Kim Snyder, CEO and Founder of KlariVis, an easy-to-use solution that enables institutions to access and interpret their data in a more strategic manner joins us in this GlobalFinTechSeries interview where she talks about her journey and what according to her will drive the need and demand for new fintech solutions in the industry.
Catch the complete story:
______
Can you tell us a little about yourself Kim. How did you venture into this segment as Founder and CEO of KlariVis and if not for a fintech entrepreneur, what would you have rather been?
Personally, I am a very family-oriented person. When not working, we spend time together as a family. We are blessed now to have all three of our adult children living in Roanoke, so have recently started some new traditions, like “Sunday Brunch-day” where we all come together every other week at a minimum, either at one of our favorite restaurants or at home to catch up. It truly is my favorite thing to do. I would say I’m a foodie – I love great food and great wine! My husband calls me a “wine snob” – I don’t think of it quite that way – I’m looking at it more from a calorie perspective – there are a lot of calories in every glass of wine, so it has to be yummy! We also enjoy traveling and hope to find more time to fit that back in our lives in the future.
Read More: GlobalFintechSeries Interview with Hamed Arbabi, CEO & Founder at VoPay
This is a little about how my KlariVis Journey started:
When I was displaced with the acquisition of my bank back in 2015, my passion for the community banking industry fueled my drive to take the chance and start my own consulting business. During the course of the past 4+ years, I hired many of the same bank executives and team members I had worked with previously to assist me in my quest to build a premier, boutique consulting firm focused on helping community banks solve the prevalent issues they are faced with in this rapidly changing industry. The team’s success is demonstrated by the fact that more than 60% of our clients hired the KBS team for multiple engagements.
While we found many of the same challenges and obstacles with our clients as we faced as bankers, the one challenge that resonated more than any other is the data conundrum that exists in the banking industry. Regardless of size, core system, talent level or management team experience, our clients were paralyzed with the mass volume of data generated by the various siloed processing systems and the bank’s inability to access that data in an efficient manner, thus making it virtually useless to the institution. The KBS team has spent countless hours (both as bankers and as consultants) mining and cleaning bank data, building out extensive models in Excel to use the data for strategic decision making, risk management, incentive plan management, board reporting, and more. We knew that with today’s technology, there had to be a better way and thus KlariVis was born. We’ve spent the past 2 years developing this solution and are thrilled to have launched it earlier this year. The reception we are getting from prospective clients has been phenomenal.
If not a fintech entrepreneur, well, I’ve never thought of my life or career as an “either-or”. I just don’t look at life that way. I consider myself very blessed – blessed to have had many opportunities and challenges along the way, all of which have played a role in my journey and have led me to KlariVis. I truly believe this is what I’m supposed to be doing.
Given the dynamics and constant evolutions in fintech today, could you talk about some of the best innovations in fintech that you think will be game-changers for the B2B segment?
Of’ course I am going to say KlariVis is a game-changer for the industry and I believe that it is (many of our clients have described it as just that!). The challenge facing most community financial institutions (“FIs”) is not a lack of data. FIs have access to an abundance of information; every day an institution will send millions of data points though expensive networks and applications in order to process, transmit and maintain daily operations. But having this massive volume of data does not automatically correlate to having valuable insights. The value is found in being able to easily turn this cache of data into actionable insights that drive the institution’s ability to serve its community, streamline operations, manage risk and ultimately, compete with larger institutions and non-bank competitors. KlariVis enables employees at all levels of the organization to efficiently access the massive amounts of customer, market, product and service data that resides in their core and ancillary siloed systems, thereby empowering bankers to make data-driven decisions by improving insight into the components that affect loan, deposit and revenue growth. Additionally, KlariVis creates organizational efficiencies that allow financial institutions to focus on strategic decision-making, not managing cumbersome data and reporting processes. With KlariVis, financial institutions now have the capability to get the right data in the right hands at the right time to make the right decisions for their organization.
Other game-changers? The new cloud-based core systems that are being developed and rolled out. As more and more banks get comfortable with cloud-based solutions such as KlariVis, they will become more and more comfortable with moving their core systems to the cloud and this will definitely be impactful – allowing them to generally see large savings opportunities and more quickly roll out competitive features or service offerings to their customers.
Robotics and AI-based automation will become game-changers for our industry. KlariVis will have AI capabilities in the near future – it is a high priority for us. Robotics –BOA implemented a robotic process automation solution which reduced the manually inputted fields from 170 to 10, significantly reducing the manpower needed during the application process. Once technology like this becomes available to our community banks, the game will be changed for sure!
Finally, I would be remiss not to mention payments, payments, payments!
How according to you will the fintech segment shape up in the next couple of years, given the constant innovations and investments in certain areas? What do you think this landscape will look like in future?
Technology is ever changing and thus the landscape will continue to do the same. I see many more bank-fintech partnerships evolving over the next few years, and there are huge opportunities that will arise out of these partnerships. The issue I had with many of the technology vendors when I was a banker is that I felt like I had to explain our industry to the technology team – they presented a fantastic “tech” solution in many cases, but the implementation was less than desired because the team didn’t understand our industry. It was very frustrating. These bank-fintech partnerships will really serve a critical role in solving this issue. I’m also very excited at the different accelerator programs that are out there now – ICBA (Independent Community Bankers Association) and FIS (Fidelity National Information Services, Inc.) to name two very prominent ones – some fantastic solutions have grown out of these accelerators and we will see more and more of these pop up and become relevant. Finally, improving the customer experience will continue to drive much of the innovation we will see in the industry….using AI to deliver personalized solutions to customers at the end of the day will be a differentiator.
The challenge facing most financial institutions (FI) is not a lack of data. The primary challenges are that their data lives on antiquated and siloed core and ancillary systems, resulting in fragmented financial and customer information, which they cannot easily get to or digest. Instead, our banks have been forced to create extensive manual processes to garner actionable insights and normally those insights are not timely due to the time required to assemble the information. It’s insane actually when you think about it. It has been interesting as we’ve been raising capital – those who have not served on a FI board or worked in a FI are absolutely shocked when we show them KlariVis – the first question they ask is…..why do banks not have this today?
We’ve talked with some larger FI’s who have embarked down the data journey by trying to hire data scientists and build their data lake in-house. What we’ve learned from these banks is that it is a huge undertaking and the C-suite is frustrated with the lack of progress in most instances. First, to actually recruit data scientists to come work at a bank is not the easiest thing to do…..let’s face it, banking is not the “sexiest” of businesses. Second, they are very expensive folks to hire and third, and most importantly, they don’t understand banking. And so they struggle with understanding the right data points to include and with the presentation of the data in a manner that makes sense to the executives and relationship managers who are using the information to make decisions. The same thing is true with some of our competitors; I actually had a competitor firm ask me a month ago – how do you know which data points are relevant? The answer is that KlariVis is built by bankers; not only the KlariVis banking experts, but also many of our consulting clients have their fingerprints all over our product due to their feedback along our development cycle. It’s been incredible.
KlariVis does the heavy lifting for our banks, so our clients can focus on what they do best – banking. We take their data from the various disparate systems, bring it into the KlariVis Cloud, transform and standardize it and deliver it back to the bankers in an attractive interface that is easy to navigate and easy to digest. By using the cloud, we will be able to deploy AI across our platform banks, which will enable them to deliver the personalized customer experience that their customers are demanding today.
However, what we are finding with many of our implementations is that the data is not necessarily always “clean”. Often we see duplicate CIF records, accounts assigned to officers who are no longer employed by the bank, missing fields, inaccurate or incomplete contact information, etc. This is where banks must focus their time and energy – putting the proper data governance structure in place to clean-up their data and then to maintain it going forward. “Junk in – junk out”. I know this is not an easy process and takes resources, but it absolutely should be at the top of the priority list for every bank. Data should be treated as the enterprise-wide asset that it is.
How would you hope/wish/aim for the fintech segment to alleviate the top pain points users face when integrating/breaking down their data?
The number one pain point I see in FIs is their ability to access their own data. I’m amazed that some banks on certain core systems must actually put a ticket into their core provider to get a report written or scheduled. That is unbelievable to me today and is a serious problem that needs to be solved. I hope with the new “open” core systems that are currently being developed, that it will push the legacy vendors to move in this direction as well and allow banks easy access to their data in easy to use formats. I’m thrilled with the push that the ABA (American Bankers Association) has been making to this end and it seems that they are making some headway with the three largest core vendors.
We’d love to know what some of your top FinTech predictions for 2020 are?
The FI – FinTech partnership will become more prevalent in 2020. Due to some of the issues we’ve discussed earlier, banks are acknowledging the fact that fintechs often have better design capabilities and quicker implementation capabilities than what exists at the major core vendors.
Everything Digital! – obviously this is becoming huge now with the coronavirus pandemic. Banks are now being forced to become digital in every way possible – before this week, I would have focused on digital account opening and commercial/mobile enhancements; but now it is everything digital. Huge opportunity for those fintech providers who have solutions that can be implemented in short order.
Most, if not all, of our community bank consulting clients are looking at opportunities to streamline the loan origination process and I think those commercial loan origination solutions are poised to be very impactful to the industry.
Tag (mention/write about) the one person in the fintech industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read!
Tom Shen, founder of Malauzai.
Your favorite FinanceTech quote
“Data is the new oil”
At KlariVis, we truly believe this – but we want to deliver refined oil to our FI clients, not crude!
Read More: GlobalFintechSeries Interview with Lil Roberts, CEO & Founder at Xendoo
KlariVis is a unique and proprietary software platform, built by banking experts, that provides critical, actionable insights for data-driven decisions across financial institutions.
Kim Snyder is the CEO and Founder of KlariVis.
