. It’s not scale on the old school. Old school would’ve said you’ve got to get to 10% to have true kind of scale. Now it’s like at a 5% scale, but given the strength of their brand, they’re able to do this. But it raises the question of like, hey, should I be building more branches to drive growth? And what I would say is it is absolutely a historically proven way to drive growth. The challenge for many institutions is their results seem to be a flip of the coin with some being successful and some de novo branches being unsuccessful. So you really, really need to do everything you can to reduce the likelihood of a tail, if you will, in a heads or a tail.
If I look at the de novo growth for an institution who may have, and this is probably larger institutions, but where I have a lot of sample and they may have built 20 branches over the last five to 10 years, I look at the variation of growth and it’s just all over the map so that sometimes they’re hitting and sometimes they’re missing, and these are very expensive investments. You really want to do everything you can to increase the likelihood of success.
And then to answer your more detailed question around, would I build another branch in an existing market versus move to a new market? I think you’re absolutely right that if I were to go into a new market and be the one branch in that new market, while it would provide me access to a whole new community and a whole new set of consumers that potentially could bank with me, if I’m only going to be that one branch or two branches in that new market, it’s going to be really hard for me to break through from awareness perspective. And so therefore, I would almost tend to think about adding a branch in a sub-market that I might not currently serve in a market where I already exist and essentially start to have those branches in that existing market complement each other.
Because what we’ve seen in our analysis is when consumers make a choice about financial institutions, if they are seeing you multiple elements of their live-work-play pattern, they’re seeing multiple of your locations. They’re making a decision based on those multiple impressions, not on just the singular impression that maybe happens to be closest to their home. There is a true network effect there. And so I think that the likelihood of success in an existing market for what I would describe as consumer growth and potentially small business growth is probably higher. Now, if I want access to the new market, I’m more on the going to be more salesforce led around commercial or wealth, then maybe tapping into new markets is great, but that’s really less of a branch led and more of a kind of salesforce led strategy. So I think it’s a little different depending upon your target segment and line of business focus.
Juliet D’Ambrosio (28:15): Gina, this is a great moment to have you talk a little bit about a phrase that Andrew used, the network effect. What is behind that phenomenon? What does the data prove out?
Gina Bleedorn (28:28): Yes, I’m happy to, and then I’d love Andrew to weigh in on what some of the maybe more even recent trends might be that are affecting the curve of that network effect even more. And what has proven to be true, and Andrew referenced it, is it historically proven to be true over the last several decades. Basically the more branch concentration you have, the better in any given area. And when you reach a certain point of critical mass, which used to be 8%, then we’ve been saying it’s closer to 6%. Now maybe Andrew mentioned it’s closer to 5% because you don’t need quite as much ubiquity since you’re not going there as much.
But when you reach a certain critical mass of branch share relative to all the branches in that area, your chances of your market share outpacing your branch share statistically double. And so you want to be on the upside of that curve. What we like to advise our clients on, however, is that doesn’t mean if you need five branches to be a critical mass, that you need five big 5,000 square foot standalone branches. You just need five points of that could be one nice big flagship, two storefronts and two ITMs only that aren’t even staffed, for instance. And so what we try to do through design solutions is help clients get to critical mass as efficiently, but also as effectively as possible. But, I would be interested to know Andrew’s perspective on all that.
Andrew Hovet (30:04): Yeah, the S-curve still exists. It is becoming, I don’t want to say less relevant. The relationships are breaking down a little bit and they’re partly breaking down because of the concentration in the high end. What we’ve seen some of the national financial institutions be able to do is where they might’ve been historically at a kind of 12% branch share, like a 15% market share of retail deposits, what they’ve been able to do is actually reduce themselves to eight or 9% branch share, yet still retain most of those deposits. So the relationship is starting to, it’s actually getting more steep, but the relationship still exists. You want to be kind of above that lower inflection point such that you’re actually getting gains the scale, as Gina described, kind of going up the curve.
The other thing that I want to make sure we highlight when we think about the S-curve and for those who are not familiar with the S-curve is essentially if you’re looking at the relationship between branch share on the X axis and deposit share on the Y axis, the kind of natural relationship would be a fair share of a 45 degree line there. But what we typically see is that banks and credit unions that are at a lower share percentage, 1%, 2% 3% branch share. They’re actually underperforming the fair share line. And then at some point, actually once you get to scale, you start to be able to outpace your fair share and then you actually, you’re able to get kind of above fair share and then eventually you get kind of diminishing returns.
At some point it doesn’t make sense to be at 20% branch share anywhere, but I think that the challenge for institutions is that that is a lagging indicator. So it’s more of a, what we could describe as a stock metric. It’s looking at deposit share and some of that deposit share has actually been developed over 20 years at least, of customer relationships. So it’s a really lagging metric. What we like to try and think about when we’re working with clients is think about something that’s more of a leading indicator or a flow metric. What is your share of new consumer household relationship? How are you doing on the front end?
So, as you build those locations, are they allowing you to get kind of your fair share of those consumers who are switching their primary financial institutions? Ultimately that will result in your lagging indicator of deposit fair share, but really making sure that you’re focusing on the front end on getting your fair share of the flow or the acquisition. And I think that’s really important when making business cases around investment in additional locations is what do I think I can get? Don’t just say I guaranteed my fair share. If the average deposits for location in this market are 95 million in deposits that if I build this branch, I’m just going to naturally get to 95. I think in tomorrow’s world, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to get to that fair share level.
So, how do you essentially handicap the level of new customer acquisition, kind of the pace at which you can acquire new customers, and how fast can you get that growth trajectory going? And that’s really what you need to be thinking about. And don’t just assume if you build it, they will come.
Juliet D’Ambrosio (33:07): First of all, thank you so much for letting us sort of just have a session of picking your brain. Your big, big brain, I might add, and I would love to hear a little bit just about your background. Gina and I have Google stalked you, obviously that’s what we love to do, but hearing it straight from you Andrew, how did you get so smart about all things analytics and financial institutions and what’s interesting to you about this work and this industry?
Andrew Hovet (33:42): As many people do in college, they’re trying to figure out what they want to do. You might not believe this, but I’m a physics major and I realized that most of the individuals in my graduating class were going on to get PhDs, and I realized there was no way that one, I could even do the work anymore. And I took what I thought was kind of the easy way out, which is I decided let’s go into consulting. The good thing about consulting is I’m not really committing to anything yet. I’ll get hopefully a range of experiences and then I can kind of pick my path from there. And I ended up working for Accenture, which at the time was called Anderson Consulting for 10 years or so. And I think that gave me a really good, interesting foundation in consulting. And then as life stage changed, I ended up working and taking a job at a bank.
And so I worked at two different banks over a dozen years. And then maybe this was my midlife crisis, I’m not sure, but I had the itch to get back into consulting. I missed it. I missed the engagement with clients and the tackling different challenges and the project-based work effort. And so picked up my family and moved to New York City and joined, what was it the time Novantis now Curinos. And so we were in New York City for four years and when the pandemic hit. We ended up moving back to New Orleans.
What really kind of attracted me to Curinos really is the kind of analytics that were behind all of the recommendations that they were making. So this wasn’t just kind of best practice consulting, but it was consulting that was founded often in proprietary datasets. And so being able to leverage rich analytics combined with being able to help clients solve their business problems, help banks figure out what the right thing to do is, but just was able to kind of bring together a few of my passions and interests, and I still love it today. I still love helping clients solve challenges.
Gina Bleedorn (35:28): Wow, that was moving and good to know you’re here at Curinos because of a midlife crisis, and that ultimately led you back to where you are. I learn every time I listen to you, and I found so many aspects even of things you had to say today that I thought I knew what you thought, but you say it from a different lens, giving more insight. So that’s been fascinating. And leads us to our last question is evident from the story you just told. It’s why do you believe in banking?
Andrew Hovet (36:03): I believe that banks can have a role. I mean, we talked a little bit about this earlier when we thought about how do we develop the frontline, but banks can be critical, and I hope they continue to be critical in people’s financial lives. Nobody likes dealing with their financial lives. There’s a lot of pain and angst and frustration, but it is necessary. And I think that the banking industry can continue to provide advice and guidance and help people through their financial challenges, through their financial goals and aspirations.
I hope that the banking industry doesn’t completely become digitized and kind of emotionless because I think we’ll leave a lot of people behind who need the personal advice and guidance. And so as much as I talk about data and I talk about where to put a branch, ultimately where banking makes an impact is into the face to face. Conversations typically happening in a branch though sometimes may be happening over the phone or over video. I think that there is an ability for the banking industry to positively impact people’s financial lives, and I hope that we are able to continue to fulfill a role there.
Gina Bleedorn (37:09): Beautiful, Andrew, and thank you for your role in helping them do just that.
Juliet D’Ambrosio (37:15):
Andrew, I have to echo Gina. She might learn something new every time she speaks to you, but I just feel like I went to a masterclass on the future of banking really. So I appreciate the time and thanks for expanding my mind.
Gina Bleedorn (37:31): That wraps up our podcast for today with Andrew Hovet from Curinos. Thank you so much and we’ll catch you next time.
Andrew Hovet (37:40): Thank you for having me. Catch you on the flip side.
Juliet D’Ambrosio (37:43): Catch you on the flip.
Outro: You’ve been listening to Believe in Banking, a podcast series created to empower decision makers, influencers, and industry leaders in financial services. Be sure to also join us on our flagship site believeinbanking.com.