Beyond Competitive Advantage: Building Banking’s Collaborative Future
ProSight Financial Association, formed by the merger of 100-year-old organizations BAI and RMA, provides banks with trusted comparative analytics, collaborative learning and risk management frameworks while maintaining strict data privacy.
By Justin Estes, Contributor at The Financial Brand
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As financial institutions navigate rapid technological change, evolving customer expectations and increasingly complex regulatory environments, industry associations play a critical role in providing guidance, resources, and community. On a recent episode of the Banking Transformed podcast, host Jim Marous spoke with Debbie Bianucci, who led BAI for nearly 30 years before becoming president and CEO of ProSight, the organization formed by the merger of BAI and RMA.
Q: After nearly 30 years of leading BAI, what convinced you that merging with RMA was the right thing at the right time?
Debbie Bianucci: The whole merger of RMA and BAI came together for one reason. It was for the industry, and the industry is changing all the time and at a faster pace than ever. Whether it’s consolidation or changing customer preferences and profitability pressures, technology — all those changes add up to financial services companies needing more than they ever have before.
With the industry changing, we also really pressure-tested the need for industry organizations that support this industry to change as well. It became clear that RMA and BAI could come together and do more for the industry than we were already doing independently.
Both organizations were over a hundred years old before we merged. Both organizations don’t lobby. There are plenty of organizations that do that important advocacy work, but neither RMA nor BAI has done it. This was an opportunity to bring organizations together to strengthen and supercharge the way that we can support the industry.
Q: What did you learn from helping financial institutions through their own mergers that you applied to this combination?
Bianucci: It’s a great question, and I often tell people we work with throughout the industry that this isn’t a bank merger. It’s not like a bank merger in many ways, but there are some of the same principles that apply no matter what types of organizations you’re combining. The toughest challenge almost to a person is about cultural alignment and how you bring the teams together.
Our missions were very compatible. They weren’t word for word, but they were close. And it was all about supporting the industry. That’s a really great common place to be, and not being a lobbying organization also made it more clear what the path could be.
From the way we work, we had to really focus on full integration. This was not a situation where we brought RMA together, and they would keep doing what RMA was doing — BAI together, they would keep doing what they were doing, and we’d share a backroom. That could have been the model.
However, the promise of ProSight is about bringing the two organizations together because that’s what the banks are doing. They’re bringing risk and compliance together, as well as retail banking and commercial banking, in ways that have not been seen in the past. And that’s really where ProSight is able to provide that value.
Building Trust in a Competitive Landscape
Q: How does ProSight differ from consultancy firms that provide insight and advisory services?
Bianucci: Well, I’ll start by saying we work with them. We work with a lot of them because they’re smart and because we can provide them opportunities to connect with financial services executives with whom they are interested.
But at the end of the day, the biggest difference is that as a nonprofit and an industry organization that is here to support the industry, we do things that require a tremendous amount of trust and confidence in what we are able to provide.
One of the best examples is that we’re the largest provider of deposit data comparative analytics in the industry. And we have been for a long time. The banks give us their data so we can help them better understand how they’re serving their customers and communities. But they know we aren’t going to use that information and consult with somebody else.
We do not consult. In fact, we are here to facilitate what the banks can’t do on their own and add value through insights without crossing the line of using that information for competitive reasons. AConsultingfirms, by their nature, are very smart; they’re very good at what they do, but they do different things that don’t require that level of trust. It’s a doctor-patient privilege kind of model that we have.
Q: What is ProSight’s North Star and core mission in the financial services industry?
Bianucci: We believe that our foundation in risk and compliance, which is such an important part of the way a well-run bank operates, is a critical differentiator for us because we understand it, we have tools, we have ways to help the banks deal with that fundamental aspect of what they have to do.
But most importantly, we can connect that with how to grow the business, whether it’s on the commercial side or the retail banking side. And banks, at the end of the day, that will thrive are the ones who can figure out how to grow and maintain the kinds of practices and safety and soundness, and the aspects of regulatory compliance and risk management that are fundamental to the way they operate.
That really differentiates us because we have the ability to connect both. And as I’m sure you’ve seen in the banks, even the regulators are working hard at having a more holistic view of what they do and how to connect the dots. And that’s what we think we can do best.
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Addressing Banking’s Biggest Challenges
Q: What’s the biggest challenge in the banking industry that ProSight helps solve?
Bianucci: A lot of organizations, at the beginning of the year, are trying to identify what are the top three challenges that the industry will face. If I do identify the top three, I might say it’s fraud, fraud, and fraud because that’s such a big deal. We are investing heavily to increase the level of support that we’re providing to all types of financial services companies in the area of fraud.
There’s a lot out there already, but it’s not doing enough of what the banks need in order to mitigate this ever-changing landscape of fraud. And so, that’s a big level of investment for us. We know that the industry is facing changes and pressures on quality deposit growth and customer acquisition, operational efficiency, new technologies, and AI, which are such a big part of that.
But I do think that what we are able to provide through data and comparative analytics, as well as the ability for bank executives to come together and share, is valuable. Your podcast the other day with Leda Glyptis, who was talking about her book Beyond Resilience — I loved what she said about finding your tribe and trusting your tribe. And that’s a great way of describing what happens at ProSight because we can bring people together in a trusted environment who will share, and so much of what they’re facing today is not anything that affects competitive advantage. They can be better because they’re together and sharing; they’ve found their tribe.
Q: How do you help members navigate rapidly changing customer expectations?
Bianucci: Well, we try to do it in a variety of ways. Maybe the easiest way to explain it is that it’s a little left brain or right brain because we have a lot of unique data. The comparative analytics that we provide are unique because the banks give us their data, and we have hundreds of dimensions. It is a quantitative way to understand better how they are serving their customers by segment, channel, product, et cetera. So, that’s one side of the equation.
But that alone is not enough, we have found, and there is a need for these executives to come together and facilitate discussions that are meaningful to them in the ways in which they understand what’s happening with their customer segments.
And I think it’s the combination of the two that is so rich in how it helps bank executives deal with the changing perspectives. There’s no question that the pace of change is fast. There’s no question that some banks have done better than others in trying not only to keep up but also to anticipate what customer preferences will be and generational differences.
However, what we can do is provide the data, the hard analytics, and the insights and perspectives that come with human interaction. And we believe in the combination of both.
Expanding Research Capabilities Through Collaboration
Q: How have ProSight’s research capabilities expanded post-merger?
Bianucci: It’s one of the things we’re the most excited about because bringing the two organizations together has supercharged what we can do and expanded our resource capabilities. One of the things we will be doing, which has already begun, is to offer more research and information tools to the industry.
We’re investing more in additional surveys surveys and the kind of tracking that we think will be complementary to what else is out there. Some of that is in the risk space, and other aspects of it will move into fraud.
For example, we just issued on the subject of AI, which is at the top of the list for so many — our greatest value was to provide a framework for risk management of AI in banks. Through a collaboration with 15 or 20 of the largest banks in the country, we developed a risk framework specifically for AI that is now being applied to various use cases.
Our role is not about building the technology tools; it really is helping the banks figure out how to best manage it as part of its evolution in the banking organizations. Connecting risk management perspectives with how business interacts makes it possible for banks to have broader, even smarter perspectives on this fast-changing technology.
Q: What excites you about the future of banking and ProSight’s role in it?
Bianucci: When somebody asks me why I have been in this industry for so long, the fact is, this is the best place to be. There’s always something interesting and new that’s happening. The people who are in this industry are smart and committed to doing the right thing to serve their customers in the communities that they’re in.
And I’d love the opportunity to just be part of that. The best part of what we do here is we get up every morning trying to figure out how we can support the industry. That’s why we’re here. And when you have a clear purpose, it gets you up every morning.
