Jim Marous - The Power of Consumer-Permissioned Data

Okay. Hello, everyone. I'm Jim Morus, and I am so happy to be here today to talk to the founder and CEO of Truve Khalil Kolkoff. And what's interesting about this podcast is, or this interview is that we're really talking about something that is so key at every institution right now, and that's data and insight. There is no organization I work with, be it big or small, that today is not concerned about. Are they using all the data available to create personalized solutions for the broadest number of customers? I had a very interesting situation. Gosh, it's now three years ago when I went to China, I visited a financial institution, digital financial institution, in fact, the biggest digital bank in the world. And we bank was very interesting because they built their business on knowing as much they could about the broadest array of market and provided solutions to many people that were not able to open financial relationships with traditional financial companies. Now, why was that possible? Number one, they were able to implement everything in a very inexpensive way because they were digital. But the most important component of this was they had a good data set on four parallel cloud platforms that allowed them to provide different financial services to different consumers based on the amount of data they had. Instead of making sure that every person could create a profit, what they did is they looked at every consumer and said, can we provide a service? And by doing so, when we look at the overall segment, we can create a product. In other words, it was actually risk management as opposed to risk avoidance. This is a major problem in our industry right now. And so I'm so happy to be talking with a company that really is providing more than ever the ability to have a broader set of data. That's customer permission. That can drive revenue, but most importantly, can expand the overall marketplace that we're trying to serve. Because one thing's for sure, we're all trying to hit more customers than ever before and hit more prospects in different segments. So to start us off, can you tell us a little bit, Kirill, about your company and actually about your story that prompted your company.

Great to be on this webinar with you, Jim. Thanks for joining, and thanks for hosting it with me, and thanks for everybody for joining. I'm CEO and founder of Truth, Kirill Klokoff. Truth is an open finance platform trove lets your customers easily verify income and employment, switch direct deposit, verify their assets, insurance, and more, and all in one platform that all of our products play really well together. Let me tell you how we arrived to where we are today. It's 2015. I graduate from business school, I get a good job back in California and I moved. Since then I got a job. I think I am making enough money to get a normal loan where I apply for a car loan with 10 financial institutions. After trading back and forth pay stubs and two weeks later I realized that I have one left. Everybody else either rejected me or gave me an offer that doesn't make a ton of sense. And the last one eventually three weeks later gave me a 15% APR to buy a car. And that was back in 2015. It didn't make any sense. And what other than I was a little hurt by the experience and my ego was a little hurt. I was actually wondering why. And the reason why as I was digging into is at that time I didn't have my credit developed as an immigrant. I had 520 credit score which is considered deep subprime or bad credit. And with bad credit, your life is not easy. You live in constant recession and you live paycheck to paycheck. And the feeling of that, that's what really drives the vision and the mission for trophies to put the data back in the hands of consumers so consumers can leverage that data in a way that benefits them. You apply for a mortgage, you can verify your income and employment instantly. And that gives you an opportunity to get more options, get loans in multiple places. Right. And verify much quicker you want to switch your direct deposit, you don't need to spend time doing clicking buttons in your payroll provider. We can automate that. And overall, the vision for the company is over time we want to help financial institutions, independent mortgage bankers and credit unions to really unlock the power of consumer permission data and leverage it to your own benefit to reduce risk, accelerate customer acquisition and reduce costs. Which is very important I think with a market where margins are very thin today.

So it's interesting, we met each other at a conference, was introduced by a mutual friend of ours and it was interesting because at that conference I realized that so many organizations that were third party solution providers had very similar elevator speeches and the amount of differentiation just wasn't that great From a normal person just hearing it, what sets you apart? I mean there's a lot of data companies out there. There's a lot of companies that say we're going to allow you to build better data sets for your marketing and for your risk profits and you're looking at personalization, all that what sets trove apart from from your competition.

Jim, have you read the book called the Amazon, the Everything Store? I Go back to it a lot when I explain to my team what are we trying to build here. I think the biggest innovation in the last or one of the biggest innovation in the last 15 years was cloud computing. And in cloud computing Amazon is the ultimate winner. And why they won the market is not because they had each of the point solution to be the best that were able to make the products well play well together. So your compute would talk to your memory, the memory will talk to the databases very quickly. There's a machine learning on top of it. And that's the vision for truth as well. When we started we started with just payroll aggregation and it solves a couple use cases like verification of income, unemployment and direct deposit switch. Last year we added insurance so you can verify insurance, home insurance, auto insurance. This year we added bank aggregation and we acquired a company called Credit Graph because they build a world class scoring attributes on top of bank aggregation data and transaction data. And if you look at all of our products, they're well integrated. You can buy from one vendor a product suite that solves most a big chunk of your verifications problems and as an organization, but also can accelerate some of the deposit acquisition in a very meaningful and somewhat creative way because we play well the bank aggregation together with direct deposit switch, with the digital direct deposit switch. So to summarize, if you decide to work with Truth, you're not buying a product, you're buying a platform that allows you to be creative with solutions that you're trying to build. And I know there are a lot of cross creative financial organizations out there that are looking to solve very, very complex problems. And usually if you try to cobble together multiple point solutions that becomes very expensive and the projects just fall apart with us. If you want to add a new product, it's just a flip of a switch. That's how I think we differentiate it from what you see in the marketplace.

Yeah, and it's interesting now because you know when we are talking to solution providers in the marketplace, a lot of solution providers are providing solutions that are also sold by their core providers, by other data companies and companies out there that are selling similar solutions. So how, not just how you differentiate, but why would somebody implement a solution, a platform from Troove when they their management team may say but we already have a core provider that says they can provide us data. What, what over and above that do you provide?

I think the biggest differentiator is really the team until you talk to or meet our team. I started the company with my co founder Ilya Ilya translated Siri from English to all other languages and he was building on large language models back in like five years ago before everybody else was doing it. So our head of product, she came from Venmo PayPal Afterpay. So the team that came together to build Truth is really innovative. I think that the product innovation cycles here are very quick. It's easy to work with us and yes, you can buy it through a reseller. We work with some of the POS LOS systems. We work with digital banking providers. You can buy point solutions and eventually I think as we just meet our customers where they are. However, if you build the we start with one product eventually you want to say if you start working with let's say Alchemy, your digital banking provider, but then you have for mortgage origination you're using Compass. We'll meet you where you are, will work with both with digital banking and LOS POS systems that you have. And the best thing is you don't need to do anything other than just say yes, I want this product. We'll flip a switch and then it just appears in that universe of whatever products that you have. So our suite of integration I think is most comprehensive in the market today.

You know, it's interesting when we talk about thin files we usually or used to talk with respect to immigrants, people came from other countries. But the reality is in your situation, it was bigger than that. It's the fact that you were just starting off and there's not a financial institution out there today that isn't trying to hit the Gen Z. The younger consumer, my son for instance, it took him a long time to build any kind of credit power, any kind of banking relationship because he had none. You're starting from square one. Nobody starts with a 800 credit score. But the reality is all this other data you're collecting that you're putting into a database that you're allowing organizations access to, but also giving consumers the permission to allow or not allow certain data sets in there measures. So you really are expanding quite a bit the database of available customers, aren't you?

I think we do. And let me start with some market stats. Let me just pull it up real quick because as I was preparing for for our session I was surprised. So quick stats on how big the market is. There's 62 million working Americans with a thin file. 11% have scores below 550, 34.8 have scores between 669. So it's subprime. We're almost at 50% of population that a lot of financial institution. Going back to your point about risk aversion, Jim, if you're risk averse, you're not even looking at that population. That's why some organizations, fintechs and other organizations like Capital One who serve specifically that audience, they were able to grow so quickly.

You know, you know, that's, that's interesting because to your point, we, you know, traditionally financial institutions, heck, I worked in a bank for a number of years and one of the first things they tell you that no risk, it was kind of like their mentality. But as you said, fintech companies and smaller financial institutions that are seeing the light for better, for lack of a better comment, really, you're seeing that they can almost double the number of consumers they can reach. Now it may not be doubling the revenue, but when you talk about the fact of growing relationships that we're talking about more than ever before, minimizing risk. This customer permission data is key to.

That isn't is it is the way to deepen the relationship is you need to understand consumer where everybody else doesn't understand it, right? Everybody can run a credit report, it's very easy. But if you talk about this 50% of consumers that today are not in your prime plus then how do you understand them? And the better way to understand is to imagine like if I came to you and I'm a company, I'm truth, I'm trying to get a loan from me, what would you ask from me? You would ask me for my P and L, my cash flow statement and balance sheet. And if you could emulate in the same way to understand the consumer in terms of their how much money they're making when they wake up in the morning and go 9 to 5 to their job and come back, where does the paycheck land and how much is it, how long they've been working in that job. That is one aspect where we solve that data with payroll data. Where if you work for example for Walmart or if you work for a small company with 10 people, we'll be able to log in as a consumer and get that data, verify their income and employment over time. We can also keep the connection in life and keep the data refreshed. So as a financial institution, you know, when somebody has the job and you want to upsell them, that gives you a real opportunity to understand are they still employed and if they're unemployed, they suddenly lost their job, maybe you can come forward and help them. Same thing with understanding your cash flow, right? When you connect to your bank account. Whether we can analyze the data from the core or we can look at the data from third party systems, you as a financial organization, you want to understand what's the cash flow look like. That is straightforward. But then the next level, the company that we acquired, it does give you 2200 attributes. It also gives you a signal. It gives you a signal in terms of, okay, how much balance do you keep in your bank account? So over time you can understand the consumer at a level as if you were underwriting say a company in your, in your territory. And finally, if you connect insurance, then you really know what's the balance sheet look like because the collateral on your car, on your home, you know where the person lives, you know how much insurance do they have. With all these three data points, you almost perfectly emulate the P and L, the cash flow, the balance sheet. And at that level you understand the consumer and you can market to the consumer in, in a way that it was not possible before. And I think that's why truth is, is really helping not only serve a different population, which I'm excited about this 50% of population, but also it helps you accelerate your business in a meaningful way by building a deep relationship with a new customer set or customers that you already have.

So what options do financial institutions have when it comes to customer permission data?

I think there are a lot of options. Going back, Jim, to your question, I'll be honest, I think there's a lot of companies that provide consumer permission data. However, we've seen this with our customers. When the consumer permission data platform evolves and you have multiple ways to look at the consumer, or you allow consumer to connect multiple different accounts, you. I like to think about this as when you drive in a car and you only have the credit score that you only can see back, you only can see your rear window. But then you start peeling off and everything else like blacking out and you start peeling off this tape and you start seeing, okay, this is how your cash flow looks, okay, this is how much money you're making and suddenly you understand where you're driving and how you can help the consumer get to their financial goals. And I think there are a lot of organizations already doing it. The most innovative organizations are doing it. Now the question is how fast can this happen for everybody in the market so you can service more population and not lose to fintechs.

So how do financial institutions actually implement your data within their current workflow? How hard is it?

It's not hard. We have this slide which we call path to success. And the path to success can be anywhere from couple of weeks all the way to say eight weeks. And when it's one week, it means, let's say you're using one of the POs or losing one of the systems that we support today, or bank digital bank providers. Then you literally go to Truth. You take our API keys, you plug in them in your system like say, Banner, Constellation, Alchemy. Soon you plug them in and then your direct deposit switch is turned on within 24 hours. And as an organization, you don't really need to do anything. It just works out of the box. And if you're running, if you have your own app, then usually the integration takes a couple of weeks. In the end, after two to three months, you really know what the data looks like. And we help you optimize and maximize the success with our product.

So you can actually develop a composable, what I call a composable solution where you may solve for one problem. At the financial institution, they can dip their toes in the water working with you and then expand the relationship. They don't have to go in all in at the very beginning, correct?

No, no. I like to think about us as a partner who has to prove that it's worth working with us. Every day you start working with us on one solution and one problem, we prove that it works for you, and then we move on to the next one and the next one and the next one. And eventually it's going back to the Amazon analogy. You don't buy from AWS all of their services on day one. You just buy one or two. Then three years later, I was looking at our services that we use. We use 47 services from AWS simply because it's so easy to plug it in and simply because it's so easy to leverage. And you build a trust with the platform. And that's the vision for us. That's the vision to help you solve more problems without going through again with procurement with yet another vendor. It's a lot of work for you to be able to just flip the switch and get the value right away.

So what's exciting about this is your solution is fast and easy to implement. Secondly, it's scalable, so you can start small and grow big. And at a time when people are still concerned about the economy and budgets are cut back, and people are certainly cut back, you actually make it so that they can implement a solution one at a time, build the revenue model or the cost retained containment model, and then that helps Pay for additional expansion of the solution. But as good as this sounds, there's obviously challenges that come in play. What challenges have you seen the financial institutions have when implementing customer permission data?

Like everything new Jim, consumer permission data is you kind of gotta start, get used to is slightly different workflow for your customers to experience and especially for the team in house, for example loan officers or somebody who works at the branch, you need to get used to that. This system is in place now and they need to understand how it works, experience it themselves. And I think one of the challenges is like dog footing. Truth is not that easy because you literally have to move your get a mortgage or switch direct deposit switch to your bank. And a lot of times that already happened. So over time. That's why I think the model of building the trust early on and continuously with not only the organization but also with folks who work at the branch who underwrite the loan. That's the model that we, I would imagine by now we have done a really good job getting the buy in from everybody at the organization and getting spread across the organization. And the other challenge is obviously not everybody wants to connect their bank account or switch their direct deposit. So the conversion what we get define as somebody opening truth all the way to successful transaction. It can be from very high, let's say 60s all the way to 20%. And the reason why is you have to have a good offer, you have to give, do it at the right time. And I think that's where the approach of having good partners, somebody who has a strong product team, somebody who has a strong UX design team who can help you design those experiences is very important. I keep hearing from our customers that oh, we tried consumer permission data before and it didn't work. And I would be can you show me how? Or I would go and sign up and try to get a mortgage or a loan. And Jim, some of these user experiences could have been, could be, could have done better. And in summary, the challenge with consumer permission data, it requires consumers intent, it requires consumers interaction with your product. It requires some consumer trust. And that's not easy to get.

Actually when you talk about this, the customer permission data as you provide the value, as they see what the value proposition is, then the ability to actually integrate this gets easier, doesn't it? Because you know, it's a trust game both between the financial institution and troove but also financial institution their customers.

Correct, you're right, you're right. It's building the trust in financial world is the biggest, the biggest hurdle A lot of organizations went through this in we just started playing open banking but there are other providers like Platinicity, they went through this journey over time. We used to work with the founder of Kovo and Kovo was one of the providers that was acquired back by Plaid and when he told me then when they started the company back in 2012, people would say exactly what they say about payroll or they used to say about payroll data. A couple years back it was like I would never enter my bank credentials into some app. And here we are 10, 11 years later. Any app you go there is a bank aggregation. I'm winning the product.

So you know, if you're let's put you in the place of the financial institution and take your, your truth hat off and put your XYZ finance institution hat on. How would you evaluate organizations that want to help with customer permission data? So when you're looking at a source, what would you look at? If you're a financial institution, how would you determine the right partner?

I like to think about what we do as a infrastructure. It's, it's like similar to water, similar to your electricity, similar to your compute, similar to any infrastructure that's out there. And the way to best understand the infrastructure is how secure it is. That's one of the biggest items we, we obsess our security. We spend a lot of time making sure that we don't have holes because we do hold valuable PII data. The second one is how is the user experience in the conversion as I mentioned? Right. It's it can be anywhere from 20% all the way to 60% and the, the differences between company that will help you get to 60% or company will just give you sell you as a solution and you will implement it however best you can and then that's where you're going to be left with. And the quality of integration is also important. Right? The tech team behind the product is important. Most of our team is coming from search engine companies. So they have built high load infrastructure at Apple, at Google and a few other organizations where you have to build it in a way that's scalable. So today we handle 3 million transactions or back in last year we handle about 3 million transactions. And that is the second aspect. And the third aspect is obviously price. When you want to buy electricity from somebody, you'd rather buy the cheapest electricity you can. Because in the end of the day it all comes down to the best price and making sure that the product works according to your requirements. But also you want to get as a financial institution, want to get a partner who will give you more product for the same price. And that's I think where true is very different from our competition in the marketplace. I'm curious Jim, let me ask you this question back. What do you hear back? What do you hear from financial institution? What is when they evaluate providers like us, how do they make a decision?

Well, it's interesting. Organizations will say number one they base it on price. So you're exactly right there. Secondly, they, they get a feel the rapport with the organization to how much are you going to help me implement this? Okay, and number three, and the part that's really miss, really missing from so many financial institutions is what I call the last mile. You know, a lot of organizations sell solutions but they don't help the organization actually implement the solution to make it so that it pays for itself. I get so frustrated when I see great solutions out there that I'm going to take Salesforce for example, a solution that a lot of organizations have. Salesforce provides a lot of power to organizations for CRM systems, everything else. But a lot of Salesforce people go and they revisit a client to find out that they're not even using it. They're getting reports from it, but they're not using it as a way to generate new relationships. So I get frustrated. Doesn't matter what the solution is, be it a, let's say a digital new account opening solution, whatever it is. Organizations I believe that don't evaluate their partners based on how are they going to hold their hand to get something implemented at the consumer level, not internally. I, I understand you better be there when I need it internally. But are you going to make it? So this is a revenue generator or a cost containment item or are you simply going to, you know, as you reference, are you going to Simply be the 20% company that says sold it, I'm out of here, you know, to that degree. Then I'm going to turn this around back to you. How does true help based on all the relationships you have and all the ways that it's being used? How do you work with an organization to make it so that their team is successful in implementing it with their customers?

I like to, when we talk internal, we call ourselves B2B2C2B because I'll explain why. Imagine your financial institution. I show up at your doors and say I'm going to solve all of your problems and first I need to explain to you how I'm going to solve all of your Problems. And when I sell to you, let's say you are a chief financial officer or somebody in risk or somebody in underwriting, you buy in, you like what you hear, we're going to save you money, reduce risk. Then the next level is we need to sell your team. That's where again, the B comes in. Where we need to go to Volkscore actually going to be showing this product to the end users, the loan officers, the field, the team on the products like product and engineering, which have to integrate this. Right. We need to win them over. And then eventually when we win that team over, then we go back to consumer. And consumer has to now believe that this is a good, good solution for them. They need to enter their credentials, we need to get the data back. And going back to why it is not a easy implementation process is a lot of organization, as you said, they will be like, okay, I sold, done, but you have to work. And we have weekly sessions with most of our customers in the first three months, explaining and handholding, giving training materials to not only the folks who are implementing it, but also to the teams in the field. And getting the buy in from the teams in the field is the ultimate goal. Because if they bought in, if they like what they see, if they see happier customers, then we will never lose. Right. Because in the end our users are not, but the buyers and the users are the folks in the field and consumers for coming to branch or trying to get a loan from it.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I, I keep on getting back to the fact that you only succeed as a company long term, not if you make the sale, but if it's actually generating revenue where you're not seen as a cost center. And truly we've talked about this offline. This drives me nuts. And one of the reasons why your solution piqued my interest when we met each other in person was the fact that number one, it seemed like it was relatively easy to implement and I'm just not easy. But you never let go of the sales process. You have a sales team, but they don't just sell, they actually help implement. Number two, you make it so that organizations are actually going to generate revenue, generate success from this, that you aren't going to be viewed as a cost center. Because I'll tell you what, as the economy went south for a while, organizations reevaluated their partnerships to say, what relationships can we cut off to save money where we don't have really any benefits seen? And there were some great companies that were cut off. But the reason was they had never shown the value to the end consumer that proved the value to the financial institution that brought value to your company. And you know, it's, it's something that I, I talk about often but it drives me nuts. In fact I do webinars or podcasts with sales team to say here's what you need to do to sell to your clients and what they're really wanting to buy. Their challenges to your first question it many times it's not asked on the front end. You know, how are you going to make it so that I act so that what you told me about actually works? So you said that organizations can implement this relatively quickly. You gave some really phenomenal time periods on where you can implement different solutions. What gets in the way of implementing at this pace that you've seen some of your clients do? What's the difference between those that take less time and those that take a massive amount of time?

I like your point. Maybe we can talk about the ROI and nice to have versus need to have. Being an early stage startup, I've seen this journey through. We started in 2020, 2021 was crazy. And now we're going back to I think what's normal. We look like the VC market looking back in 2017, 2018. And the difference is you cannot sell nice to have vitamins products anymore. So when we talk to our customers or future customers on the first call we tell you here's the business case. It might not be correct for your organization, but it's roughly correct. Say you pay for an instant database, let's say work number $55. We're going to give it to you for $20. Let me show you how much money we can save you today. And then I think that speaks the interest because going back to the value we always show how much money did we save you on every transaction.

Yeah.

Or how much, how many users we accelerated, what was the uplift from? What was the new revenue that we brought in? And our sales team and everybody in the organization is trained around that. Look, we need to prove every day that we are not a vitamin, we're a painkiller. If we're a painkiller, then the future is bright. If you're a vitamin. There are a lot of companies that gonna be unfortunately because of the environment, probably gonna be out of business or acquired in the next 24 months. It's a very unfortunate environment for a startup today. So going back to what stops companies from going, going live quickly, I think the easiest are Those that are fintechs, they have the only digital product, they have good engineering team. We sit with them for a couple of weeks. We have a shared Slack channel. They go live instantly and on the other spectrum Jim. And they go live instantly with for all of their millions of consumers that they have. On the other spectrum is the organization that are having branches that have field offices and there we need to. It's a hand to hand combat. The average loan officer age is 47. So you need. And they're not the most techiest. We need to win them over and over again in a hand to hand combat by training, by showing how the product works. And it has to make sense for them because otherwise they would just go back to their old norms of how they used to do it for the last 20 years because that's the easiest and that change management is, is not easy. As a startup, any change management is not easy. And especially in a big established financial institution with say thousands of thousands of wrenches.

Yep. Well that's, I mean that's, I talk about it often that you know, you have to embrace change, take risk and disrupt yourself. That is really much easier said than done. And a lot of people look at things and say how will that mess up my job from what I've usually done? So tell you what, let's go here. What are some of the best case studies that you've seen where organizations have used the benefits of customer permission data to bring solutions to marketplace? Give me a couple examples of how organizations today are using your tools to do things better.

Great. There are a few case studies on the website. Our largest customers, for interesting reasons they're not willing to give the case study. When I tried why, when I tried to Google why would somebody not give you a case study? One of the first point was competitive advantage. So let's not name the names but let's say it's top 15 mortgage lender in the country. And back in the day we email them and we email chief information officer. It's a multi thousand people organization.

Right.

I email chief information office in five minutes I get the response back, let's talk doesn't happen that often. And when I hop on a call I realized they already have fired the work number because they increased the prices on them again and they were not happy. So they're looking for alternative solutions and the work number for those who don't know, it's part of The Equifax, it's two and a half billion dollar company that with 60% EBITDA margin. And do you know any other business with 60% EBITDA margin? I don't know many. It's hard to find out there exactly. They keep increasing prices so once a year you get a big fat check with the price increase. And one of those years that chief information officer, he said I don't want to deal with this anymore. And that's exactly the time when we ping him. They've been custom for about two years. We solve about 40% of their verifications instantly. And I think with the rollout of some new products we're probably going to go up to 60, 70%. And at this point he almost forgot that that problem existed in and being an early customer at the startup is great because I think he also got an unbelievably good price and unbelievably good deal. So it was a win win all around for truth and that mortgage lender. Let me give you an example. A credit union. We work with one of the top 10 credit unions. They use us for direct deposit switch. So direct deposit switch is a product that allows you to accelerate the switching of direct deposit from your payroll provider to the new bank account. And the biggest challenge there, it's not that it is you have to switch the adjusted the direct deposit. It's you have to move your life. That's the challenge. And so we were able to construct a solution for them that not only helps consumers to switch direct deposit, which I think by now is a common dental product, everybody has roughly the same integrations, everybody has roughly the same solution and there's very little differentiation. However, if you combine it with ability to understand their cash flow, ability to understand their bills, and ability to tell them where to go to switch their bills, we saw an uplift of 35% and that's non trivial. At a established organization that doesn't sign up a whole lot of new customers, that was meaningful. Revenue adoption, revenue increase. So this is just a couple of cases where I've seen customers have been very successful with it and under NDA I can disclose all the names and talk about how, how exactly did that work?

So as we wrap this up to a degree, what do you see on the horizon? You know, there's a lot of talk about privacy, security, government regulations. What do you see as regulatory changes that may impact this space in the near future?

Let's go back to the beginning of Internet and I'll explain why. It used to be that Internet was not taken seriously. And then in 2000 it started growing and 2010, this is when it really hit the prime and in the process, Jim, I could buy your data online and I could move it around however I want because nobody understood the value of the data. The data was fairly accessible and there were no laws around it. Europe being, I think European Union is being a little bit ahead of the curve here. They implement gdpr, there's open banking laws. And in a world where I think the value of data is becoming more and more apparent, the data loss will become more standardized. If you look when we started troop we had just CCPA, California Consumer Protection Act. Now there are about 30 states that have a version of CCPA or they're looking at adopting a version of ccpa. Eventually all across the United States will have a version of GDPR or CCPA that would be adopted all across. It will be harder to sell the data behind your back to acquire your data and sell the data behind your back. So the future is moving towards where consumer explicitly has to give you the consent. Not just a checkbox with a font 5 on page 25 where you say yes, I sign off all my data but actually it has to be more of a product proper disclosure. And that's where the open banking has ended. But open banking is just the beginning. The open finance is I think the future where all of the financial data.frank 1033 section 1033 where it stays consumer financial data should be available to the consumer at any time and they should be able to share the data with whoever they want. I think that's the future. It's happening right in front of our eyes. CFPB is making, has made a lot of changes. The open banking is here and we're moving into that privacy, security, more private and secure world where the data would be hard to come by, sell or leak to an extent. Right. Ideally the data should be permission based where you have my data for a period of time and then I can disconnect my account if I don't want to or I can give you a timeframe of 30 days when you can touch my data. And that's the world I think that we're going to be living in in the next five to seven years.

You know, I think it's interesting too because I it really is not a value transfer. You know, we brought up the Amazon example a couple times and I've talked about it many times in my podcast and in webinars and in speeches and we pay every year for Amazon to sell us stuff. If you were charged $100 by Nordstrom to be able to come in to buy things, you go, I'll avoid Nordstrom. The reality is we spend more than $100 a year for us to be able to get served by Amazon in Amazon prime. And virtually everybody is a member. Well, the reason is because they continue to provide value over and above their products they sell. I don't look at the prices and say, geez, am I going to pay a little bit more here? Where I could have gone to the store, drove to the store and got some pretty good personal care products or vitamins or whatever it may be. The reality is it's the use of data for my benefit. And at the end of the day, the reason the government gets involved is because organizations use data that doesn't give me a benefit. And when it comes down to, and you mentioned it, customer permission data, those words alone say the power is going to be in my hands, the consumer's hands, and I'm going to allow it on an individualized basis to every organization I work with based on the value they provide me in return. We talked about ChatGPT or generative AI, and the reality is I'm going to want generative AI to get to know me better, to work on my behalf until it does something wrong. I'm going to probably turn it on and off for different organizations based on the value proposition, the value transfer. I think this is where financial institutions many times miss the point. You can provide an extraordinarily strong value transfer to that 50% of the marketplace that today is not being served because nobody wants to talk to them, because they don't fit into the normal mode of what they want. A bank wants as a customer, that they want this much revenue generated. The reality is, look at the segment as a whole. If you could generate 50% more business simply by lowering the threshold on the revenue that you require, but increasing the threshold on information you get, you can do so much more. I think from a consumer perspective, me as a consumer, me as a financial institution consumer, I get more frustrated every day at my traditional financial institution that doesn't listen to what I need, doesn't use my data to my benefit. And many times you can feel, when it's a general hit where you can feel very easily, they went to a huge segment, a big swath, maybe every small business in their database and talked about this because they didn't recognize the nuances of who I am. You know, the, the future of your data, the future of your solution is not just the direct deposit transfer. It's the ability to dig deeper into the consumer's life to provide them better services that are different than they are today. It's not going to be the general checking account, but maybe it's a checking account with a line of credit, a small line of credit that's available at a push of a button. When I notify you that you've overdrawn your account, you push a button on your mobile device that says I'm going to take, I'm going to take a short term loan out for $50 to pay for this rather than paying 35 hours in an NSF fee. This is all the ways that data can be used that you provide in the partnerships you provide. Again, I, I was a fan when I first met you because you're, you are helping to deal with a problem that's out there. And the biggest, I believe the biggest roadblock, the biggest hurdle in the marketplace today are financial institutions that continue to look at banking the way they did in the past without looking at new data sources, new partnerships, new ways of implementing new ways of building products around everybody out there. We talk about wanting to serve Gen Z, but unfortunately many finance institutions want the Gen Z to look like a baby boomer before they work with a Gen Z. There aren't many of those out there. I mean you were an example of a person who's starting a new business. You just graduated from college, you're out in California, you're, you're not alone in your ability to be new in the marketplace for financial services. And you, number one, didn't have a very high credit rating because you had no credit and you couldn't do what everybody at your age wanted to do in your career path wanted to do. This is solution and the ability to find a partnership also with a company like Truth that's going to hold your hand. You go down the field and make sure it's implemented correctly as opposed to simply being available on the platform. You know, I hope you have great success in raising the bar from 20% to 60% utilization of your services because everybody benefits your B2C to B to A, B to A, whatever it was all those letters that I mentally figured it out but I couldn't do it again. I think it's important for people to understand what you provide, the differentiation. So with that in mind, you know, Kirill, how does somebody get a hold of you and your team to at least hear deeper about what you provide?

It's very easy. First we'll send the recording right after we finish here, we'll send a follow up email to everybody who signed up for the webinar. If you don't get that email, you can always go to troop.com and enter your email and we'll reach out and provide you an overview of the platform. But also, going back to the business case will help you build a business case that will make your CFO and your boss very happy. They will look at it and say, okay, you might be up for a promotion next year. That's my goal for people who work with us in financial institutions is they should be getting a promotion because they bring new value, they're being innovative. And whether it's accelerating revenue and deposit acquisition or reducing costs and reducing risk, I think there's a strong business case for leveraging new venues of data. The alternative data, I.e. consumer permission and whoever does adopt it and fintechs have been very successful at it, is going to be winning the market. One stat that I forgot to mention, Jim, when we're talking, is the distribution of new open checking accounts. And the fintechs have been winning.

My friend Ron Shevlin just put a report out that said new accounts being opened, especially with the young people, they're not going to traditional finance institutions.

That can be reversed. I think to reverse that, the bar in terms of risk has to be a little lowered because Gen Z looks more like a subprime. Even though they're not all the BNPL products and node reporting to credit agencies, they look much more like subprime. They're looking for snappy, quick user experiences and they're looking for somebody who would understand them at a very deep level the way Twitter, Google and Facebook understands them. Yeah, and I think that that is, that's the future. And if you want to email me directly, I'm Kirill at Truth and Kirill.

Let's do a shameless plug for both of us here in the next three weeks or so. Depends on when you you see this webinar, if you watched it live or if you watch on a recording. We're going to be jointly putting out a white paper on customer the power of customer permission data. We're going to be talking about the case studies, we're going to be talking about the roi. We're going to be talking about the definition of what customer permission data is and what's different than what they're used to using and what stands for way success. This is going to be a short, easy, easy to absorb white paper that's going to really play off what we discussed today. It's going to include a transcript of this discussion. And again, it's going to open eyes in the financial institution marketplace as to what is possible in the new wave where you're competing against organizations and that are doing things faster, easier and actually to a broader marketplace than we've worked with in the past. Kirill, again, thank you so much for letting me talk to you today and for me to actually get to understand your company even better.

Jim, thank you so much for hosting this wonderful event. And everybody, thanks for joining. I had a lot of fun. Hope you did, too. Speak more later.