IT Matters Episode 2: Sean Farrell + Financial Services Technology

[Music] welcome to the it matters podcast where we explore why it matters and matters pertaining to i.t here's your host aaron bock welcome to the it matters podcast uh thank you for joining us today we're excited to have you all on this lovely spring day here in charlotte north carolina i'm joined today by sean farrell from qds quality data systems based here in charlotte north carolina we'll get into sean's background here in just a second but for those that you are not familiar with the i.t matters podcast we're going to be talking about why i.t

matters inside of an organization also what are some of the i.t matters inside of an organization and out so why is it important what are some of the trends our guest today sean is the ceo of qds like i mentioned uh sean welcome to the show hey aaron thanks for having me man excited to be on look forward to talking about stuff yeah excited to have you for those of you who who don't know sean sean has has been at qds for 10 years i actually met sean probably three years ago and i consider sean somewhat of a mentor being a ceo of qds who is a couple years ahead of opcalla sean i guess tell the listeners a little bit more about yourself your background how you ended up at qds what does qds do etc yeah so aaron man i grew up in charlotte been here since i was three years old uh so very close to a lifer with uh based on how many people commute here every every year it seems like i was a baseball player growing up i never really thought i'd go into the family business had a good career at the university of north carolina was blessed to be drafted by the the oakland a's uh ended up tearing up my shoulder diving for a ball in the outfield so thought i'd come you know work while i was rehabbing never really got any better and and really kind of fell in love with sales and being a competitive athlete you know started uh back in 2003 honestly uh with the company as a straight commission salesperson and worked my way up have been the ceo for the last 10 years here and we have really moved our company from a company that sold mostly desktop equipment that did not connect to anything to the majority of our growth has been investing in systems technologies for financial institutions that do connect to their banking core system or their eft provider so you know it has become a very important part of the solutions that we've implemented through our growth over the last 10 years absolutely so that the listeners get a better understanding so how how big is qds today and how much has it grown over the last couple years yeah i mean we we have been blessed with a huge growth streak probably over the last six years we've grown from roughly a five million dollar business to we did just under 22 million in revenue last year um we're spread across states so we support community banks and credit unions that range from you know maybe tens of millions in assets up to i think our largest account uh is now 100 billion in assets so kind of that community and regional size institution so it's it's a very dynamic environment and uh certainly we'll talk about how banking is shifting these days towards technology yeah and maybe before we get into banking i i want to start with you personally and then qds and then we'll get into some of the i guess the industry tech trends but i kind of want to know personally in your life what are some of the technologies that that are key to you or that you use every day that really help you function help sean as a ceo function that you couldn't live without yeah i'm one of those weird i think we're called zenios right so i'm i'm i was born in 81 so i'm kind of right on that line of you know i did play oregon trail growing up and you know remember that and not a digital native but you know technology really runs my life so did you feed your ox meager portions too i probably i'm sure i died of typhoid or something along the way as well you never know what's going to happen on that on that and if you watch 1883 it brings that uh that whole trend back to life but uh there you go you know unfortunately you know as a ceo i live and die on my phone you know i do have an apple iphone so i certainly play with a variety of apps that keep me tuned in really live and die on my calendar we have certainly done a lot more streaming as of late so we have you know i have young kids i have twin three-year-olds and an eight-year-old so disney plus has become a very big deal in our household and we run a google mesh internet system to make sure that you know wi-fi carries throughout the house so uh it is normally when i travel for work when that technology tends to break and you always get the call from from your wife going you know what's wrong with the tv or why is it our internet working it's like i don't know what i can do from tennessee today honey but you know so yes we are your fault you probably could but that's your fault you know that's right that's right we are uh very dependent on the internet at our house and uh my oldest is very into roblox and some of the gaming community so uh it's definitely a tech dependent environment in my household for sure yeah and so we'll and so you also mentioned you know we will get into the the banking and the the community credit unions but qds also started working as mostly an equipment for banks for cash management is from what i understand not a whole lot of technology i guess in the beginning but you guys have evolved considerably in technology as well so maybe what was the cause for some of the changes or or at what point did you guys decide to get i guess more technological and support and and the why behind it maybe yeah i mean so you figure a lot of the legacy products that we used to sell are like the dollar bill counters that you see in the movies that the casinos run so you know like if a bank branch would open that might be two thousand to five thousand dollars in revenue and we might get a couple pieces of equipment and we'd be happy with that well as we look strategically you know a lot of automation technology and how do we handle cash and coin and check transactions was really moving towards things that integrate to the bank or credit union's core system offer greater functionality and those solutions might range from say twenty five thousand dollars to seventy five thousand dollars so as we became more expert in technologies like that you know our deal sizes start to move up and now you know we we have multiple deals that are typically in the seven figure realm which that wasn't even uh you know we're we used to be kind of a rounding error in that equation and now you know we're doing one two five million dollar deals with you know technology and all these integrations and it's much more of a i t and software type environment than yes it's a physical piece of equipment that has physical motors and wheels and whatnot so it's been a it's been an interesting transition and and a lot of expertise that we've had to learn over time but it's been uh it's been a wild ride and really opportunity driven it sounds like you know there was an opportunity to help people more grow revenue within qds so you guys decided okay we need to be able to to be the thought leaders be the people to do that for our customers absolutely i mean we we are very big on selling with integrity not trying to get the most revenue but the right revenue a lot of what ocala is based on as well frankly but you know really trying to help clients achieve results and the technologies today just happen to be more impactful and as our industry continues to struggle like many with staffing issues you know our automation technology can handle a lot of that lift of well how do we get business done when we're struggling to replace you know tammy teller or whatnot in that environment so um you know not only is our equipment counted on and but it has a significant impact to client service and customer experience yeah that's a good point and and i want to come back to that because i'm assuming the last two years have made it even more eye-opening for some of your customers with covid and the lack of of people and the inability for people to come in and so but before we get there um let's go back a second so as a ceo of qds right you all i think operate i think the last time i talked to you was 20 plus states you all are somewhere around 80 to 100 employees when when you think of it as a ceo like how do you guys really consider it inside your organization is it is it part of every function or is it more of an internal function what what is it to qds yeah i would say like any company you know at times we have fallen prey to maybe we're not as automated as the technologies that we sell but you know we have done a good job of migrating things to the cloud you know we were ready for hybrid work before cobra cove it hit so the fact that we had the majority of our technology allow people to work from multiple places has been beneficial we have some professional service and managed service employees that are extremely technical and have high volumes of work coming at them so we've been able to build them custom pcs and you know we have multiple employees running three four monitors for efficiency and so the ability to leverage technology to help people get stuff done you know as me being that person that really believes in efficiency you know you don't want somebody running on an i3 processor with one screen when g's if we just invest a little bit more money in technology for them like you know we eliminate 20 percent of waste of just boot time on their computer and man i forget what the numbers are but i think you're 25 to 30 percent more efficient by having just a second screen so now everybody in our company for the most part runs at least two and some are running three or four so i am a big believer in removing obstacles and setting people up for success and having the right technology and applications and and bandwidth and all of those things are are vital to success because no one wants to have that frustration of running a 486 processor you know 10 years ago and like man it takes me 10 minutes for the spreadsheet just to run versus having having them have the right tools yeah and it's interesting like what you said right when we see this with our customers all the time it's you have your dedicated i.t people but what you just described is really in every function every every different part of your business there's an i t component that is part of it and so you know whether it's finance processing a spreadsheet or whether it's customer service supporting a customer and communicating with them even though they might not be dedicated to supporting qds's internal i.t systems they're dealing with i.t in technology

that is making their life easier or more complicated if it's not working and so you know that that's where we get into and say you know okay how are organizations adapting so before we move on to the next topic one other question on qds so you you you operate in 20 plus states how do you communicate with and maybe during covid was it was a good test you said you guys were already set up for hybrid how did you guys how do you guys communicate with your employees and how do you make sure that you have that same experience of working in the office or being able to work hybrid yeah i i in honesty can't quite take credit for 20. we're in we're in 12 states today which is still okay 12. still giving you extra credit still still playing we may be in 20 soon enough we'll see you know we are an office 365 shop so as teams has continued to evolve you know i i think we did the same kinds of things that everyone else did through covet it was just really setting frequency around all right we were doing you know maybe leadership communication three times a week whether it was zoom or teams to just keep those communication things live we do do a lot of video conferences still teams is primarily our internal platform frankly i like zoom from a presenting environment a little bit better so we do have one or two zoom licenses same with recruiting like teams can be a little bit clunky if if someone doesn't have that environment so zoom is a little more consumer friendly you know we try the virtual happy hours we we have weekly team meetings that are all run virtual so i think everyone used kova to get comfortable with that environment we just happened to already have the platform ready with office 365 so that really allowed us to migrate quickly now we learn best practices through that of what was working what can fall back to in-person meetings but you know we're probably still running as a company 30 to 50 you know video team meetings a week no doubt yeah we're seeing that across the board and you mentioned zoom in teams we obviously work with a lot more than that but the the zoom teams which meeting platform are you on next bingo game of how many meeting platforms can i be on in a day that seems to be the norm during covid just curious was there any um you know outside the box you said virtual happy hours that was kind of outside the box any other kind of cool ways people connected via technology through covid one of my favorite tools which we purchased more for the sale side of our house is vidyard uh or vidyard however you know yeah so that this in the show notes too for those listening so yeah great technology canadian company if you want a great person to follow tyler lessard who's their you know svp of marketing is one of the best creative people i know but that is a tool that i use often to communicate everything internally so i i will record a lot of five to ten minute company update video so whether we have new hires or policy changes or we're celebrating some wins on the sales side i typically communicate that out to all employees so again they get to see my face we're talking about certain things you know it makes it a little more personal than just hey here's a bulleted email that you're probably going to ignore and not read so we have really leveraged that we use it a lot on our sales side uh for one to one you know video interaction we can also record things so from a tool set that is probably we are i believe the only one in our industry that uses that i believe bombbomb is a similar competitor uh to them but really have loved vidyard as a platform yeah i was gonna say for all sales folks listening out there pay attention to vidyard and bom bom both are great tools to communicate with prospects as well so i do not know affiliation with either of those just throwing that out there yeah well we're just sharing what we're using so uh no i mean i think that's great and it's cool we've seen all over the map like from virtual yoga classes that people are doing to someone the other day was talking about a system called bonusly where they're doing like point sharing system among employees to to virtually reward each other so it's cool to see what technology is doing for people to to collaborate and communicate so all right so let's let's switch gears so qds is is working in the we'll call it in the finance industry with with local community banks uh credit unions probably others that i'm missing you you deal with automating cash management via atms traditional cash machines etc you're a managed service company to help support that you do professional services so you do sort of work in a technology portion of these organizations so from your perspective maybe let's start with the struggles where are local community banks credit unions maybe where are they struggling to adopt technology um or where do they struggle with like why to use new technology yeah what are the kind of like maybe objections you guys get and overcome i think a lot of a lot of the true technology struggle is resource bandwidth and talent so not every community bank in rural america can recruit the i.t talent that they need when you start looking at a lot of it's a highly regulated industry with very you know secure data you're dealing with people's finances so how am i managing user access and all of these things that tie into how do i keep my customers information safe without having to hire you know 50 it people if i'm a you know 10 branch community bank you know those have been some of the struggles so now as we start to look at well how do we keep their network safe but offer more functionality for a customer you know that's where that it and kind of retail collide of hey we want to offer better digital transactions we want to offer a great online banking experience we want our people to be able to do more at atm machines maybe we want to have a a teller pop up on the screen and help somebody execute a transaction well a lot of that has server you know components on the back end and you know are they running in a cloud environment um so all of those things of taking a what used to be a very on-premise highly tight controlled as400 environment to new cores that are coming with cloud-based architecture and all these apis and what are we going to be able to connect to that's a different talent set than just hey can i make sure my network is secure am i using multi-factor authentication you know those are those are legitimate challenges on the i t side for financial institutions to protect and safeguard very important data and then manage that against how do we tie a better customer experience by implementing new technology without breaking stuff i assume you all are part i mean you mentioned customer experience you all are very much a part of the customer experience though like if i if i drive through a community bank i'm probably using an atm at some point so i have to imagine that you are dealing with more than just i.t in an organization too so who's typically getting involved and where do you get maybe the most objections to automation is it in it is it in you know from a c-suite level is it someone that just doesn't understand it no i mean typically we engage with the c-suite or we'll call it retail so retail is a banking term member experience is a credit union term so who owns like if someone goes to a branch what can they do and what what are they able to accomplish through technology or the people at those locations so normally you have visionaries that are going we want to be able to offer these services and that's typically who we're working with and then it has to be the one that says okay well we're you know we're running do we run a vdi environment do we run an on-premise server do we outsource rit today to a third-party provider so depending on the size and complexity of the organization there are still plenty of smaller community banks and credit unions that do use managed service providers or you know they outsource a lot of that i t responsibility so you know we're typically on their network and if they would like us to be able to remote into their atm which is one of the services that we offer and they're like great we would love for you to be able to do that well now we're talking firewall settings and hey is your atm traffic separate from your main traffic well oh i don't know that answer so you know we have really really sharp i.t people that know their environment and they're gonna they're gonna put very strict guide rails up on this is what we're gonna allow you to do and this is not and then there's some people they're like i don't know how this stuff works let me get the answers on how we can set up this subnet and all that stuff that it's kind of a wide range of experience sets out there for sure and i'm sure you guys come across varying levels of technology fuel within the branches so some probably very manual still some pretty innovative um i follow you on linkedin i see some of the branches and they look like spaceships compared to some of the other ones so i guess in your guys experience and this is not just you but your organization qds when you are helping someone when you see a local branch a retail branch of whatever a credit union or a local bank that seems to do we'll call it i.t well

or customer experience well or technology well what do you see that they're doing different than maybe the one the the folks that are a little bit behind or not adopting or it's very clear that their their technology is not as is as advanced as others yeah i would say probably up even into covet right there the financial industry was known as kind of the laggard right like hey you watched retail press forward and another of you know a number of other industries that were a lot more uh digital transformation ahead of the finance market so i i think those who understand and have understood the change of the consumer behavior over the last two to four years they have invested and are typically some of them are even willing to be bleeding edge on we know we need this from an experience standpoint we know there may be some gaps in the process or things we don't understand but they they have invested in technology and are willing to take some risks on new branch formats and new ways to deliver technology versus we still do run into the people that you know hey this is work for 20 years like our processes are pretty good i don't know if our customer base is really gonna you know adopt to this and i think those are the people that really struggle through covid they had to close locations and now it's like well gee we have forced our consumer base to maybe an outdated online banking system maybe they're doing transactions you know through the drive through tube system that wasn't designed to do the types of transactions they have to do because the branches closed versus the people that were on the front end of that curve invested in technology it was a fairly simple migration for hey you know you can use our itm machines or hey we've got a great online banking app that we can direct you to and you know their adoption skyrocketed but that that investment had been made prior with some vision so we we do run into those that are ahead of the curve and are tend to be more successful and then those that are struggling to keep up and don't have a great plan to get there for those of us who don't know what itm versus an atm is what's the difference great question so itm truly stands for interactive teller machine which typically is associated with the ability to have a live teller come up on the screen and help you execute a transaction we also use that in terms of connecting to the bank's core software platform so that you can do a lot of the things a teller would do in self-service so kind of an atm on steroids if you will not just cash withdraw and deposit but loan payments and large withdrawals and having access to all of your accounts not just your primary checking so yes good good pause to ask that question interactive teller machine yeah and i i've not come across them very often but i'm tired of punching the atm when it doesn't do what i need so maybe i need to interact with itms a little bit more we need more money in your account i don't know maybe yeah we'll see that's that's the thing i've never needed a cash counter because we you know we just don't have that on around here so i'm probably i think i can answer this question for a lot of the banking industry but i'm going to ask it anyways and i want to hear your your thoughts so qds obviously supporting the financial industry big on automation and but you you support a finance industry that i mean everyone right now is concerned with security obviously everyone's concerned about what they see in the news but for from your perspective what are some of the trends that you at qds are watching that you think you need to pay attention to that'll affect you in the next couple years and same with your customers what is what is the local rural uh branch uh looking at the credit unions what are what trends do they do they need to be paying attention to going back to resources i think one of the huge trends is to do more managed services with people so we have benefited from that of most of our clients are happy that we can do a b c d and e for them and they're willing to pay us a small fee to execute that so their internal resources can focus on other priorities is that because of instability and being able to keep people retained and get people in the offices is that what's driving that and just so as more and more technology is coming into you know the financial institution if i had 10 projects before i've got 25 now so if i'm able to take a task list and if my vendor on my behalf can handle five six eight things for me and i don't have to hire three more people to handle those tasks manage those tasks balance those tasks that is where a lot of people are having success a lot of people have looked at outsourcing atms altogether where the institution is just going to pay a monthly fee we own the terminal we are managing all of the processes so hey now i don't have to have three people in the back office in my atm department i just have my name on the terminal and someone else is functionally running and operating the terminals would that probably i guess would that increase the compliance for you all that you would not have to maintain and requirements i assume it would yes it does we have invested heavily in a due diligence packet to make sure that we are up most in compliance and staying up with regulations etc the other key trend is you know what is going to happen with the bitcoin and cryptocurrency and blockchain so not as waiting for you to bring that up not an area of strength for me i have tried i've sat through a couple webinars i normally get about five to ten minutes in like okay this is starting to make sense and by about 15 to 20 minutes by the time they get into nfts and other stuff like i'm i'm lost and you know for something that was supposed to be unhackable we've now seen multiple hacking attacks on blockchain environments i think i think there was like 150 million dollar loss and one of the the gaming uh things in the last week or two so you know all of this stuff around unpenetrable security and this is the the beauty of blockchain and we're we're already seeing that failing but we are seeing a lot more of the financial institutions react stronger it was kind of like a yeah yeah yeah bitcoin you know whatever and now it's like you're starting to see financial planners involved in it we have a couple atm clients that uh are offering bitcoin on their atms we do not offer that service today but there's a lot more conversations going on around how is crypto going to change what's going on and so i think that's just an interesting trend to watch and do we continue to see challenges with security that will scare people away from that or do people continue to have less trust in our government or governments around the world and see that there is a lot of value in a blockchain environment that's you know decentralized if you will yeah i was waiting for you to bring up crypto because i think every every bank is trying to figure out how to deal with the crypto and ft the the whole movement and and where it goes and i agree i don't i don't think anyone knows the answer but i i'm assuming you guys are getting this question in every conversation we're hearing it on on our side securing digital wallets how do you maintain security around that so i definitely think more to come over the next couple years what what about on qds's side so you kind of answered from the bank side you know focusing on managed service focusing on maybe what's happening with crypto i assume that second one also affects you all and how you address crypto in the future but what do you see as a tech trend or something in the future predict like where will qds be in five years using technology and how it will be different than today yeah it's a great question and i think that's one of the challenges of the leader and through my lifetime we have seen the technology curve shorten and shorten and shorten so what used to be a 10-year curve is now five what used to be a five-year curve is now two so i have a lot of trouble which is why you know it's always nice to have people in other verticals to like what's going on in your industry like am i completely blind um i pay a lot of attention since we are a service company at our heart you know i watch people like morris jenkins and other people that are delivering services and like hey they got the cool technician on the app thing and you know a lot more people are building out app infrastructure so you know could i see us investing in a mobile app or offering more of a customer facing portal environment probably our company is very big on transparency so is technology a way for us to again be more transparent with our clients we use a lot of software as a service tool so we're working in the similar workspace with our clients so those would be some trends that i think about as a company is how do we make ourselves more transparent to our clients share more data but also have a good comfort in security making sure our vendors have multi-factor authentication obviously we're evaluating phone systems in this whole ucas platform environment so man it is it is really hard to know three to four years in advance like where is technology gonna move and am i set up for that move or am i just gonna miss it and you know you can become a laggard very quickly and that's always a concern at my level is man i feel like in a lot of areas we're progressive and if i'm not paying attention in two years we could be you know five years behind so it's a yeah it's a challenge for leaders this the cycle has definitely shortened and i i think to your point you know we don't really know what's going to happen with a lot of technology in the future some you hear about the term for years and it's just a buzzword and some takes off immediately but the customer experience that you talked about you know the mobile app or whatever it may be we're hearing that across the board we have a customer who they make the metal brands for like automotive parts for the stamping and the forming of it you wouldn't think that's a super innovative consumer tech but just like domino's shows you how the pizza is being made when it's in the oven when it came out who you know is taking your pizza when it's going to arrive a lot of people are kind of reaching for that and saying we want that in our organization to give more visibility and transparency like you said so i think you're going to see a lot more of that over the next couple years by a couple years we'll probably be talking about even more uh invasive technology on on on how things are being done i think through kova just to attack on that we've seen the back side of that right so there is a ton of frustration with supply chain so you know people who have not invested in that technology like gee i ordered my couch you know two months ago i have no idea if you've made it is it in shipping so i'm constantly having to call the store like where's my stuff same with cars you know my dad had gotten on the list to buy a new car and yep it'll be it was due out in april and he called like you know late march and they're like yeah i don't even think they've made it yet in in japan so it's like there is this big chasm developing from the people that do that well and are transparent versus those that haven't and customers get very frustrated in the unknown and as that process has really drawn out due to supply chain that makes it even more frustrating of gee i had to pay you a bunch of money up front i have no idea when my stuff's going to come in and gee i hope it's right when it gets here yeah it's we're going to see it continue and it's it's it's going to get more and more important to organizations so couple two more questions before i let you go sean one is i want to know so you mentioned a couple uh things you use personally what is your favorite technology you use day to day personally it could be in your personal life it could be it at work what do you use that you would recommend to others oh i am not a big fan of apple the company but i am i use their stuff often i mean i think about what a difference to be able to use a technology like face time how many imessages do i send in a day so if i think about how efficient the ios environment and applications in that environment have made me how great the pictures are you can take now i mean if you think about everything that you can do with that phone in your pocket that that is essentially my operating environment right and then if you do multi-channel or omni channel well if i had an ipad it would be the same experience so you know i i cannot function i don't know that my phone is ever like more than six feet away from me so if i think about a technology that i live and breathe on it's you know audio phone video phone whether it's zoom or facetime or you name it you know i i if someone took away my phone for a week i would be in trouble no doubt about it all right we won't we won't make you go live out in the woods for a week but um if you ever do let me know so last question for you sean before uh wrap up so if you were speaking you were giving the sean farrell state of the union in front of a million people and you could leave them with a piece of advice about technology and in your industry and what we've talked about today what would it be what would you tell someone to pay attention to and adopt or it could be internal it could be with your customers etc you know i i think the best thing the best advice i would give make sure your people understand why technology is going to be a bigger and bigger part of our overall environment so educating them on why multi-factor authentication is important why you know all of this information security reports to me so i don't care how much how many and we have invested six figures a year in information security tools the number one phishing attack is human error so if you can educate people on why you have processes why these things are important i think that will help make you successful why why are we using these tools the way we're using them why is this important i think the job of any good leader and any advice i can say is don't just tell them what but tell them why and i think they will better understand and it will resonate versus yeah this is the process just follow what we say so i guess that's my two cents if you will on making sure under p people understand the why i think that could be the title for your future book you write is don't just tell them what tell them why so i'm i'm starting your author career now sean thank you for joining us um if you guys want to check out uh check out sean and his company qualitydatasystems.com we'll put show notes in here with some of the technologies that we talked about sean any parting thoughts for the folks no i just technology is a big part of our daily lives i would encourage anyone out there thinking about i.t i mean there there are so many paths and so many things you can do especially on the security side of the house so i continue to say that there are paths that don't have to involve a four-year degree that can make you very valuable in today's business economy so if you're someone out there and i'm getting on my soapbox that doesn't have the four-year college degree and thinks you can't amount to anything without that piece of paper i'm here to tell you like you can do it you can be a valuable part of any organization and you can do a lot of that learning in the real world so to speak so don't put too much uh countenance in that i guess yeah i couldn't agree with you more so sean thanks for joining us today for all you listeners out there thank you guys for listening in uh subscribe on apple podcast spotify we're also running this on youtube if you're not uh watching this so thank you for joining i hope you guys have an awesome rest of the week sounds good man take care thanks sean thanks for listening the it matters podcast is produced by apala an i.t advisory firm that helps businesses navigate the vast and complex it marketplace learn more about apcala at opkalla.com

[Music]

2022-08-08 09:49

Other news