Banking on Information with Cyrus Taheri, Chief Growth Officer at TrueNorth

In this episode, Rutger van Faassen interviews Cyrus Taheri, Chief Growth Officer at TrueNorth, discussing the importance of purpose and impact in the consultancy world, particularly in the FinTech sector. Cyrus shares insights on how TrueNorth helps community banks and credit unions leverage technology to compete with larger institutions. The conversation also explores the future of banking, emphasizing the integration of AI and the need for organizations to adapt to this changing landscape.

Keywords

TrueNorth, FinTech, banking, AI, technology, community banks, consultancy, growth, impact, purpose

Takeaways

- Cyrus emphasizes the importance of purpose in his work.
- TrueNorth focuses on helping small organizations scale effectively.
- The impact of technology on community banks is significant.
- Cyrus believes in breaking down projects into manageable pieces.
- TrueNorth aims to bridge the gap between FinTech and traditional banking.
- Education is a key component of TrueNorth's approach.
- Clients appreciate the quick value delivery from TrueNorth.
- Cyrus highlights the importance of adaptability in the banking sector.
- The future of banking will heavily involve AI integration.
- Cyrus believes that every future leader will need to be AI savvy.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Purpose and Impact
02:46 True North's Role in FinTech
05:09 Bridging the Gap: FinTech and Traditional Banking
07:36 Delivering Value Quickly
10:07 The Future of Banking: AI Integration
12:15 Preparing for an AI-Driven Future

Transcript

Rutger van Faassen (00:01.326)
Hello and welcome to another episode of banking on information. Today my guest is Cyrus Tahiri who is chief growth officer at TrueNorth. Welcome to the podcast Cyrus.

Cyrus Taheri (00:13.09)
Thank you for having me, Rutger. How you doing?

Rutger van Faassen (00:15.384)
Great, glad that you're here. We are going to start with that all important question, which is why Cyrus, do you do what you do?

Cyrus Taheri (00:25.966)
It's a great question. And first of all, thank you for having me. I'm a fan of the podcast and I like how it's simple, but very, very deeply informative. So it's pretty cool format. So from my side, so I'm career consultant and I think I grew up in big organizations, big companies, big machines inside those companies. and so forth. And what I learned is that I...

about six years back, I stepped out of what I was doing because I think once you reach a certain type of organization size, you may lose a little bit of the meaning of why you're doing things. And so I usually tend to gravitate with, you know, in companies that have certain type of purpose, certain type of impact.

You know, once you're in the big org, sometimes you're just doing things like you're running in the wheel and hamster wheel. And you don't know sometimes why you're doing things, but you have to do it. Right. think Today, I, like you said, I, I'm part of TrueNorth, which is a boutique consultancy. We're a small organization, but we, I believe, drive a lot of impact. And the input we do everything we do, trans we see it translated either, in customers being able to serve their customers better.

You can see the impact very, very quickly. And also we work with small organizations that are trying to scale and be massively influential through growth. And so you can see how you're setting up seeds and helping them or guiding them through their decisions around technology. But then fast forward a year or two, and then you can see what they became. And so, I think impact for me is very important. Purpose is very important. We work with the smallest bank in America. So,

this is a sub $5 million asset bank. He's probably my favorite customer. And he has nothing to do with, it's not about revenue. It's about the story, right? He's the 100 year old bank that was founded by the grandfather. Now he's driving it. our clients driving it. But he sees technology as the way forward, the sustainable way forward.

Rutger van Faassen (02:18.262)
Right. Yep.

Rutger van Faassen (02:28.544)
Right. Yep.

Cyrus Taheri (02:42.872)
How he's going to compete with the big brands, how is he going to compete with the big, big, big banks. And the only way the level setter there is technology, right? And so there we can come in very light, right, and careful, but we're able to help them make some decisions in terms of investment, rationalize some of their processes. And then hopefully, fast forward a couple of years, we're going to see the story no longer maybe the smallest bank, but maybe the coolest bank.

Rutger van Faassen (03:11.522)
Yeah.

Cyrus Taheri (03:11.822)
So for me, again, that's kind of what drives me every day is, there a purpose? And there is a cultural alignment usually with our clients. So our clients like to help their customers, their, you know, kind of service first type organizations. And so that, that whole thing makes it every day really cool to work in TrueNorth. Now there is good days and by anybody, right? But I think you add them all and you subtract them all and he's always positive. So I'm very excited to where I landed and I'm able to do

Rutger van Faassen (03:35.043)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Cyrus Taheri (03:40.342)
some of the things that I like to do on a daily basis.

Rutger van Faassen (03:41.942)
Yeah. So you like to help people get things done, solve problems that really serve a purpose, right? That really make an impact. And it's not just moving boxes around, but actually making impact and helping people do that. I think that is a great why. Now, what do you do at TrueNorth? What typically do you help solve for your customers?

Cyrus Taheri (03:53.859)
does.

Cyrus Taheri (04:07.822)
So in TrueNorth, we started our career in the FinTech world. financial technology. We were originally part of LendingClub and we were a technology delivery team inside that.

You know, We were divested into what became TrueNorth and LendingClub became our first client. You know, It was early days and now LendingClub is a massive unit, multi-billion dollar organization. They bought a bank themselves, right? And so we also worked with the brands like Upgrade and many other big lenders. And when you start getting into that world, that's a highly innovative world. It's a very automated.

A lot of focus on customer experience, trying to take the friction out of the acquisition. and things of that nature. One thing led to another and TrueNorth became then involved with launching neobanks in the United States. That was less about building, more about stitching or assembling the world of ecosystem to launch faster into the market. So we work in some of these neobanks. And today what we do, we still help with a lot of fintechs build and accelerate their technology launches and get into market.

But what we're doing today is because we know the world of fintechs, we have a lot of access to new technologies and how they were applied, as I say, to this disruptor world. We want to bring disruption to banks, right? We want banks to be able to compete. And today, TrueNorth is working quite closely with community banks and credit unions. right? Trying to arm those banks, credit unions to be able to grow. And a lot of these, again, it goes down to purpose, right? The funny story is...

Community banks and credit unions care about either their members or their communities, and they serve relationships and they want to extend those relationships. And they're using technology to, again, be able to compete with whatever is better pricing, rates, reach, whatever needs the others have. So again, it aligns to the whole purpose idea. And that's what we do today. We're trying to bring the FinTech and the next generation technologies carefully into banks.

Rutger van Faassen (06:05.835)
Yeah. Yeah.

Cyrus Taheri (06:18.015)
We also don't bring it right away. We try to do it in bite sizes and let them evolve as they take in technology because it's not one and done right? So that's what we do today.

Rutger van Faassen (06:27.197)
So you're bringing the fintech mentality and the fintech experience to banks and credit unions and help them sort of step into that. Because sometimes it can be a bit of a cultural misalignment, right? between kind of like more traditional financial institutions and fintechs. Fintechs sometimes have this sort of idea of like, hey, go fast and break things. But obviously you've learned a lot over the years, right? and you bring all that wisdom

from the fintech industry to banks and credit unions to be able to help them sort of step into that and use technology more like they were a fintech.

Cyrus Taheri (07:00.814)
That's right. you said it right. What TrueNorth brings to the table to these banks is 120 plus modernization programs, right? A bunch of builds. And with that came a lot of mistakes we've seen, a lot of best practices we gathered.

A lot of skills that are needed. right? And some assets that help you accelerate. another. So we bring a lot of the institutional experience. right? Trying to bring it to banks, trying to educate. A lot of the work we do initially at the forefront is education, is ensuring that they understand the world of FinTech.

They also get maybe the confusion and the overload of logos and options that are out there. Buzzwords, AI, blockchain, Things of that nature. So we do a lot of education and then how do you carefully take those in and then make sure that those actually serve a particular purpose within your bank and is driving the value that you want, whether it is on the revenue side or optimization, something whichever side you want.

Rutger van Faassen (08:01.076)
Yeah. Now, when you talk to your customers and they describe how they got value from working with TrueNorth, what do they typically say?

Cyrus Taheri (08:10.114)
Well, they usually they like that we are Our philosophy tends to be about showing value quickly. So we, even if you hired to TrueNorth for a multi-year engagement, we break it down in three months MVP, right? So as a customer of TrueNorth should expect something in three months coming out that is.

Rutger van Faassen (08:22.367)
Mm-hmm.

Cyrus Taheri (08:31.82)
tangible and able to be taken to market. So it's actually real, right? The second thing is we break those out every two weeks, our team does demos. So they show you that there is an incremental value at every time. So we're trying to learn to, you know, to see that there is a bit of momentum and then you can, and everything that we build, we can build on top, right? So we'll break it into bite sizes in that also not only put our mind into

Rutger van Faassen (08:34.473)
Yeah. Yeah.

Cyrus Taheri (08:57.678)
into a very frequent type release or frequent, you know, kind of time to market. But it's also taking, it's starting to train almost the bank into expecting that innovation, you know, as they go forward.

And they also learned that, you know, as you, what you thought originally you wanted to do, maybe after the launch, after three months, you get feedback because you're in the market, maybe not exactly what you wanted. And so it allows you to pivot quickly. We pivot a few times with a few banks. And that helped them actually win versus staying maybe in a trajectory, especially in this world that is very volatile, be able to actually capitalize on the investments that you make. right?

Rutger van Faassen (09:35.871)
Yeah. I can see that that's very valuable, that it isn't kind of like this sort of there is light at the end of the tunnel three years from now, but that you sort of say, actually we break it down into manageable pieces, which actually goes back to the FinTech roots, right? That's how a lot of FinTech ship products, they make sure that they put things out there, test it, and then to your point, if you have feedback and it's kind of like, a little bit more to the left, or we didn't like this feature, we prefer that, then you can still make changes. right? Nothing is completely set in stone.

I think that that is very valuable to have a partner like TrueNorth, be able to do that with you and get you into that kind of mindset.

Cyrus Taheri (10:12.782)
Damn, that's our, Usually that's our value. Obviously I'm always proud of my people. So I think I describe our TrueNorth guys as the nicest Fintech geeks you can find. around. once My job is very easy, right? As trying to grow the company and trying to, My job is to expose these individuals to the banks or the CIOs or the CTOs or the CEOs. And then they just fall in love with them. And that's usually a very easy job for me to do,

because the quality of our individuals are phenomenal. right? They're really nice people at the same time, they're phenomenally smart. So I'm a lucky guy.

Rutger van Faassen (10:48.735)
That's great. Now, I like to do this thing called Futures Thinking, which is we don't know what the future is going to bring, but it's good to think about a possible future. So if you look at the banking industry, and let's look out like 10 years out, so 2035, what does that look like? Can you paint me a picture of what a possible future looks like?

Cyrus Taheri (11:10.88)
It's a great question that I was just mentioning to you offline that every few weeks or so our executive team meets in TrueNorth and we check each other's out, in. we doing the right things and we're investing in the right skills? Are we looking at the right markets? You know, because everything changes so fast. So we just came out of one today and we agreed that, just like before, I think there was somebody said that every business should become a D or will become a digital business. I think,

every business fast forward X years is going to become an AI powered business. So no longer are going to be the days that you're going to find, this is an AI startup and this is a normal startup. They're all going to be AI something, but also intrinsically in the way that we would deliver or anyone manage their business, there's going to be AI helping us deliver faster, better, more productive ways.

There's going to be you as a user of a bank, you're going to use co-pilots or you're going to have aids that would help you work. So it's AI powered, whether it is not only at the product level, but operational level or at delivery level. and so forth. So it's going to be very intrinsic and very pervasive within the bank. So, any institution, we don't think it's just banks. And what's in TrueNorth is that's where we're investing heavily. We're not particularly

tied into, Hey, you need to have an AI product. What we're trying to do is trying to say, the future of the delivery workforce, should it look maybe a bit different, right? Do we need to use new tools? Do we need to be more productive or push for more productivity? So we deliver faster, better, cheaper for our customers. But then also creating models like, call it an AI factory. So anybody that wants to build an agent can come to TrueNorth and we have the best practices, the methods,

the security levels and everything that you need to launch an AI agent that's compliant, that works well, that is tested, that is upgradable, that is traceable, et cetera, et cetera. That's the world that we want to play, that we're starting to play. We have a couple of proof of concepts there, but I think that's the world of the future. Is how do you adapt your business to be very, very valuable in that future business?

Rutger van Faassen (13:29.457)
Yeah. Well, so AI is going to be everywhere. Yeah, to your point, like you're not going to sort of say, hey, this is the AI part. It's almost a little bit like the word fintech, right? Like which financial organization does not use tech? Like pretty much every financial institution is a tech institution. therefore a fintech, probably what you're saying is then 10 years from now, we're not going to sort of say, hey, we're an AI company because everyone uses AI and it is, it's going to be everywhere in every part of our business. Now, if that's the case, if that possible future comes true,

And I think there's high likeliness of that coming through. what do we need to do today to get ready for it?

Cyrus Taheri (14:05.086)
Great question. A couple of things. So before I answer that, I just want to let you know, I read an article, I think it was in the news a few weeks back and it hit on me, was that every future leader in the next 10 years will be very savvy on AI or we would expect AI to be part of their journey, right? So this is an impact not only on the workforce and the type of people you will need, right? Because

It's going to be very different. But it's also like almost expected. that you're as a, So, imagine maybe a new government comes in, a new leader comes in, and the new OCC leader in 10 years or 20 years, that new OCC leader may be coming in and say, well, if you don't have AI, maybe you're more risky to me than not. SBA, or anybody, right? So that whole expectation on leadership,

Rutger van Faassen (14:54.0)
Right. Yep.

Cyrus Taheri (15:00.658)
and people think that the same leaders are going to stay, but no, that's not true. There's a new block coming in. That new block coming in, what I read is that they're going to be expecting a lot of AI and productivity and so forth. So that, to answer your question, a lot of it comes with talent, it comes with culture, and a lot of it is, I think, finding those wedges for you to get comfortable in an organization.

We don't think you should use AI by any means anywhere unleashed, right? Like crazy. there are, mean, today in the day to day, I use it for many things. I don't think I'd be able to be productive at all without AI because I can multiply what I'm able to do. But in a bank that is highly regulated and very, you know, very carefully, you can identify areas where you and your team become more savvy, more comfortable. And you started learning more about what would that entail in terms of security? What are they going think about?

Rutger van Faassen (15:39.13)
Right. Yeah.

Cyrus Taheri (15:58.402)
you know, skills, what it entails investments. And so I think the people that start getting exposed to it will understand it better. And the people that use it will find a value, whether it's not immediately will identify later that those that don't do it. Right. I think when you avoid it, whether it is fear, whether it's denial, whatever it is, I think what's going to happen is going to create a gap, not only in your organization in the ability to win.

Rutger van Faassen (16:13.039)
Yep.

Cyrus Taheri (16:27.138)
But I think it's going to create a gap in your ability, in your people, attracting the talent that you need and being able to create a culture over time that makes you succeed. I think getting your hands dirty to a certain extent, right? We are going to start Potential POC with one of our banks where we are inviting the OCC. We want them to go through that and check what we're doing on the AI point of view. Just because if you think about it, the more transparent you are and the more

you know, the more controlled environment you have it, the better, right? And I think it would be seen with good eyes and the good and the bad will come out quickly and be fixed versus not doing it. Then you're still far behind, right?

Rutger van Faassen (17:10.629)
Yeah. So AI is here and it's only going to be more around in the future. So everyone needs to get involved, needs to get comfortable with it. And especially younger generations and future generations will need to know how to deal with it. I think that's probably a good point to wrap this up. Thank you very much to Cyrus for being on the podcast.

Cyrus Taheri (17:34.328)
Thank you so much for having me, man. Appreciate it.

Rutger van Faassen (17:36.536)
And until next time, choose to be curious.