Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
00:17:42 · Vijay Konduru
[00:17:42] S2: Thank you, Laura. So when you think about small business owners, and I'm gonna stick to America even though I know you're based in The UK, they do go through a lot of challenges, especially right now. Like, I'll throw some stats out at you guys. So we have 36,000,000,000 registered small businesses in America. Around 82% of them do not have a payroll or have any paid employees. Now what that means is to get all of the functions that a business needs to run to operate, they either have to go and pay for outside services and accumulate all of those services, figure out how to make them all come together, etcetera. Or worse, they gotta figure out all the answers themselves, which means that small business owners have to wear many, many hats sometimes even during the course of one day. Right? Before the doors to their business opens, they might be playing the role of marketer or a social media strategist. During the day when their business is open, they're running the operations of the business. After the doors to their business close in the evening, they might actually get back to reconciling invoices and playing the role of an accountant or getting ready for tax season, etcetera. So what this means is business owners are having to, one, figure out all of the expertise for themselves, and they have to put in a lot of invisible work and time that's not obviously apparent to everybody else. So to help with alleviating all of these challenges that small business owners have, we are launching the eighteen sixty six Studio. It's an AI powered operating system that will help small business owners with all of the critical jobs to be done. It brings together agentic workflows and other smart products and features into one connected experience to help small business owners start their business, run their business, grow their business, and potentially even exit or or transition out of their business. And we're really, really excited about what this product can do for small business in America. The product is scheduled to launch in a few weeks. We do have a wait list for early access set up right now.
00:20:11 · Laura Watkins
[00:20:11] S0: Wow. Congratulations. Yeah. The numbers that you were throwing out there are are are not insignificant. So, yeah, this this obviously has identified a a real a real pain point. Obviously, Maya, you know, your experience to date working with businesses as they expand and grow and sort of bringing a lot of things under the umbrella, how much does AI and bringing AI agents together change what a a bank can actually offer its customers, particularly in the SMB space? Well, and
00:20:45 · Maia Bittner
[00:20:45] S3: I think if they're offering, you know, help incorporating, help with payroll, all of that stuff is really valuable. There's a whole bunch of companies that will help you incorporate. Or Stripe Atlas has a feature. Clerky has a feature. A lot of companies do this. But, you know, to Vijay's point, it's a stand alone service that you have to pay for, you have to learn about, you have to sign up for, you have to maintain an account for and pay for in this whole separate universe, and then you're left finding a yet another service for your payroll and yet another service for your banking. And they all have referral deals with each other because they know that when someone's starting a business, they need all of this stuff at once. But if you just had it in one platform, that does seem interesting to me. Even better if somehow Huntington Bank's, you know, unit economics or customer acquisition fees can help make it more affordable to give these people these features right at the start. But it seems like a cool growth play. It is very painful for consumers to change their bank account, very, very difficult to get them to do so, even more so for businesses and SMB. So I see this as Huntington trying to get in early to that process and even before the bank account decision when they're doing that early work of setting up a business and setting up payroll and trying to be there right at the start because it's much more high leverage since it's so, so, so difficult to get people to switch.
00:22:12 · Laura Watkins, Pav Gill
[00:22:12] S0: And, Pa, bringing you in, as sort banks are moving beyond traditional financial products and and sort of more partnering, with their customers on on business decisions, how does that change their responsibility towards their end customers? [00:22:26] S1: I think they just would need to be more aware in terms of responsibility and exposure, because customers may have different say, licensing requirements or setup requirements. And if there's a decision that needs to be, or advice that needs to be challenged, I think there needs to be an easy way for the customer reach out to a human. So that's just something which I as a user would like. I mean, it's kinda weird, like I I still miss the good old days. I can't believe I was missing them, but I would rather press a a phone, like a thousand buttons to speak to a human than negotiate with a chatbot, for example, right, for the privilege of doing so. So I think you don't... You you also need to balance that that level of access, and... But I think on the flip side, it's super easy, so as a as a small, I mean, a startup founder myself, a lot of times KYC relies on bank information, and all kinds of other things. I mean, getting a bank set up, it's a whole KYC process, So that kind of assurance is huge if the bank's also involved in helping you structure and get a lot of these things in place. I think from a vendor risk standpoint, it makes contracting so much easier potentially.
00:23:41 · Vijay Konduru
[00:23:41] S2: One of the things to call out is that someone like Pav or or or Maya being in the industry, etcetera, super tech savvy. They know what to get done. And it's so... Encouraging, but it's eye opening to hear about even their challenges, right, potentially with doing a start up and so on and so forth. We gotta remember that most of the small businesses, especially the ones in America that we're talking about, do not have a tech stack. They are not tech savvy. Right? So we are hoping to kinda help them cut through all the noise that they're being exposed to, help them, again, aggregate all of their decision making in in one system. If I if I could take some time, I'd love to talk about the archetype or the use case that really set the vision for what this product could become in the future. So we have this archetype called Sarah. She is a bakery owner in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is a Midwestern city. And think about this product steady state where it says, hey. Our special kinda smart news is highlighting that tariffs are gonna change the price of some of the ingredients you have in in in your menu. Oh, by the way, there's construction near your bakery that might reduce foot traffic. So do you want me to go ahead and adjust your your inventory orders to account for the slower foot traffic? Or you have a catering order coming in, but you don't have enough liquid cash in your bank account. So it provides advice on whether Sarah should accept that catering order or not. So that's the kind of use case and vision that really set this product vision into motion. And we believe that by combining all of these different kinda outcomes into one place, Sarah, the bakery owner, can just make better decisions and manage her business in a much more seamless manner.
00:25:53 · Laura Watkins, Vijay Konduru
[00:25:53] S0: And then sort of how do you decide within that, like, which tasks kind of to perhaps point around talking to, like, humans versus AI? Like, how do you decide that? Like, which one is is sort of integrated and which one where the human needs to still play a role? [00:26:06] S2: Yeah. One of the things we are very clear about at Huntington, especially as we start to integrate AI into more experiences and more products, is that AI or agentic AI will not replace access to human experts. We will always enable our customers to reach out to our humans, whether on the phone or within a digital chat environment or walk into the branches if they live within the proximity of one. And we are very, very confident that that's gonna be what we always offer. [00:26:41] S0: Wonderful. So kinda keeping both in in balance as much as the customer's need is. Maya, you were gonna you were gonna add.