the way who've helped us grow and learn and build through that and it does look like a revolution looking backwards but it's been just very step by step okay so when did you actually take on your first fintech partner i would say the end of 22 2022 so we recapitalized the bank in may of 21 and that first onboarding was a year and a half later maybe it's changed over the last three plus years but what are you looking for in a fintech partner yeah i think our objectives we want to do main street banking we are a community bank at heart we are just changing the paradigm of how the delivery of the products and services occurs instead of the traditional brick and mortar branch right which is a conglomeration of that geographic community typically just generally speaking we're saying that that model is obviously very difficult to scale it's under tremendous amounts of pressure and it's this paradigm around geography and physicality is what needs to be challenged all the other rules the safe sound principles many of them have by definition have to stay in place deposits loans capital liquidity payments right the risk management the safety the soundness that the regulatory interaction that that is so important the transparency just that how that structure works is is critical but it's that we are looking for specific partners who deliver mostly to small businesses we've got some niche consumer kind of tolerance in our model and appetite if you will but where we see the biggest opportunity are those verticalized kind of specialized commercial small business focused partners who have a real edge and it all goes back peter like i was saying this is banking 101 it's business 101 it's never going to change ever it's all relationship based right it's just the nature of the relationship and how you define that and how you think and how you think about the paradigm that changes for us but we have strong through our partners we have very very strong relationships with our end users with the end depositors or the borrowers of the bank or payment companies of the bank and then therefore we have very strong relationships with our partners but we want them to do we want them to do something special provide a differentiated service that has stickiness already to it and then by us bringing the banking products and services and that homogeneity of the banking

infrastructure we help our partners really capitalize on the special sauce that they already have and we enhance that it's a very symbiotic approach so can you share some of the names of the fintech partners that you're working with that you can share publicly we try not to mean that you can web crawl them and find them they're all i'd try not to for you know various reasons but you can think thematically what i would think about thematically is just this that community banks typical community bank i've worked at two really good ones they're full of really smart bankers right really dialed into the community and they care a lot and they offer differentiated relationship services to their to their customers heretofore they've offered differentiated banking services to them as well that's what's being commoditized and traditionally they don't have the scale or the expertise to compete with the verticalized software offerings in terms of how do i so let's take a a restaurant vertical for example a well-run restaurant vertical software platform has developed such deep relationships with the restaurant customers of theirs and expertise in how those restaurants operate their business it would be challenging for any bank even up to the biggest banks to hire a team of bankers who could compete from a relationship management standpoint with the the software company and so despite a community bank's best efforts they're generalists naturally or they have a small team maybe they can focus on you know a segment or they've got some specialized knowledge but they have a really hard time competing with that vertical software company then conversely on the on the upside the big banks some of these companies may just be too small for them to do come after profitably and serve and so there's this big hole in the market and that's this is what we knew from the beginning we called them back then is fees industry specific verticals from a kind of the payments world and that still exists today and that's where you know we're making so much progress and really enhancing our partners business and their relationships with with their customers by helping them to embed seamless banking products and services it's it's not rocket science it's hard to execute okay so let's go back to 2023 and 2024 you know you've you've started adding fintechs