For our 25th episode, President & Chief Strategy Officer Ethan Whitehill chats with Melissa Beltrame, Marketing Director at nbkc bank, about the future of fintech, the value of inside-out branding and why all brands should be fanatical about the customer experience.
Ethan Whitehill: Hi everyone. I’m Ethan Whitehill, President and Chief Strategy Officer of Crux, the “un-agency”. Welcome to episode number 25 of To the Point. We produce this monthly podcast to bring you thought-provoking conversations that get to the crux of it and help entrepreneurial brands fuel growth. Today’s guest is Melissa Beltrame. Melissa serves as marketing director SVP at nbkc bank [as] an experienced corporate marketing executive and strategic thinker. With 20-plus years of experience, Melissa has led and implemented numerous growth initiatives, product launches, lead generation efforts, rebranding projects, and integrated marketing strategies across a variety of B2B and B2C companies. These include such well-known local and global brands as Lead Bank, YRC Worldwide, nbkc, Hallmark Cards and Dillard’s. Outside of her corporate roles, she stays connected in the community through board service, helping organizations such as KVC Health Systems and Big Brothers, Big Sisters of America. Melissa, thank you for joining us today.
Melissa Beltrame: I’m glad to be here today. Thank you, Ethan.
Ethan Whitehill: If you don’t mind, I’m just gonna dive right in. And first question is: tell our listeners a bit about nbkc and what makes your business unique.
Melissa Beltrame: nbkc bank is a family-owned community bank here in Kansas City. We have been around for about 25 years. Earlier this year we celebrated our 25th birthday, and we got our start in home loan originations actually. And so, in 1999 we were called Horizons Bank of Kansas City and then rebranded to nbkc. And nbkc does not stand for National Bank of Kansas City. We’re actually a state-chartered bank, not a national-chartered bank. And so, we still do a lot of home loans business. Our other products include deposits as well as lending. We do commercial as well as consumer lending. In fact, recently and this year we introduced a national HELOC product and today we have four branches in the greater Kansas City area. Additional numbers: we’re about $1.2 billion in assets, and we’ve got 2 million or so indirect customers through our banking as a service partnership and about 40,000 customers across the United States. So, we’re certainly in growth mode, and we hope to grow about 10-15% over the next couple years [and] double in size. So, our goal is pretty straightforward. It’s really to offer simple, transparent, actually helpful banking solutions to our customers.
Ethan Whitehill: So, I have to ask, what does the NB stand for?
Melissa Beltrame: It stands for simple, transparent, actually helpful banking solutions to our customers. Yes, it is not a full acronym. And we do a lot of things that make us unique at the bank. We love to fight above our weight class. And a couple examples of that is that we have our in-house development team, which is very unusual for a bank our size, or actually any company our size. We have about a dozen developers in-house and that allows us to create or build our own solutions, whereas oftentimes banks our size buy those solutions. And so that’s really kind of a differentiating point of ours. We’ve also served wider markets than what you would expect a bank our size to serve. And so, we serve customers in all 50 states and really, we do a few things exceptionally well, and we work hard to be curious, be creative, and really fanatical about the customer experience. So those are a couple things that differentiate us from the myriad banks in Kansas City.
Ethan Whitehill: And I know that you’ve learned customer experience through a variety of roles throughout your career. You had quite the journey starting with, well, from trucking to banking and in previous conversations you shared that the two are more similar than maybe we might think. Tell us a little bit about that.
Melissa Beltrame: Right. Who would’ve thought banking and trucking? But there are actually quite a few similarities. They’re table stakes. At the end of the day, products have to get from point A to point B, transportation, logistics, and people and businesses have gotta pay for those products. So, both businesses and consumers use trucking and banking. So not only are they commodities, but they’re also highly regulated industries, which has made me hone my attention to detail and pay attention to all of the small, little things. So, I have been grateful to have a variety of experiences over my career. I think it’s really been helpful because I’ve had exposure to transportation, to personal expression, [and] to retail in the past 12 years I’ve been in banking. And essentially what I would say is that it’s taught me three key things. It’s allowed me to be more adaptable. I am able to look for those different trends, whether that be in business landscapes or trends in the industry.
Marketing trends and technologies evolve rapidly as we know. And so, a marketer with diverse skills can easily adjust and flex in those certain situations. The second reason or second thing I would say, it’s taught me to be a better collaborator. So, we wear many hats and in different sized companies; you oftentimes wear more hats than [a] single straightforward role. And so, I would say any employee who has the opportunity to work with cross-functional teams, whether that be product or customer service or sales, is going to be a better employee because they’re developing those skill sets and certainly learning those other disciplines, as well. And then the third skill I would say that I’ve honed just based on my variety of experiences is really problem-solving. So, it allows you to become a better problem-solver. Diverse skills often lead to more innovative solutions, and you’ve probably seen that in your business, as well. But as employees draw in different areas of expertise to overcome challenges and provide sounder recommendations, the company is just better for it at the end of the day. So again, a person who can view the world through different lenses is not just a better marketer but a better employee because they’ve been exposed to a variety of those experiences and situations. So yes, I would definitely encourage anyone to have different experiences ’cause they’ll be able to bring more to the table.
Ethan Whitehill: Well, and you said innovation lives at the intersections, right? That’s where you find it. And knowing that you’ve got this kind of broad background, and your team actually has a very broad background as they look at the industry and the market itself, how does that make them more equipped? Or I would say, what advantages does it create when it comes to small banking and nbkc?
Melissa Beltrame: Sure. Small business banking is really relationship-driven at the heart of it. So, we work very hard to create a relationship with our customers. And that’s really foundational in any relationship, not just a business relationship or a business banking relationship. But choosing the right banking partner can have a significant impact on the business’ financial health and their growth potential. And so, what we really want to try to do is develop that relationship with our small businesses, with our medium-sized businesses, with our FinTech partners. And so, I would say the three things that we’ve learned through business banking are just best practices. And what I would encourage any entrepreneur or startup business is kind of three things. Understand what those fees and services are; hidden fees can really add up. They can strain cash flow, and the right services can simplify a business’ financial management.
So nbkc offers no monthly fee business checking account. And that’s really important, especially as some of those small businesses are counting their penny. So, my first tip would be [to] look for banks that offer no-fee business accounts and provide access to the right digital tools. My second tip or best practice that we’ve learned along the way is to ensure that you have access to the right financing options. And that can really be developed through the course of a relationship. So again, if you build a relationship with your bank early on, even before you may need a loan or funding, then you can better understand your options and oftentimes strengthen your chances of being approved for that loan. The third one and the biggest one, Ethan, is to separate the business account from a personal account. So, at one time I had heard that about 25% of small businesses were still using their personal account as their business account. Messy, right?
Ethan Whitehill: That sounds like a problem. Yes.
Melissa Beltrame: Yeah. And so, keeping those business accounts separate from the personal accounts is imperative when it comes to tax reporting, bookkeeping, legal protection, and ultimately you wanna make sure that those are separate. So, we’ve learned a lot about business banking, but it really boils down to developing a relationship with a banker or a trusted advisor and someone who’s got your back.
Ethan Whitehill: And as you’re talking, I’m realizing you probably have some things in common with those businesses that are growing and scaling. You’ve been there, done that, you’ve seen it, and it might be helpful for them to understand as you grow, as you add more process, how do you keep your culture, you know? How do you stay real and focus on things like relationships, like you were just talking about?
Melissa Beltrame: A culture is something that evolves over time, but the foundation really seems to remain the same. And so, we’re tweaking and nuancing our products as well as our processes, but our foundation remains the same. And we stay true to our core values, which is strive to simplify, embrace the culture, and listen intently. And so, once we have that foundation, then it allows us to tweak and pivot a little bit, so we remain true to our values. And then we also really focus on hiring the right people. And that makes a difference because it allows us to understand new ways of doing things. If we’re hiring people outside of industry, go deep into an area of expertise if we’re hiring within the industry. And so, once we hire those right people, we try to get the very best possible talent into the nbkc house. And we are always on the lookout for people who are naturally curious, people who like to have fun, people who challenge the status quo and people who expect to win.
Ethan Whitehill: That’s amazing. <Laugh>, I imagine it’s not a fast hiring process, as you say that you probably spend quite a bit of time getting to know these folks.
Melissa Beltrame: We do. Yeah, we do. And that’s important because we want them to grow with us as we change our processes and look for new business opportunities, as well.
Ethan Whitehill: So, I want to zoom out a little bit. You mentioned earlier the millions of online customers you have through your FinTech relationships. How do you help those customers and clients humanize the relationship with those end-banking customers?
Melissa Beltrame: Well, it really comes down to that banking relationship. And there’s two keys to building trust. The way that I see it, one is consistency and reliability. And the other one is authentic, transparent communication. And so, we try to do both of those things in our internal culture and hopefully that parlays out to the external culture – some of the things that we’re specifically doing at the bank to try to make that experience wonderful.
A couple things: first, from a marketing perspective, we try to segment our audiences so that we’re communicating specifically to the right people at the right time, trying to anticipate their financial needs, their behaviors, their life events. Because at the end of the day, we know customers feel valued when their unique needs are being recognized and met. So that’s something marketing is working on currently. The second thing is that we’re trying to humanize the digital experience. We’ve all been in this situation where we’ve needed just a quick answer to something.
And the IVR does not recognize what we’re asking. And so, we have real humans on the end. So, we have combined, from a customer service perspective, an AI-driven chat bot along with real people who are customer service representatives, and they’re available throughout the week, even on Saturday mornings, accessible when a customer or a business needs an immediate answer to someone. And so that human interaction and moments of financial stress, if you will, and there’s a real person that they can talk to that’s helping to humanize the experience. And then the third thing that we are doing to help humanize the experience is just a human-centered design. So, I touched on it a little bit earlier, but design intuitive, user-friendly platforms. Think: Apple is doing all these great things; how can we better anticipate our prospects and customers’ needs? And you know, we’re doing that by building some of our own tools as again, our developers built our loan app for our loan application process.
We have built our online banking application process because we know that at the end of the day, a smooth, seamless digital experience feels more approachable and builds confidence. And so, I guess it boils down to [trying] to anticipate our customers’ needs. We listen intently to the feedback that we get from our customers in the form of reviews that are written by other real people’s surveys – quarterly and monthly surveys. And we strive to ultimately create banking products that reduce the friction for our customers so that they can easily and more seamlessly do their banking.
Ethan Whitehill: Everything you just said there is great evidence of why you are so good in this specific space of the banking platform behind these FinTech companies. Talk to us a little bit about that because I think that’s fascinating. Banking as a service, that concept, what does it mean exactly? And why is nbkc so good at that?
Melissa Beltrame: Well, thank you <laugh>. First of all, we’ve been doing it for a few years now. So, BaaS or banking as a service is most simply defined as non-bank companies needing bank services. And so that’s where nbkc bank comes in. We are the FDIC-insured financial institution. The non-bank is the customer-facing brand. nbkc is the banking platform that kind of sits behind or underneath the customer-facing brand. And essentially when a company partners with a bank for BaaS, it allows them to offer banking products such as checking accounts, savings accounts, payments [and] loans, without having to become a bank themselves. And so, we have had some good success in BaaS. We got our start by beginning our own accelerator. It was called the Fountain City Accelerator in 2019. And what that really did for us, besides start to get our name out there as it relates to BaaS, it allowed us to grasp and understand how tech entrepreneurs did business.
And so, it kind of boils down to that whole relationship again. But nbkc has been doing BaaS for five years or so. We’ve been doing it pretty well, and we’ve homed in on two things that have really allowed us to do it right. The first one is we’ve got the right mindset, we believe. So, we’re a tech-forward bank that also places a lot of emphasis on relationships. We look for the right fit; we look for the right partner. We’re not a one-size-fits-all. And that’s resulted in about 15 banking partnerships for BaaS today. The other thing that we’ve done is that we don’t dabble. We go deep. We’re not a jack of all trades. And what that looks like is that we’ve got a dedicated team. So, when we first started doing BaaS, we had about three people.
We’ve grown that to a team of about 30 to 35 dedicated employees out of a workforce of 360 or so employees at nbkc. So, we’re hiring the right people; we are carving out the right resources; we’re really making dedicated efforts to do BaaS well and to do it right. And additionally, we’ve leaned into certain areas. Again, I mentioned we’re not a jack of all trades. We’ve really leaned into deposit products or deposit relationships specifically. And so, we know that we’re not going to be all things to all people, but boy, can we really do a great business account, checking account, debit card, those type of services. So, we’re starting to learn how to do lending as a service really well. And so that’s kind of new on the horizon for us. And then the third thing is, as it relates to BaaS, there’s about 20 banks or so that do BaaS well in the financial services industry. And the most critical piece is that very sound risk management and compliance component. We spend a lot of time making sure that we’re working hand in hand with the regulators and the compliance team. We even review other banks’ consent orders so that we don’t fall into the same traps. And most importantly, it’s very important for us to do BaaS in a compliant and risk-averse way. So, we’ve learned a lot along the way, and we’re excited to continue to expand this line of business.
Ethan Whitehill: Just to help me and our listeners understand what a customer or a client of BaaS would be, what does that look like?
Melissa Beltrame: Acorns, Betterment, Gusto. Those are all examples of some of our clients. Again, they’re the market-facing brand, and we are that platform behind them.
Ethan Whitehill: Guess I have some money with you then.
Melissa Beltrame: You’re one of our 2 million or so indirect customers. <Laugh>
Ethan Whitehill: That’s right.
Melissa Beltrame: Excellent.
Ethan Whitehill: Well, that’s amazing. And so, as you balance all that business, which you know, 10% of your workforce is dedicated to it, and it’s growing, how do you manage all those audiences? You talked about segmentation earlier. How do you look at that to keep that straight?
Melissa Beltrame: Strong brand identity and foundation-tailored messages to different audiences. That kind of speaks to the segmentation: a great visual consistency. But I would say the most important aspect is just leveraging that inside-out branding. And we’ve talked a little bit about that before. You know, you start with your employees, you inculcate your values throughout the organization, and then those employees will start to mirror the aspects that you want reflected on the outside of your organization. So, we really wanna stand for simplicity and innovation and product and design excellence. And so, when we’re looking at any of our efforts or any of our audiences, we view it through those lenses. So, at the end of the day, we hope that the efforts that we’re putting forth for all of our different audiences is that nbkc stands for our recognizable and trusted brand regardless of what audience we’re serving at what time.
Ethan Whitehill: Well, I love what you’re saying because at the heart of trust is people ultimately, and if you’re doing that inside-out branding, it’s about your people, and there’s a human on the other side, which is fantastic. So, as we look out, we’re at the end of the year, and we’re kind of looking ahead to 2025 and beyond. What are some of the trends on the horizon that you would say small businesses today have to be aware of?
Melissa Beltrame: Well, two things come to mind. The first is figuring out ways to incorporate more brilliant technology innovations. And the second would be keeping a keen eye on opportunities to improve the customer experience. So, first, AI. We talk a lot about AI. Everyone is actually talking a lot about AI, all of the reports and emails that are in your inbox towards the end of the year, AI is making us smarter about the customer experience, and it’s making our internal processes more efficient. So, for example, two or three months ago we released our first working model of an AI tool that we built in-house. It’s part of our internal mortgage application review. And we have focused on document-handling inefficiencies. So, we leaned in, and we know it’s fast and it’s predictable. So, I think that’s one trend. We have to be open to embracing new technologies and figuring out how they can make our systems and our processes better. And then the second thing is just managing customer expectations and figuring out how to provide the best possible customer experience. So banking is an interesting beast. We know that Amazon has set the standard for what an exceptional customer experience looks like. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s efficient, like even Starbucks has set the standard.
I was able to get a very customized drink this morning, but banks are trying to figure this out still. And we are trying to crack the nut of an outstanding experience while also being mindful of security risks. So, banks are up the crux of keeping a customer’s information, their money [and] their identity safe and secure while also offering the speed of a real-time payment, if you will. And so, we want to be innovative and provide that seamless experience while also trying to mitigate fraud on the back end. And so, I think that will be a challenge for us as we figure out real-time payments. We live in a world of immediate gratification, particularly for banking. The world of immediate gratification can be alarming due to the increased threat of fraud. So, we’re continuing to work on that, and we wanna keep our customers’ information and their money safe but also deliver outstanding customer experience.
Ethan Whitehill: To be frictionless without fraud is a challenge. Every time I do two-factor authentication, I curse the fraudsters out there. <laugh> Well, thank you for that. That’s a great perspective. And now I’m gonna get a little more personal perspective ’cause we’re up to my secret question.
Melissa Beltrame: Excellent. Can’t wait.
Ethan Whitehill: So, 20-sided die. 20 questions, totally random. Not sure what we’re gonna ask, but we’ll find out. This is very appropriate. What are you most thankful for?
Melissa Beltrame: Oh, I’m most thankful for my family actually. So, I have a great husband and three daughters ranging in age from sixth grade to 16. And as the season of Thanksgiving, they’re a wonderful support for me. And we are coming off the heels of Thanksgiving. And so that was an easy question, Ethan <laugh>. My family and good health and my faith would be those top three if I can pick them well.
Ethan Whitehill: And we’re thankful for our clients and our guests here on the podcast. So, thank you for joining us, Melissa. How can our listeners connect with you if they wanna learn about nbkc and its services or you know, just ask you any questions, you know, directly?
Melissa Beltrame: Certainly, I would welcome that. So, I’m on LinkedIn. My email address is Melissa.Beltrame@nbkc.com. And I would love the opportunity to connect and certainly appreciate you inviting me to be a guest on To the Point podcast this morning. So, thank you, Ethan.