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Whitney McDonald 09:45:01
Whitney, hello and welcome to The Buzz a bank automation news podcast. My name is Whitney McDonald and I’m the editor of bank automation News. Today is September 30, 2024 Joining me is CEO of Esquire bank, Andrew saglioka. Esquire is a national branchless tech enabled bank that serves two niche verticals, merchant acquiring and the litigation market. He’s here to discuss how the bank leans on tech to serve these underserved markets, tapping its partnership strategy and its in house team of programmers. Thanks for joining us. Andrew,Andrew Sagliocca 09:45:35
great. Thank you, Whitney. We appreciate the time, and we appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to spend time with myself and discuss Esquire. So I’ve been in banking for 37 years. I’ve been at Esquire since the beginning, which we are on year 1817, full years we’ve been prior to that I worked at a regional $60 billion bank that when I joined, we grew from about a billion and a half dollars to 60 billion through acquisitions and growth the old fashioned way, going from about a dozen branches to over 300 and prior To that, I started my career at KPMG in the financial institutions group.

Whitney McDonald 09:46:26
Great. Well, why don’t we take the introduction a little bit further, and you can tell me a little bit about Esquire too, the market that you serve, and then, and then we’ll get into the tech. Great.

Andrew Sagliocca 09:46:37
So Esquire is a national branchless, tech enabled bank. We service two verticals nationally. Both are underserved verticals. One is a contingent fee, plaintive litigation. Vertical. That’s about half a trillion dollars a year that settles through the banking industry and is very underserved by the banking community, including when I was more of a traditional banker the first half of my career. And the other is a payment vertical that bankers call the merchant acquiring vertical that is about 10 and a half trillion dollars a year. Merchant acquiring banks clear payments for debits and credit debit and credit cards for those merchants or small businesses. And from what I understand, that no there’s about 120 odd banks out of over 4000 that service that industry. So we chose purposefully to focus on two underserved national verticals that we could service on a branchless basis with a tech enabled platform.

Whitney McDonald 09:48:04
Now, let’s talk through this branch list strategy, this tech driven strategy, with the markets in mind. Why is this the right approach? What does this give to these markets, you know, on the small business side, what is this accessibility on the on the tech front provide, as far as a banking experience, you know, at your fingertips.

Andrew Sagliocca 09:48:25
So if you were to be a partner with you know, Alexa at a law firm, and you ran a plaintiff law firm, you’d be servicing people that have catastrophic car accidents, medical claims, you could be involved with people in the BP oil spill down in the Gulf Coast, or the California wildfires. There’s so many examples. So that is a half a trillion dollar a year industry. There is no cash in the industry. Think about it. Money settles between defense, which is usually the insurance carrier, to the law firm, which represents the injured party, via check or wire or ACH, and that money then, or those funds are dispersed to the claimant or claimants the same way. So it is a cashless platform. As far as I’m concerned, the half a trillion dollars is a pretty big platform or vertical on an annual basis. So tech and rolling out, not only tech enabled marketing content and the like, which we’ll talk about, but rolling out the branch within your law firm’s office, the cash management platform, the Remote Deposit. Capture technology that banks use throughout their branch networks, along with the security is critically important to success of this. And on the payment side, I’m sure you have a credit card and a debit card in your wallet, unlike the dinosaur that I am, I’m sure you don’t carry around cash. So when you purchase goods and services, either by going to the store or to the deli or to the supermarket or you do it online, or both someone and it is a bank, someone clears those payments, there is an issuing bank, right? That’s the Bank of America card you have in your wallet, or the American Express card you have in your wallet. That’s different. That’s consumer focused. Someone needs to clear 10 and a half trillion dollars or more of payments between the credit card issuers, Visa, MasterCard, American, Express, Discover, and the merchants, which are the small businesses selling the goods and services, which that that money that we clear is their revenue, someone needs to do that. There’s about 120 odd banks that do it in the country. So it’s a great opportunity. So so both platforms are very tech enabled, because the solutions you’re delivering are by definition, branchless. They have to be. And like I said, That doesn’t include the tech enabled Salesforce based CRM digital marketing, cloud tech enabled content that we used and rolled out, first and foremost in the litigation market, which was our focus, first before the payment market, that that not only has the content and the branding and the sales type approach for those prospective clients, but also utilizes the the the limited AI that we use right now to Make sure that the content is delivered that those prospective customers and or clients want to see.

Whitney McDonald 09:52:28
Now, couple things to break down here, and thank you so much for describing both sides of the business. And of course, stands out that, yes, of course, these are tech driven, tech enabled. Maybe we can focus on the payment side for a second what your small business clients are asking for. Maybe share a little bit about why Esquire what may be a traditional institution. I know that you mentioned the other institutions that offer capabilities or clearing capabilities like this. Why being tech enabled? Why Esquire what capabilities kind of draw those small businesses in Sure.

Andrew Sagliocca 09:53:03
So on the payment side, it’s more of an indirect platform. So we have 85,000 small business nationally, in all 50 states. However, the sales function to quote acquire those 85,000 small businesses or merchants is done by commercial entities called ISOs, independent sales organizations. Our job is to underwrite risk manage from a financial perspective, risk, manage from a compliance card brand perspective, and clear those payments and manage that money so that it gets to the small businesses in a timely, effective and efficient manner, and it keeps them happy. What makes us different on that side of the equation, different than a first data, which is now Fiserv or a chase or city or Wells, which are monsters in the market, is our ISOs and our merchants have access, not only to my merchant group or the bank’s merchant group, but they have direct access to the senior leadership right up through me, so we have quite a bit of technology in that area for Managing underwriting, underwriting itself, boarding, managing risk and the like. But that’s much more back end technology than front end. I think probably for our discussion, the more interesting vertical is probably the litigation, where we are from front to back, the sales engine, market. Engine, and obviously, back in bank, providing products and services and the like to that industry.

Whitney McDonald 09:55:09
Now, when it comes to the offerings that you have, of course, the the magic happening of clearing of payment, or, you know, the underwriting capabilities, what drives that technology? Do you build that all in house? Do you partner with different tech providers or kind of, kind of talk me through how the magic happens?

Andrew Sagliocca 09:55:30
Great question. So first and foremost, that the ground floor, there are multiple systems out there, and most banks are providers of so the most known systems that that I know in the market, that most people hear of is first data, which is now Fiserv and tsis. Those are core processing platforms, no different than a traditional Fiserv loan and deposit type system, or Jack Henry or FIS on top of that, the interesting thing there is, we are a provider of three core platforms, tsis, first, data and a smaller platform that we can customize and work with, well, that we use on a limited basis. That’s very unusual. Most banks service one core platform. It’d be like me telling you, well, I use Jack Henry for this, and Fiserv for that, and FIS for this, which you would think I was crazy, and I would be crazy from a underwriting standpoint. We built the platform ourselves. It’s an underwriting database and risk management boarding system that is proprietary to what we built. That’s not probably the most important piece, although it’s it’s important where we partner with people away from what we have built is on the risk management side. So the the fiservs and the first datas of the world and the teases of the world don’t sell front end platforms, which is why we had to build it, nor do they sell risk management platforms. So we partnered with a FinTech on the risk management side, but it’s rare, if ever, that we don’t highly customize what we buy out of the box with our in house team and in house programmers to meet specifically our business needs.

Whitney McDonald 09:57:40
Can you share a little bit more about who you have in house. I know you just mentioned a team of developers and programmers. How many do you have in house?

Andrew Sagliocca 09:57:48
Sure. So we have a, when I say a true CTO, he’s a C not a CTO by type. So my CTO, Marty corn, who works with us, comes from the investment banking and brokerage side. So when I met Marty almost 10 years ago now, Marty said after the interview, if you want to call it, that it was more, more of a discussion. He said, My only problem that I have, Andrew is I’m not a banker. And I said, that’s the best news you could have ever told me, because I’m not looking to hire a banker. I’m looking to hire somebody who looks outside the banking network. So Marty is a true CTO. He worked at Oppenheimer credit, Swiss Bank of America, both nationally and internationally. Um, So Marty is very accustomed to running teams of programmers, as you could probably imagine. So Marty runs a team internally of about six or eight internal programmers. They will they will work on the programs themselves. They also are great project managers and project leaders. So we couple on bigger projects, which is probably three quarters of what we do. We couple on larger projects his team with an outsourced service. But the outsourced service is not in any remote way leading the project. We are leading the project Marty is leading it with his project leader, using the outsource services more as programmers than as project managers. So at any given time, let’s say we’re working, typically, on several, two, three major projects at the same time. At any given time, we’re probably working with upwards of 20 or 30 programmers across different projects.

Whitney McDonald 09:59:51
Now maybe we can talk through what those projects might entail, what what are the focus of those? Are they kind of client driven on what the clients are at? Asking for more internal projects or back end processes. Maybe you can kind of give me some insight as to what those entail.

Andrew Sagliocca 10:00:10
Good. So I’m going to switch over to the litigation side only because it makes a better point. So on the litigation vertical, which, as I said, is half a trillion, there is about 80,000 there’s 100 plus 1000 law firms in the country. There’s about 80,000 that are both plaintiff or contingent and non contingent. Call it hourly. 50,000 are purely contingent. And our focus for our high value targets is about 15 to 20,000 arguably, depending on how you look at it, ranges in there. If I go a little bit backwards, the first thing we needed to do was focus on data right because if we want to talk about technology and we want to talk about AI. Let’s start with how we get there, which how we get there is data and data enrichment, which we’ve been doing this now for about five years. Soup to nuts and data enrichment and data quality is every moment of every day. It never stops. It never ends. It’s never good enough. It’s always not right, because it’s never good enough. And we spend a lot of time and a lot of resources and quite a bit of money on enriching data constantly, and our focus off of that database, which was built on Salesforce CRM, but again, highly customized to our vertical. Our focus was to get out in front of thought leadership. What does that mean? That means if you’re a lawyer out in the marketplace, you want to know that we understand your business and your business model, right? Who cares about selling products and services? If, if I am empathetic to your needs and wants and and and and knowledge that most bankers don’t have, only because they don’t focus on it, not because we’re smarter than smarter than anybody, but if I am speaking your language through the marketing content that we deliver, then you’re Probably going to know of Esquire bank, our brand, and hopefully think of us when you have financing and or banking needs, right? So, so our focus, in a very long winded, roundabout way, was building a very customized Salesforce, CRM, building out a very robust Salesforce, marketing cloud, building out a very customized website, which, as we all know, is really the front end skin of what’s being done. We’ve built out a digital content page for lawyers separate in the state from our website that you can go out and visit that shows that we understand the business of law and how to run a law firm. And last but not least, we went out with some industry information about people in the law community and the good that they do for the claimants to to promote the fact that, you know, lawyers and law firms are an integral part of what goes on our society, and nobody ever thinks of them until they need them, and until you have a major injury, and then it’s, oh, I need a lawyer. Um, so those are a multitude of things that we are we have done and continuously work on. We have an underwriting platform called Encino, that I’m sure you have heard of, that’s built on Salesforce. So you see the theme here. All of these platforms are interlinked, including all the way down to Fiserv. And believe it or not, uh Encino, at the end of the day, is our one source of truth for our clients, holistically and how we view our clients, because it it journeys the whole life cycle of marketing, perspective, sales, sales, customer updates, underwriting, boarding and the like, including then back from Fiserv. So it’s those are the kind of focal i. That got us here, and now we’re working on solutions that, if I back it up a second, I think the best thing we can do to either vertical we serve nationally, is to make sure we shut our mouth and we listen to what the client not only has to say, but more importantly, let them describe their business. Because usually when you allow them to have that conversation, they typically explain their pain points and what their frustrations are. And I think we do a pretty good job of listening and then trying to diverse solutions. So one of the things that we are working on currently, which is a significant project, is a customized lending platform for the litigation market that will probably roll out early part of next year. That is not Fiserv, not FIS, not Jack Henry, that we had to work with the software provider over the past year on some significant customization for our vertical.

Whitney McDonald 10:06:13
Now I know that you kind of just talk through a little bit of a future look and what’s to come on the litigation side, anything on the small business side that you’re seeing or hearing from your clients, that they’re asking for, on the innovation front, anything specific to that side of the business that you’re innovating around, or I know that you just mentioned, of course, listening to clients is the key. So anything that you’re hearing on that front,

Andrew Sagliocca 10:06:40
you know, in the in the litigation vertical, all start there that we service. They are looking for. It’s a it’s a very unusual market. You know, we don’t see non bank finance companies as competition, their business partners. We don’t see fintechs as competition. We see them as business partners. So at the end of the day, what? What the small businesses we service on the litigation side, which we are a fraction of, which is why we spend so much money on marketing and growth, and which is why we grow it 20% or more a year, because there is a lot of upside and a lot of opportunity. They are focused on an institution that understands their vertical one. We already talked about that too, is willing to partner with non bank finance companies, which we do, because we can provide every solution they are looking for, in house solutions so that the branches in their office, we do that they are looking for a one step process for their accounting or controller or CFO area, which is the backbone of any business. So what we’re hearing is is pretty simple. We want to be able to serve self service our banking needs. We want you to be very flexible. If you can’t provide all the financing. So we want you to forge those relationships, because we don’t want to do it. We want self service on the lending side for these micro loans we use for the cases we manage. We want to be able to be more granular on our escrow management side, because at the end of the day, an escrow account is really a conglomeration of claimant money, and the more you can fragment that and bifurcate it and break it down, the easier it is for them to manage. And the traditional, listen, I think Fiserv and FIS and Jack Henry do a great job. They really do. But at the end of the day, as far as cutting edge technology, you know, they typically buy it rather than build it. When they buy it, they don’t integrate it. And if we understand what our client needs are, then we’re able not only to go to them, which typically other than the core platform, they’re not the ones we select, not for any other reason, but they’re usually not at the forefront of the technology, and they’re usually not willing to spend a lot of time customizing that technology for our needs. On the payment side, small businesses want to be paid quicker. I. Yeah, right. I you walked in Whitney walked in today and swiped her card and bought a dress, and I’d like to be paid today or tomorrow morning. And you know, ACH and wires don’t cut it. Wires will never cut it. ACH is more of a delay, and they are looking for real time payment, which we are involved in and on the forefront of with, obviously, the Fed and the Clearinghouse, looking at real time payments, not only looking, but actually in the middle of testing it and making sure that we like it with select customers. And the card brands like Visa, for instance, have great programs called visa direct that we are speaking to them and working on that not many institutions are involved in. So you know, on the payment side, My head spins every day with the amount of technology. I think there’s more technology on the payment side than there is room for growth on the payment side, and there’s endless room for growth.

Whitney McDonald 10:11:15
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