Charles Potts: The Process of Bringing Innovation to You

Technology has become an integral part of success in banking. With the demand for immediacy from customers and the need for more robust risk management tools, community banks increasingly rely on their technology provider partners to help them satisfy customer requirements.

That’s one reason why ICBA Innovation takes a multipronged approach to meeting community bank needs. From our education events—including our solution forums and webinars—to our collaborative endeavors—like ICBA’s ThinkTECH Accelerator—our goal is to ensure that community banks have access to the most robust and beneficial solutions on the market. In fact, we review nearly 1,500 companies each year to fill our pipeline with products that directly speak to community banks and your unique requirements. 

Community bankers play heavily in our recruitment of these solutions by sending us leads and information on challenges and opportunities. You also share information on the trends you’re seeing, and we seek out the companies that address them—all of which goes into selecting promising solutions to fast-track for community bank consumption. 

Case in point: Our most recent ThinkTECH Accelerator cohort includes several AI-based solutions that support your growth needs. AI has an ability to take out a lot of the inefficient, costly activities that happen in the back office, improve decisioning and risk management around fraud/AML/BSA, and drive customer growth through optimization strategies. What you can do with AI tools just gets more interesting, profound and real every day. 

Notably, these companies may not have been chosen without your input. For the Accelerator alone, Selection Committee members spend more than 50 hours vetting potential candidates. These bankers willingly give up that time to help select the companies that will resonate with your needs. 

To borrow a point from ThinkTECH Accelerator Selection Committee member Tony Gorrell, CEO of $1.6 billion-asset Sutton Bank in Attica, Ohio: Community bankers want products that will help them either make money or save money. And when interviewing Accelerator companies, the Selection Committee focuses on that, as well as questions related to pricing, core integration and compliance. Bankers also explore how coachable the company’s founders are, because the same way you build relationships with your customers, you build relationships with entrepreneurs. Ultimately, that exchange makes the products and services better. 

So, while the team at ICBA Innovation drives programs forward, this community of community bankers shapes their direction. We invite you to participate, attend ICBA Innovation events and join interviews during our next Accelerator cohort. The work you do with ICBA Innovation will not only benefit your bank today; it will also influence the future of community banking. To me, that seems like a commitment worth making.