Examining the New Role of Operations in Payments with Guest Linda Cooper

Wrestling Payments Podcast: Season 1 - Episode 4

Episode Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred innovation and modernization across different businesses and industries, and banking is one of the fields that had no choice but to keep up. However, innovation is an ongoing process that requires leveraging both new and existing resources effectively.

In this episode of the Wrestling Payments podcast, our host Joe Casali welcomes Linda Cooper, the VP & senior operations manager at Gorham Savings Bank. They talk about the ways to optimize processes and better leverage existing resources, how COVID has driven significant changes in the banking space, and the importance of continuous improvement.

Download Episode Transcript

##

Guest-at-a-Glance

💡 Name: Linda Cooper

💡 What she does: She's the VP & senior operations manager at Gorham Savings Bank.

💡 Company: Gorham Savings Bank

💡 Noteworthy: Although Linda has been with the Gorham Savings Bank for ten years, she's not a lifelong banker. She has experience in multiple industries, including retail and manufacturing.

💡 Where to find Linda: LinkedIn

##

Key Insights

⚡ We need to leverage existing resources better. Implementing new tools is not enough; we also need to leverage the existing resources more effectively. Linda explains, "Something new I've been thinking about as sort of backward innovation, meaning review, as things slow down. The economy’s slowing down; interest rates are up; a lot of us are seeing a decrease in volume of loan activity or whatever. I think that it's a prime opportunity to really review the usage of existing software to make sure you're leveraging all the functionality that's there. A lot of us implement systems for a specific reason or to cover a specific thing. And, 'Oh, we'll get to that later' — the new stuff — and then later never comes. And so, I think that to formalize that a little bit and create the bandwidth and get the right people around the table to really look at those things, to see what we're missing."

⚡ COVID spurred innovation in the banking industry. If there's anything that the pandemic taught us is that traditional ways don't always work best. Linda says, "People that just would not consider or couldn't wrap their heads around any changes to how we do things — removing paper from the process, doing things electronically — all of a sudden we did it, and we're like, 'Oh, wow. That works pretty well.' And so, it increased the appetite, I think, for change in a way that I'm not sure anything else would have done because we were forced into it. Now, that's not to say that there aren't people that went right back to their paper files, and they're so happy to be printing things, but a vast majority of us, I think, got on that bandwagon, which has changed the appetite, the environment for innovation."

⚡ Modernization is a continuous process. Modernization is ongoing and open-ending. There are no boundaries to innovation, even in the banking space. Linda says, "With the modernization, how can we better leverage these? And it's almost an ongoing process. Continuous improvement, I guess, is really what it is, in order to make sure that you're always using, always thinking, never settling for, 'Yeah, this is good enough.' Always looking to see, 'Is there a better way?'"

##

Episode Highlights

Fraud highlights collaboration

"We look at fraud in a lot of different places, but fraud really highlights collaboration. It just becomes more and more; everybody's involved in prevention and detection. All of the new payment rails have rules and just more involvement in that area. So, I think that just remains relevant to everybody that has any involvement with NEACH and payments in general."

Optimize the existing processes as much as possible

"It's a huge amount of time. Now, granted, you may be talking two and a half hours across ten people. But still, nonetheless, it's a ton of time that was basically being wasted that we were able to capture with just simply implementing something that was there all along. Those are the kinds of things that really can pay off and that operations across all areas, of any industry really, should be looking at their systems to say, 'What is out there that I could do?'"

Innovation takes courage

"I think that oftentimes it takes a person or some people making that noise, not taking themselves too seriously and throwing things up against the wall to see if they stick. And you've got to have thick skin because some things aren't going to work, and sometimes they make perfect sense, and they still aren't going to be adopted; they're not going to be allowed for whatever reason. So, I think that's really it. Just looking at things always with the perspective of, 'I might not know everything about this.'"

To hear this episode and many more like it, subscribe to Wrestling Payments on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts, or listen above.