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and regulatory and compliance expertise. But the fintechs
can add another dimension: disruptive technologies and
agility. There are growing customer expectations for If you are a merchant level
omnichannel shopping. There is movement toward open
banking, digitization, interoperability and the digital salesperson or small ISO, it is
economy. Financial services in the future will be open-
sourced and real-time. Given this, bankers are thinking unlikely you will have a senior
about things such as: level contact at one of the big

• Optimizing the customer experience – the prime banks, but if you work with
competitive differentiator
your local community bank, you
• Providing a unified mobile payments experience will soon get to know the loan

• Changing the bank's operating culture to foster officers and even the CEO.
innovation and break out of legacy systems and silos

• Hooking up with fintechs to provide richer products
so that everyone can be a merchant and every device operational efficiencies and cost avoidance, and harness
can accept payments valuable customer data.

• Preparing for the next wave of fintech: software as
a strategy. It's one thing to be a fintech with a dozen In the second quarter of 2018, Jack Henry will do a proof
employees and a dream, but it is another thing to be of concept with The Clearing House and an alpha test
a bank with hundreds of employees and thousands with Zelle for a faster payments platform. TCH will build
of clients. Any proposed solution must go beyond a new rail for real time clearing and settlement, and the
simple integration and training, sales support and a charge will be uniform across the network for a truly level
marketing plan. playing field.
Why this matters Jack Henry has a hosted remittance product that targets
new and existing lockbox users. It includes multiple scan
There are a few reasons why this is important to you. capabilities, accounting validation update, and third-party
First, ProfitStars, www.profitstars.com, has a rich suite of interface files.
treasury services and products that your clients need, and
it is looking for ISOs to sell their product suite. You can There is also an e-lockbox product for check-free payments,
sell their products to your merchants regardless of where as well as a remote deposit product that will deposit checks
they are located and regardless of whether the merchant and post to QuickBooks. For large commercial depositors,
is using a bank running on the Jack Henry core platform. it can receive bulk mail, do the sorting and preparation,
manually key to an accounts receivable system, balance
Second, your merchants will look to you as their trusted and prepare the deposit via remote deposit capture, and
resource for information on payments, because they will image deposits for an archive. This allows the business to
not get this information from their bank, unless they are get rid of processing Metavante and Fiserv checks.
a large enterprise, for example, one that has over $100
million in sales. Community banks do not have the sales Community banks have not focused on selling treasury
staff to leave the branch and make sales calls. products. The loan team, operations team and treasury
operations are siloed. But the bank can sell electronic
Third, by cultivating a relationship with a local community banking as a catalyst to open the door to talk about treasury
bank, you will gain a valuable source of new merchant products and to identify and generate loan referrals. They
clients. Payments generate as much as 40 percent of non- can use data mining to identify large depositors and high
interest income for a bank, but community banks will transaction activity. The issue is that banks do not know
need well-staffed, well-trained, up-to-date ISO partners to how to sell. Bankers are heard to say, "This would be a
talk to their merchants. great job if it wasn't for the customers!" This is where ISOs
come in, because ISOs know how to sell.
Banks are building a new payments rail that encompasses
faster payments and payments from mobile devices. It has Brandes Elitch, Director of Partner Acquisition for CrossCheck Inc., has
been 40 years since the last new rail, the ATM, and look been a cash management practitioner for several Fortune 500 com-
how long it took for national ATM coverage. panies, sold cash management services for major banks and served
as a consultant to bankcard acquirers. A Certified Cash Manager
To do this, banks need to find trusted partners, nontradi- and Accredited ACH Professional, Brandes has a Master's in Business
tional third parties, to mitigate the rise of disintermedia- Administration from New York University and a Juris Doctor from Santa
tion, protect customer relations and revenue streams, gain Clara University. He can be reached at brandese@cross-check.com.

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