Yours in Finance: Greg Palmer

The same questions, asked of the people shaping the future of banking and fintech.

One of my favorite things of my days as a traditional journalist was asking the same questions of different people and hearing answers with a wide range. I still love that. I’m also super curious about how professionals inside of banking and fintech think about the industry and the ways it’s changing, so I’m inviting them to take the Atomic’s “Yours in Finance” questionnaire.

Here, Greg Palmer, VP of strategy and host of Finovate, responds.

“The phone doesn’t care.”

Welcome to Yours in Finance where we are tracking how banking is changing. Once again. We’re asking people shaping the future of banking and fintech the same questions. This one: Greg Palmer.

Greg is the VP of Strategy and host of Finovate, a fast-paced, demo-first showcase of the latest innovations in financial and banking technology from across the globe. 15 years with Finovate have given Greg a unique, bird’s-eye view of the fintech industry as it has exploded into prominence, allowing him to watch not only individual innovations as they gain traction, but also the high-level trends that continue to shape the industry. Greg is also a seasoned demo and speaking coach in addition to his own work as an emcee and speaker.

The interview is edited for brevity and clarity.

What's difficult about managing money?

It depends on who you're talking about, who's doing the managing. For individual consumers, there are so many different challenges. They have to try and balance living their lives with saving for the future, monthly budgeting versus long-term budgeting, monthly cash flow and trying to make sure all the bills get paid. For a lot of consumers right now, the water levels are rising, and they're rising precipitously.

Most financial institutions have a pretty good sense of how to take care of consumers' money. I think the challenge for them is taking care of the consumers themselves. A lot of bankers are drawn to banking because they like numbers. They like finance. They like this kind of level of detail. But consumers have a really emotional attachment to their money for obvious reasons.

One of the things that we're seeing right now from a consumer standpoint is that they're asking financial institutions for a little help on the emotional side. You know, ‘what should I be concerned about? What's actually okay? What am I worried about that I don't need to be worried about, or what am I not worrying about that I really should be worrying about?’

What do you like about digital banking?

What I like about digital banking is that it brings banking tools to people where they are. It's no longer something that is onerous to go and try and get. For me personally, for a lot of people that I know, you don't have to go to a bank branch. I haven't been to a bank branch myself in something like 18 months, and the last time I had to go in was to get something notarized.

Being able to engage at the moment that you want, in the way that you want, is really helpful.

Let's say you have a bad day at work. Let's say you maybe even get laid off. In that critical moment, being able to take your phone out of your pocket and say, ‘okay, let's take a look. How are my finances looking?’ That's the moment that you really need it, right? When you have these big reactions, or something big going on, and you need this assurance, or you need to be able to quickly understand your financial picture.

It ultimately served this goal of demystifying the process. Banks have existed for a long time on vibe, right?  Imagine a big bank. You go into this big room with columns, you're like, ‘oh, this is serious. These are experts who are managing my money’ and that's true that they are experts for managing your money, but at the same time, I don't know how helpful that vibe really is, that potentially intimidating atmosphere. Some people want that atmosphere, a lot of people really don't, particularly people who are coming from demographic groups that have traditionally been excluded by traditional banks. If you are the wrong color and you go into a bank in the wrong city, you can feel like an outsider, even if you're an account holder. That doesn't happen with digital banking. The phone doesn't care.

What financial habit or behavior are you unwilling to automate?

That is a thinker. I certainly don't want to get into debt without having a very lengthy sign-off and review process. I don't want the first time that I set up a payment to ever be automated. But once I have a trusted recurring payment, like my utilities or things like that, then those kinds of things can be automated.

It really comes down to spending money with somebody that I haven't spent money with before, or making a decision that could potentially have long-term ramifications, especially around getting into debt. Taking on a loan, taking on additional sources of credit, things like that, I would never be comfortable automating.

What's a financial decision you'd be happy to outsource to an AI agent right now?

Well, I would never completely outsource anything to an AI agent, but I would take advice from a variety of sources on long-term budgeting, like, what percentage of your money should I be saving in various buckets. What's the priority for me? Saving for retirement, saving for my kids' college, a rainy day fund?  And on the flip side, where should I be spending to get the most long-term bang for my buck? Should I take a car loan, or should I buy the car outright with cash? Which is going to be a better financial future for me?

Again, I would never do something just because an AI agent tells me to do it, but an AI agent might give me something to think about that I hadn't thought of before.

The reticence is about trust. It's also about where's the source coming from for those AI agents. I like the quote [from Harry Potter]: “‘never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.”

For a lot of AI tools, they're drawing from Reddit. They're drawing from other internet forums.I would treat AI the same way that I would treat Reddit. Good food for thought, but not necessarily an official source.

What earns the right to be someone's primary financial relationship?

What's astonishing to me is how many people don't really seem to think about that question at all. They kind of default into a primary banking relationship because this was the bank that was closest to my college campus, and when I opened an account, I just picked the first bank and walked in there, and next thing you know, it's 20 years later, and I'm still banking with them because of a decision that I made in 30 seconds, two decades ago. So I think that the potentially shocking truth to everybody in the fintech space is that maybe not a lot of thought goes into these decisions. There's a level of arbitrariness to this.

In my previous job before Finovate, I was working for the marketing team at Washington Mutual, and we were out at community festivals trying to get people to open up checking accounts at a music festival. Obviously, a funded checking account is something that is worth a significant amount to the bank, but are people really opening accounts because they saw a booth at a fair? And I can tell you from experience, yes, they are. They do that.

For the consumers who make an informed decision, this is where it becomes a little bit murkier. I think a lot of people are looking at it through the lens of what's the best rate. Increasingly, we're seeing people who look at this through the lens of I want to bank locally. There's a lot of people who are more socially conscious, who think that if I give my money to a financial institution, I want that money to stay in my state. I want that money to stay in my city. I want it to fund coffee shops, or restaurants in my neighborhood, or small businesses in my neighborhood.

So, there's a lot of people increasingly who are looking at these ethical considerations, or value-based considerations. And you can't have this conversation without talking about trust, without talking about human connection. There are people who have really deep and personal relationships with their financial institutions. They know a specific person in a branch, or they feel like their FI understands them in a way that other FIs don't.

How do you define a bank?

Oh, that's a fun one because this is one where the word bank is really changing right now.

I'm going to go at a really high level. Banks exist to profit off of credit. So, I would say that any institution that is taking money, or holding money for people, and then investing that money somewhere else for profit would qualify as a bank.

I would draw a big line, though, between banks and banking services. Traditional banking services can frequently be done outside of banks, and Venmo is the biggest example here. You used to have to have a bank to pay somebody. Now you don't.

The really interesting thing right now is people have the ability to kind of build their own banks. Fifty years ago, you would have gotten all these services from the same bank. Now, you can really decide where my money should go. It's increasingly easy to just open up different apps. You have money in different places. You can think about how my investment accounts are different from my savings accounts, or different from my checking account, or different from who sends the money, and how you like to receive money.

But how many of those providers are technically banks? That's where you don't really know. It looks like a bank, but for me, I think the line really does come back to if you're profiting off of credit, then you're a bank.

What's the last thing you bought that you're still thinking about?

The last thing that I bought that I'm still thinking about is we had solar panels installed on our roof, and we had a new roof put in as a part of that process. I think about the solar panels in particular.

Now it's getting sunny. The days are really long up here in Seattle right now, so this is the time of year where the solar panels really start to do work, and I'm enjoying that. I'm looking at my app and looking at how many kilowatt hours of energy I'm creating on a daily basis. I'm really geeking out about it.

I coach Little League baseball. My kid just got a new catcher's mitt, and so I think about it a lot because I watch him using it a lot. I'm having fun with it, and it's getting more and more broken in. He's catching better with it, so these types of things as well.

The theme probably would be items that you purchase for continued use that have a way of staying in your brain. The catcher's mitt isn't so different from the solar panels in that regard, right? You get this, and you hope that this new piece of equipment will benefit your life, and that you'll get a lot of value out of it. If the thing breaks tomorrow, I'm gonna be disappointed. If it lasts another five years, it's gonna be amazing. And we don't know. We don't know how the story is going to go on either of these things.