Announcing GSB’s New Digital Banking School

Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, July 15th, 2020 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. Eric Cook here joining you from the front seat of my Nissan Armada. I had to be out of the office today and I am working. I had somebody the other day coin the phrase. A no WFA. You've all heard of WFH for work from home, but WFA maybe we can see if we can get this trending. Do the hashtag work from anywhere, and I am doing it from the front seat of my Armada, and I wanted to make sure even if it's an abbreviated version of Free Webinar Wednesdays, I wanted to make sure. To hop on and say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world. So today's show and all shows are recorded and made available at Free Webinar Wednesdays. And, assuming that yours truly actually gets the recording moved over into a post, it will make it on freewebinarwednesdays.com, which I have not done quite yet for my presentation. From last week, but I spent some time talking about the value of focusing on a vertical market and what we've done here in our office as it relates to the banking space and some of the things that we're doing now to double down on our expertise and the ways that we serve the banking audience. And hopefully, if you were able to join that webinar live, you got some ideas on how you could maybe take what you're doing in your business and leverage that for your own vertical market and really make sure that those that you wanna serve are getting the best attention that they deserve. So that will be up here shortly along with this one. So stay tuned and thanks for your patience. Those of you that are attending live, if you would like to ask a question or make a comment, please feel free to hit me up in the chat area, which you're gonna find in your control panel over on the right-hand side of your screen. And I would love to hear from you. As well. So what I want to talk about today, actually just a couple of things. Let me go organize my windows a little bit here. So you all know, I guess I'm assuming those of you that have been frequent flyers here on Free Webinar Wednesdays know that You know, I've got a Mac computer, but my phone and pretty much most of our ecosystem that we've built here at the WSI agency has been focused on Google G Suite. I've been a longtime fan of the Android phones, and I've had the Pixel 1, Pixel 2, Pixel 3. I don't know if I'll get the Pixel 4, but I'll probably check out the 5 when it comes out. Although I am using AirPods now, you can see these, but they work just fine with the Pixel. And as part of that Google ecosystem, I've always used Chrome. It's been my go-to browser pretty much from the get-go, especially when we jumped over into G Suite and we started using all of the Google products for business Gmail and Calendar and Contacts. And we've even started using some of the G Suite productivity suites a little bit more proactively. I've actually done a handful of presentations using Google Slides. We use Google Docs quite a bit. But I have to admit, I am very, very impressed. And one of the reasons why I've actually started looking around Whoops. Is Chrome has just gotten really bloated. It's slowing my computer down. I'm notorious for having multiple tabs open, but even just that it's very basic in any of the technical documents that you read online and you look at Chrome, it's getting that reputation and just validates what I'm suspecting. I downloaded because it became available for Mac. Operating systems, I downloaded Microsoft Edge, and I have to tell you that I am very impressed. Now, Internet Explorer completely different experience. In fact, we just found out the new initiative that I kicked off recently, the linkedbanker.com. We went back and reviewed it, and the platform that we actually built all of the learning modules on and have the website hosted on. Doesn't support IE 11, the latest version. Although I say latest, Microsoft's deprecated Internet Explorer. I oftentimes refer to it as Internet Exploder because it is that bad. But more and more businesses are getting away from IE, and I think really gave Microsoft a bad rep when it comes to browsers. So what they've done is they've completely re-engineered their browser. They based it off of the Chromium engine, which really Is what runs Chrome. It runs Safari. I think it even runs Firefox. And they knocked it out of the park. I downloaded it a couple of days ago. It asked me whether or not I wanted to port over my information. I said yes. It grabbed every stitch of information from my Chrome browser. I'm sure I gave it permission, so I'm not saying that it was creepy and it did it without my authority, but it grabbed all of my extensions. Any of the sessions that I had in Chrome, for example, when I was logged into Gmail or logged into Facebook or logged into Asana, it carried those over as well. I didn't have to re-authenticate or re-log into those platforms like I thought I would have to, even though I've got multi-factor authentication turned on for most of the stuff that I use. It carried those sessions over and I was up and running literally in 5 minutes, and I've been using it as my primary browser driver for the last couple of days. I've actually shut Chrome down. I haven't uninstalled it because there's still a few things that I need to get to in Chrome, but I have been using the Microsoft Edge browser as my primary driver for anything and everything related to browsing the web on my Mac, and it has been awesome. I tend not to use Safari, and I know for Mac purists that's probably sacrilegious. Only because, and maybe there is, but I have not found a lot of the extensions that I tend to use in Chrome and now within Edge. So there may be ways to do that, but I'm just not sure. But I will tell you, if you have an opportunity to try it out, if you've got it on your PC, obviously you're probably already using it because I believe Microsoft really tried to make an effort But if you're on a Mac and you've been using Safari, or maybe you've been using Chrome like I've been doing for a number of years, and things just seem to slow down a little bit, I would encourage you to download Edge, give it a shot, use it as your primary browser for a little while, and see whether the performance on your computer improves like mine has. And I think you'll be really impressed. So I'll be curious to hear what you say. So I wanted to start off today's webinar with a little tech tip and make sure to share that with you. And, um, I, I, it's really weird to have the words coming out of my mouth that I'm excited about a Microsoft browser, but I'm, uh, I'm very impressed with Edge, and I think you will be too. The next item, and, uh, this is a little bit more, a lot more, or probably exclusively for the My banker friends, and I'm looking through the list and I see a few of you out there, so I appreciate you showing up. We recently made the announcement that a brand new school, which is a pretty big deal in the banking world, has been announced and is accepting applications, or I guess enrollment, if you wanna say that. I was tapped by the Graduate School of Banking to be the section leader, Which means I am not part of GSB faculty. I teach there at the regular GSB school, which unfortunately was canceled this year. And their sales and marketing school, which is still planning on going in September through the beginning of October. But Kirby, the CEO over there, reached out to me about a year ago and said, hey, we're thinking about building a new school. We've been talking to a few people and we want you to head it up, and I was super excited. This is what we believe to be not only the industry's first, but the world's first digital banking school. And so if you go to gsb.org, if you are a banker, this is probably gonna be really interesting to you. If you're not a banker and you wanna drop off, I totally get it. Or maybe you can give this URL to your banker friends and tell them that they should go to this school. To figure out how they can make their bank better at doing digital stuff. That's a good idea, do that. But the program itself is more than just digital marketing, and a lot of times when I have conversations with bankers, they think that while certainly that's what we do from a digital marketing perspective with website development and social media and SEO and advertising and all that stuff, Taking an organization and embracing a digital culture and becoming a digital bank or evolving to more of a digital footprint as a bank, as a community bank, is much more than just having a Facebook page and doing some Google Ads and sending a few emails. It involves a lot of other internal decisions. It involves attention to things like compliance and risk management and vendor review and strategic planning. It involves things like staffing, and do you have the right employees? You might have an employee base that's been with you for 10, 15, 20 years. They have grown up in the bank. They have assumed leadership positions in the bank, and when they started, the concept of digital banking just didn't exist. There was no such thing as digital banking because Internet banking was introduced, and then websites and social media, and now person-to-person payment and Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and all these other different payment functions that are still even out there that aren't even widely adopted. So we've created this school with the Graduate School of Banking to address all of those areas. Cybersecurity, for example, is another area. You've got a whole Another wrinkle of things, which is what we talked about with Scott Augenbaum a couple weeks ago when he joined, and we talked about just the growing increased prevalence of cybersecurity as it relates to consumers and with COVID and whatnot. But if you hit the schools and banking— schools and programs and go to the digital banking school, you'll get a sense of the main courses that are going to be there. It's going to be delivered virtually, where initially we were bummed that we weren't going to be able to bring people on campus into Madison, Wisconsin, and be together for a week. But the fact that we've moved this virtually, one, if you're going to do a digital banking school, if any school should be able to be delivered virtually, it should be a digital banking school because that's what it's all about. But 2, by delivering the content virtually, and this is maybe a lesson for those of you that are listening that aren't part of a bank but want to reach your audience and a broad cross-section of your audience, delivering this school virtually is gonna allow us the ability to not only tap into senior management. So the CEO, because registration is on a per-bank basis, so the bank pays one registration fee and then that gets them registered and then they get a connection and they can have as many people attend that session as they want. So you can have the CEO with the chief technology officer, the chief marketing officer, the chief compliance officer, the chief retail officer. You can have branch managers. You can have— I mean, it doesn't matter. You can have as many people as you want sitting around that computer or sitting in that boardroom listening to that presentation or even joining remotely for that matter and being able to be a part of these sessions. So it's gonna be Wednesdays and Fridays starting on September 30th for 4 consecutive weeks. So there's gonna be 8 total sessions. And each session is going to be dedicated to a specific topic. So the first session is all about the influence of fintech, picking your business model. The next session is going to be more along customer connection, branch strategy, internal decisioning. And then it's going to continue on through there with things like HR. I'll be delivering a session. The 7th one is actually going to be on digital marketing and building relationships electronically. with your customers when you don't get a chance to see them. We've always talked about that being a challenge, but it was usually, well, we see some of our customers and we don't see some of them. But now the we don't see is getting to be a larger percentage of the populace because fewer and fewer people are able or interested in coming into your lobbies, and you have to figure out a way to get better at building those electronic relationships and delivering value and establishing your subject matter expertise, not just as a bank, But as a banker in that bank. And then the 8th session, which I believe is culminating on Friday the 23rd of October, is going to be a facilitated roundtable discussion, almost like a peer group, where we're gonna have a panel of bankers that have gone through this process of developing and embracing a digital strategy and deploying that out into their organization. And we're going to share lessons learned and some things that they did that they maybe in hindsight maybe wouldn't have done. So it'll help bankers that go through the program that get their juices flowing and figure out exactly what it is that they would like to do next. This culmination panel discussion is really going to be a way to help set them off into the next phase of the process and how they can start implementing some of the things that they have learned over the previous 7 sessions. So we're super excited about it. And those of you that are bankers, hopefully you can see where this is a rather unique experience. It's a unique opportunity. Normally these schools for GSB or any of the others that I teach at, these normally have a per individual registration fee. So the Sales and Marketing School, which I alluded to earlier, You can certainly get some information about that. Very much more focused on sales and marketing and retail strategies. We're not going to get into a lot of the other big fintech and culture and legal and compliance issues as it relates to the bigger banks. But this is priced on a per-student basis, not on a per-bank basis. So if your bank wanted to send multiple people, you would have to pay multiple entry fees, whereas the Digital Banking School One fee, $2,950, and you get access to it. All the sessions are going to be recorded and made available, so you'll have access to that information afterwards. We're going to create likely a Slack channel that will give all the participants access for continual conversation, access to resources, access to all the faculty members. So you'll be able to be part of that, and that'll be available on an ongoing basis to be a continued resource for you. So if you are a banker, hit that up, check out the register online area. You can view some of these links over here, a little bit more detail around the different sessions under the curriculum area. So just really super excited to be able to deploy that. So check it out. Digital Banking School. And I guess the last thing that I wanted to just draw attention to, and I've chatted about this a little bit, and you can see that I'm not on Internet Explorer, so it's going to look really good, although we are making even more changes to the Linked Banker. But we are looking at launching our Linked Banker first Mastermind get-to-know-you call on Thursday the 30th of July. So a little over, a little under a couple of weeks away. So those of you that have registered as bankers for the Linked Banker, you'll be getting an email here at some point just to make sure that you hold that date and time for the kickoff call. We're going to go ahead and make sure that it's recorded for you as well. If you are not a banker and you're joining today's session and you're not familiar with what the heck the Linked Banker is, what we've done is furthering our efforts of focusing on that particular vertical industry that we feel that we know better than any other industries that we serve. We've developed a community, and you can do something similar to this by doing it in a Facebook group or a LinkedIn group if you wanted to. But this is our effort a little bit above those types of services to try to pull bankers together, to be the catalyst and the facilitator to help bankers better understand digital and social technologies, to build their relationships and support their brand and kind of establish subject matter expertise so that people see them as their banker, their friend, their confidant, their trusted advisor. And not just someone that works at the bank that's not really an important part of their banking world, their financial life, whatever you wanna say there. So those of you that are banks, if you've not joined, go ahead and at the very, very bottom, boom, you've got them ready, sign me up. You can go ahead and register for an account. Would love to see you over in the LinkBanker community. And if you're not a banker, this might give you an idea of how you could start the process of creating a virtual community So that as people might not be seeing you in person as much, just like I'm not doing in-person conferences and banking schools, it's becoming more and more of a virtual world. We have to think of ways that we can stay in touch with our customers and our prospects and the communities and the stakeholders that we want to influence and serve. And this is one of our ways that we've come up with doing that. So With that, I think it was really just 3 things that I wanted to talk about. I can't believe still that I led off with bragging about a Microsoft browser, but I'm loving Edge, so give it a shot. Let me know what you think. If you're a banker, hop over to gsb.org and check out the Digital Banking School. Join us and be part of something cool. Evolve your bank, evolve your culture, and do better at all things that touch the digital world. And again, if you're a banker and you've not signed up yet, hop on over to the Linked Banker and join the community. We'd love to see you there and help however we can to help you be a better banker and user of all the different digital tools and toys and tech that's out there to be able to make sense of it. So with that, I'm going to sign off from my automobile. I've got a little blended Starbucks mocha that I picked up that's probably not blended anymore, and it's probably melted, but I'm gonna enjoy that. I'm gonna suggest that you enjoy your day. I appreciate you hopping on Free Webinar Wednesdays with me, and I will look forward to seeing you next week and on future weeks here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until then, make it an awesome week, everybody. Take care. Bye-bye.