Episode 9: Martin Wise

Martin Wise  00:00

There's also paying more attention to existing customers and paying engagement and retention of existing customers because money is not free anymore and there are interest rates and there are things to do. And there are challenges in some corners of the banking market and there are mergers going on that disrupt the landscape and all those things.

Jack Hubbard  00:21

I've had the privilege of being in and around banking for more than 50 years. Lots of changes during that time. We've gone from Ledger's to laptops, typewriters to technology. One thing, however, remains the same. Banking is a people business. And I'll be talking with those people that make banking great here on Jack Rants With Modern bankers. 

Welcome to Jack Rants With Modern Bankers brought to you by RelPro, and Vertical IQ. Each week I feature top voices in financial services from bankers and consultants, to best selling authors and many more. The goal of this program is simple, to provide insights, success practices and to bring new ideas to the table that you can use to maximize your results. 

My guest today is Martin Wise. Bobby Martin introduced me to Martin several years ago, and it's been a game changer and a life changer for me. Martin earned a BS from the University of Southampton and an MBA from the prestigious London School of Business. He has a 20 year career in financial services under his belt having served in various capacities with Merrill Lynch, both in Europe and here in the United States. He launched RelPro in 2015. I gotta tell you, I use his amazing system almost every day. And I wish every single banker who prospected do the same. It's Martin Wise, on Jack Rants With Modern Bankers. Here we go. 

Well, as I mentioned in the introduction, Bobby Martin, and Susan Bell introduced us, Martin and we became fast friends and I've gotten to know you pretty well. And I know there's a lot of good things going on in your life. And as I ask everybody as we start this program, tell me something good?

Martin Wise  02:16

What’s something good is that my diehard team, Manchester City, won what's called the Treble in, I call it football. You might think of it as soccer in Europe this year. So winning the English Premier League, winning the what we call the FA Cup, and then the Champions League, which they've never won before. And so it was a heck of a season for someone that supported them since the mid 60s, through thick and thin. That's something good. I'll take this down when the season starts again in a few weeks, but you know, it was good while it lasts.

Jack Hubbard  03:00

You know, being from England. I'm curious when you were a kid. How much did you actually go to soccer games?

Martin Wise  03:09

Well, I played soccer. That's how I really got into it, I guess. I was a goalie in sort of elementary and middle school before I converted to rugby after that and then I went back to being a soccer goalie when I was at college. But yeah, you're right. We had local teams. I guess Oxford United was my local team. They were never in the Premier League. We used to go to some games. Absolutely. Yeah, not so often. I lived on a farm and it was a little travel away to get to, to a soccer game. But no, there was always a soccer game within fair reach.

Jack Hubbard  03:50

And then when did you come over to the United States?

Martin Wise  03:53

Came over in 98? Actually 25 years ago, two weeks ago. I should have put something on LinkedIn about it. Maybe I still will, because the official, my wife and daughters arrived on August 2 of 98. So maybe that's the other anniversary, but yeah, 25 years ago.

Jack Hubbard  04:12

Amazing. And what brought you here? Why did you decide to come here?

Martin Wise  04:15

So I worked. I had the privilege of working at Merrill Lynch for 20 years, 10 years in London, 10 years in New York. And we had the opportunity to come over for what was going to be a two year assignment in New York and my wife and I looked at each other and said, “Well, yeah, before the girls go to high school, maybe this will be an adventurous thing to do for just two years. You know, we'll be back.” And, you know, and so two years, 25 years on, we're still here, but yeah, it was, it was a great opportunity that I had and it turned into, you know, I've sort of have my own little version of the American dream, I guess coming over and seeing what's possible here both working in the headquarters have a major global financial institution, but also but also the ability to start a business which I? Yeah, it's not easy, you know that. But I feel like, I don't think I could have done the founding and growing of a business in the UK in the same way that I've been able to hear and I appreciate that.

Jack Hubbard  05:20

Well, you did start the business in 2016. And I'm curious, what was the catalyst? And I'm wondering, how much did your experience at Merrill Lynch kind of frame what was going to happen with RelPro?

Martin Wise  05:35

Yeah, it's a great question. I could talk about that for a long time. But I'll give you the short strokes. Yeah, to your point RelPro, the product was born in 2016. Actually, the forebear of it. And it's still a holding company is relationship Capital Partners, which I founded in 2009. Having just left [inaudible], in the, as I call it, the beginning of a late the rise under the late and so that the catalyst for creating the product RelPro in 2016, was really the journey that we've had in the 2009 to 2015 period of that relationship, Capital Partners. And really, at that point, doing data and analytics engagements for clients, which increasingly became financial services clients. Frankly, in order to see what types of problems they were trying to address in applying data analytics to business development and relationship management, there was a linkage back to Merrill, I ran the global client coverage team, which was intimately involved in orchestrating our go to market activities for 15. Vice chairman who were our most senior calling ambassadors, as it were for the firm. And that got me into really that very, the application of data and analytics to very relationship intensive client development, business development situations, and, and I was very intrigued by that, and had some experiences and just how powerful that could be.

And so wanted to take that idea further. And that's what led to the formation of the early stages of RelPro, as it was, you know, obviously, the, the audience or the client landscape that I was helping with at Merrill Lynch was very much board and C suite, global company, public companies kind of things. And because of the financial crisis in 08 and 09, that really wasn't an option to go and do something else for other investment banks, they had other things on their mind.

And so really, just by a bit of luck, really, and a bit of happenstance, the early foundations for the company, in 09 and 2010, were with the pieces of financial services that were continuing to move. And that was private equity and wealth management, and particularly private equity, focusing on small and mid market businesses and our first client and there's still a wonderful client today was the Riverside company, who are a great private equity firm, co-headquartered in Cleveland, and New York. And they focus on small and mid market businesses. And so we got to see the kinds of data and just the kinds of real world problems that people were facing in navigating that small mid market, private company landscape. And that's what led to what we do.

Jack Hubbard  08:48

I want to talk about those challenges, because I had an interesting question. When I was up in Syracuse for my good friend, John Woodkowski recently, and I want to ask you about that because it was directly about RelPro. But you mentioned the team, Manchester, you have got a terrific team behind you. When you started, it was probably you and maybe a couple of folks, but you've generated and put together a really fine team, Martin. Talk about the folks at RelPro.

Martin Wise 09:20

Well, thank you. I'm very, you know, proud with a small team that we've pulled together and got us this far. You know, growing a business is one thing, bootstrapping is another which is effectively what we did. We didn't take any VC or private equity money to do this. And so to your point, what else do you have? It's people  and guts and spirit and technical abilities and so on. Yeah, it gives me great pleasure to have just appointed Raaj Rajmangal  as our president. I'm still CEO but as our President Raaj joined us out of college as a young programmer engineer on our technology side, ultimately became CTO and now President of the company. Others, Lauren Myers, who is our Chief Customer Officer who you know, well, last Rosenthal, who's our chief growth officer, we've been together while Raaj and I've been together for 11 years, Lance 10, Lauren, more than six. It's a wonderful team. And we've obviously been scaling, there's 35 of us now, in 14 states, which, that's other opportunities and challenges that come from that, but it's a great team, and I feel very privileged to have been a part of it. 

And, you know, it's, it's a journey, it takes a particular type of person to want to be part of a startup formative company journey, because it's not a straight line, as you well know. And therefore, one of my former Merrill colleagues who went to work at Thomson Reuters in the olden days, she told us said something that I'll always remember that phrase that, culture, Trump's strategy all the time if you're building a business, because culture is what you is what you have all the time, and it helps you to navigate even as the strategy needs to evolve. And I think we have a great team with a great spirit. And, you know, part of the mission right now is obviously to continue to keep the essence of that spirit as we keep growing.

Jack Hubbard  12:04

Well, you mentioned 14 states, and I'm reading this book now. It's called The Nine, Phil Simon is the author. And it's really a great book, and it talks quite a lot about entrepreneurialism and remote work. You mentioned 14 states. How do you keep a team like that together? When you're so remote?

Martin Wise  12:30

Yeah, you know, I think the bottom line has to be around, on the one hand, a common purpose and a good understanding of what the purpose and the mission of the cut of the organization is. Communication, both and I'll explain a little bit about how we tackle some of that but also the sense of community as well. And there are numerous advantages of remote working. The fact that we're in 14 states meet and particularly since we're serving a national, particularly a national banking client base means that we can, we can have our people show up at events around the country and meet with bankers and other people in the middle market finance ecosystem, without putting them on planes all the time. It's a huge benefit. And but to your point, is there any question of how to keep it all together.

We've always had a strong operating sort of cadence as it were, you know, we have effectively half of the corporate team are  client facing and half of the team are engineers and product specialists and effectively each of those teams, within the teams talk every day, they have a stand up there, we're comparing notes on what they're learning in the market and what they're hearing, and so on, we always kick off the sales and customer success week starts at 830 on a Monday morning with a review of  our key client relationships, and what are we doing for our key clients? And also, what are the trials and the new clients that we're onboarding at the moment so that everyone is on the same page about what's happening and then stand ups during the week.

And then every Friday, we've done this ever since RelPro was formed in 2015. We always, Friday 12 o'clock, the whole team, whole company gets together. And they and everybody has a piece about sales, a piece of marketing and a piece about product development. And so everybody in the team once a week hears the voice of the customer, the voice of the market, the voice of the engineering, and QA team. And frankly, we're not trying to do 1000 different things. We're trying to serve professional business development professionals in financial and professional services in our way. And so I think clarity of mission, clarity of purpose, opportunities for people to get together. 

The other important thing is, even though we are remote, every three months, we will get together with the team we fly in from the four corners of the country. I mean, literally we, our most recent hire was in Portland, Oregon. And so literally that and we have temper in Maine, and literally at four corners of the country. But once every three months, we will come together. We did that last week, partly business meetings, partly team building events. But also, last Thursday, we all rolled up our sleeves and we did some community service volunteering at the New York Botanical Garden, great to get out there and do things together and in a different way, and just mix and mingle with our team. But the New York Botanical Garden is also a client. And so we get to kind of pay back. And it's really a great, great experience. So yeah, remote work, but community mission, and also just bringing people together once every three months, which you know, if you've got 3000 people, you can't do that but 35, you can do that.

Jack Hubbard  16:17

That's really great. Yeah, it's so fascinating. You know, Bobby, Martin, and I met, 25 or so years ago, got to know Susan Bell really well. And that was really all kind of face to face. You and I have gotten to know each other and we've never met. We've never shaken hands and we've played golf, but you know what you can, this is a good example of how you can build trust and develop good relationships remotely.

Now having said that, it would be great, and we will get together but what my point is, you know, I've known Brynne Tillman for many, many years and we worked together when I was with St. Mayer and Hubbard and putting this company together, The Modern Banker, and doing all of the e-learning that we did, and everything we've not met face to face since we started this company. And so you can do this. You have to have trust, you have to build trust, you have to over communicate, what will speak up, communicate. 

So I'm in this program with 25,30 bankers in Syracuse recently, and I was talking about RelPro and one of your client banks was in the room extolling your virtues, of course, and that was great. And one of the questions was, because I want to ask you about what you do, but I don't want this to be. I didn't want to ask it in such a way that sounded like a commercial but the way the banker asked me the question was so good. So I'll ask you, what challenges does RelPro solve for bankers?

Martin Wise  18:01

Oh, thank you. Well, clear mission, clear purpose. So what what challenges we solved is that what I always say is that if a banker doesn't have RelPro, what is the banker need to do as they grow their business, they need to find companies, they need to find people to call, they need to know how to get in touch with them with accurate contact details, they need to learn more about the companies and people so they can have a decent conversation with them. And they need to keep tabs on them. 

Well, if you don't have a helper, what does that look like? I went to one banker from very large national bank in California, told me five years ago, she said when she saw her up, she said, “Well, I don't have you right now but I have a browser with 18 tabs open of different sources that I need to do to find a company, find a person learn more about it, do things this and that.” And she said “Look, in fairness, eight of the 18 tabs you're not going to get rid of” because they are internal systems that I have to navigate with. Because we have a very fragmented internal environment doesn't everybody in a large bank. But she said the other 10 She said, "You can get that down to like two or three if I use RelPro” and she said, “Not only that, but you've actually got better quality data, you've got it all joined up.” So you're gonna help me find more companies, find more people, learn more about them, get accurate contact information, have a more informed conversation and be able to keep in touch with them. And by the way, put that in my CRM, so that I don't have to then kind of rejigger and retype it and so on.” So she said, “You're gonna make me more productive, you're gonna give me more leads and more and more things to do. And you're going to save me a bunch of time.” If we'd had this conversation a year ago, it would all have been about bankers want to find companies to lend money to them. Everyone had all this pile of money from the federal stimulus programs and it was all sitting there waiting to be lent. 

We all know now that then lending is still lending, it's still there to be done. The complexion of it may have changed a bit, but they're still lending. But there's also gathering deposits. There's also paying more attention to existing customers, and paying engagement and retention of existing customers, because money is not free anymore. And there are interest rates, and there are things to do. And there are challenges in some corners of the banking market. And there are mergers going on that disrupt the landscape and all those things. 

And so, The Modern Banker, you might say at least the 2023 banker, if you had to draw a picture, it's a banker with their arms and legs being just pulled in different directions. Yeah, lending, deposit client retention, client engagement. And by the way, what's the most precious resource is not capital and money, it's time. And so what we help the bankers to do, to your point is to give them some time back in their day. 

The large banks that rolled us out five years ago, did a time and motion study and they figured out that for the commercial bankers that were using RelPro, they were saving 15 to 20 minutes per prospect, going through the finding the qualifying the getting people at the meet the Preparing for meetings, all that stuff. 15 to 20 minutes, bankers are not cheap. They never will be that talented professionals, you take 15 to 20 minutes times the 100 companies that they're needing to research over a period of time it paid for RelPro, just as it was without any new business being attached to it. So the problem we solve is giving them back more time and also being able to genuinely help them find new people and companies to go talk to.

Jack Hubbard  21:51

Yeah, and I won't rant long but one of the challenges that I see is with community bankers who don't realize the power of a small investment in a company like a RelPro, like a Vertical IQ, because they're bankers are generalists and they can't know everything about everything and they don't have the kind of tools that the bigger banks have. The bank that I was mentioning, is a $500 million bank. They're not a big bank but they do realize the power of education and the power of information at their fingertips, and to your point, save them a lot of time. Well, I use the system almost every day. It's just a wonderful system. And it really has helped me save a lot of time as well. When I go out and teach banking schools, one of the things bankers ask me is, where should I get a list? Where do I buy a list? And those lists are old and stale, and people are dead and retired and sold their companies and it's frustrating. But you at RelPro garner information from I believe over 20 trusted sources. Talk about how you get all that information aggregated into one system?

Martin Wise  23:10

Well, that is the essence of what we do. You’re right. And how we do it is as you mentioned them earlier, the great team that we have who have constructed this infrastructure and data concordance architecture to bring it all together. What we're doing as well and I think one of the team when they've refreshed our websites have captured this quote from me on our website, you know, early on,  I thought we were going to have to when I founded the company, kind of create some super splendor for us never no one ever thought about it before kind of data set that you know, involving technology that nobody even ever imagined and so on and so on. What I realized is it's why it's a journey what I realized is that actually the real world problems that people have you get bamboozled by all this we'll talk about AI I'm sure somewhere in this conversation, but we have to Martin right but you know people get bamboozled by all this sort of clever, really, really, really clever stuff but the reality is that what we discovered early on is that the basic problems that people are facing in their working lives is a really basic you know, to who said earlier accessibility to basic information that helps them find companies and people that they want to develop relationships with or know more about what their clients are up to. 

What we found is that the solution wasn't or at least our solution as we bootstrapped the organization wasn't to invest millions of dollars in some kind of a pipe dream of a brand new, do it know the way no one ever has done it before kind of a thing, but rather to bring together and partner with best in class data or information providers that have a piece of the jigsaw that the bank is trying to get to with those 18 tabs, but basically, to your point join and integrate and link that data all together in the spirit of providing a solution to the most important person who's the client who's trying to get the job done. 

And we found that the, the data partners that we started to work with back in the early days, and it's still the case that they'd love to work with us because we also take their data, and we put it by integrating it, we put it into a very sticky use case where bankers are getting value from it. And if bankers are paying us, we pay our partners then everybody's happy. And we are continuing to add to that actually. I literally signed a new three data sourcing agreement yesterday morning with a company that has great contact information for business executives already. You know, there's more to come. 

And, so that will come on stream, probably by the time we've done it in late July but it was a summer project for us. But we're adding to it all the time. And there's some other additions that were making. We added government contract data recently. And bankers wanted to see that joined up, we also, within the next release cycle, we'll be we'll be releasing information about the wealth profiles of business executives, so that not only helps Commercial and Business bankers to be more aware of the wealth profile of the executive they're talking to, but it also captures that that trend that is always been lengthened, but it's now in today's banking market, really important about banks having both a wealth and a banking relationship with business owners. And we want to inform both of those conversations and therefore be able to help the broader banking enterprise even more than we do today.

Jack Hubbard  26:57

Well, and you do it well, and I did you a disservice by talking about lists, because I want to make sure that everybody understands that this just isn't a list. I'll give you an example. I was at this seminar. So I pulled up a company that I know really well. And I pulled up through their retirement program. And I was able to show how many people are on the program, how much is in their system, their retirement system, and who they actually use? And so when you start looking at all of these insights, Martin, it's so powerful. And one of the things that you talk about is relationship mapping. And I'm curious if when you talk about wealth, and the 401 k's and the government contracting, all that, I'm curious how relationship mapping fits into this.

Martin Wise  27:57

Yeah, actually. Thanks for asking. I do get that question a little, but not a lot, not a lot. Not as much as I would like in a way to get relationship mapping is why I found a broker. So when we establish a relationship, Capital Partners, relationship capital, it is the essence of the connections that exist between people, and how that is a valuable asset, and how valuable it is to tap into those relationship networks and so on. And, frankly, a little bit before. I mean, at Merrill Lynch, I built this, I built a board as part of it, I led a team that builds effectively a private version of LinkedIn, before LinkedIn even existed for Merrill, which Bank of America still use today. Which was all about essentially helping to identify our relationship map.

How did people at Merrill know the board and C suite people that we wanted to get to? And literally, people have heard this story before. I mean, the reason that I'm in this business today is because within three days of having the data available to us, at Merrill, we won a $6 million M&A mandate because of a connection that we found to a chemical company in the Midwest that was going private that we needed to get a meeting with and we got a meeting because we found a very unexpected way of being able to connect with one of the people involved in that decision. 

So I saw the power of it. And my original goal to record its relation to Capital Partners was to establish a very sort of who knows who overlay on the markets that we could leverage the business development. It turned out that well, those kinds of affiliation based relationship networks work really well for public company board members who are all on five boards and they all overlap and they want different skills and so on. When you're working in sort of, you know, the real world of small and midsize businesses, there are important relationships at work, but they're not. They're not necessarily all of those affiliation based. We're all on the same board together. But the essence of relationship mapping and providing insights for bankers who are through CLIs or their own approach to banking bankers are, are and should be relationship based people. 

We want RelPro as always, a part of roleplay has always been about providing insights into relationships and affiliations that people have, in order that when we have a conversation with them, we can have a way there are other things we can talk about other than please buy my products, and please do a checking account with me. So relationship mapping, in the original definition of the term, in RelPro was all about affiliation, network overlaps, and how to map relationships from that. It turns out, we also have data integration capabilities, where we can pull relationships that are visible just by the email traffic going through a company and being able to show that within RelPro, when maybe your partners or your colleagues have a relationship with someone that you're trying to get to. Not everybody wants that. Not everybody thinks better than the essence, showing networks and showing how people interconnect is just it's always been a thing of interest to me. And that's why it's a part of the RelPro solution.

Jack Hubbard  31:39

It's outstanding. But there's more, when I train, and I'm still in the classroom and training and happy to do it and love it. I talk about PIM and MIM, people in motion, and money in motion. And both of those have one thing in common: their triggers. And that's what happens in business every single day. One of the things that you've done really well is something called buyer intent, which kind of talks about those triggers. What's buyer intent as it relates to RelPro?

Martin Wise  32:11

Yeah, so thank you, buyer intent data is effectively information which indicates the web searches or the web content that company's employees are browsing, at and above average level of piqued interest if you like. And, therefore, buyer and buyer intent data can indicate companies that are particularly interested at the present time, in particular, financial services or financial products. It sounds a bit like how do you do that? Well, the partners that currently we partner with zoominfo, who we've worked with for 13 years now, as a source of that buyer intent data, they're very good at it. 

But like everything else we do, we're also adding other sources of intent later, because there's no one perfect source. So we'll bring some more in there as well. But the buyer intent data basically comes together, because when employees of a company are doing a web search, we can't tell you whether it was Jimmy or Sally or Fred that we're doing specifically that search. But that search gets tagged against an IP address and the IP address gets tagged against a company. And so we can tap into information that essentially here is this company in the far flung part of the country that is looking for deposit accounts, or is looking for 401k solutions, or is looking for asset based lending, for example. And we've brought that data into RelPro. 

We initially brought it in thank you, Jack, because we thought that it would be helpful, particularly to bankers who were prospecting, who wanted to say, show me companies that are interested in deposits, and I'll go and source deposits from it. And that's true, that's but it turns out, that's only 50% of the value, because the other 50%, which has come very, very evident, is again, in today's environment, you know, clients have legs, they move, there's so much interest in, in who's providing financial services as competition in the market. 

And so actually, the other the other 50% of the value of the buyer intent data on RelPro is helping bankers with their existing client portfolio where they can come into RelPro once a week and say, right, “Show me every every intense signal that is coming out of my existing client portfolio, not just my prospects, but my existing plant portfolio.” And then you can get good news because you can say, well, here's a client that I wasn't scheduled to see but now I'm going to have a meeting with them to go talk about asset based lending for example. But you can also have this as a real world story from one of our clients where they were, they saw that their client was interested in a particular financial product. But then some of the terms that we track in intent are also the names of banks. So, not only did they see that this loyal client was interested in this product or service, they also saw that this client had been doing above average levels of searching for XYZ Bank, which was a competitor of our client. 

And so all of a sudden, it's not like they  then burst it all down to their client and say what's going on, but it says, they go and see the client and they go prepared for a conversation. That is not only evidence that there is an interest, but also that there's a competitive play here as well. It prepares them for the meeting. So buyer intent is we added this about 15 months ago into the platform, it's really come with something of an experiment, it's really coming of age now. Because I think there's just so much dynamic in the financial market and so much different demand for financial products and services, and buyer intent data as a way to surface that and give visibility to the banker.

Jack Hubbard  36:15

Unbelievable. Well, you mentioned earlier, as we kind of start wrapping this up, you mentioned AI. So I do have to ask, because everybody's talking about it, chat GPT AI, how do you see this integrating into your product?

Martin Wise  36:34

Yeah, it will come. The bottom line is it goes back to something we said earlier part of RelPro, value proposition is about time saving. And I don't in any way, subscribe to the notion that AI will replace bankers, there's a human element to banking, I'm not going to do certain banking or financial transactions that are important to me personally, or in my business, I'm not going to do that with a robot, happy to get money out of the ATM but if I'm having a conversation about how to raise capital for my business, I want to actually want to talk to someone because I want to know that they understand what it is I'm trying to do. And I want to learn from their experience on how they can help me. 

But I do think that AI as it's currently being described, or termed is an ingredient in further efficiencies. And if you think about the way in which RelPro’s already aggregating a lot of different capabilities and information sources, about companies about contacts, executives, and also you've mentioned industry, research, industry, intelligence from people like Bobby And Susan, vertical IQ,  it is with that spectrum of inflammation and others that we're adding together, it's it's very conceivable that we will start to use AI to be able to maybe provide a set of a set of text or a narrative that a bank could use as part of their communication with a company. 

I'm not going to replace the human element of the banker by saying, Well, I actually do want to still reference the Chicago Cubs or whatever in some kind of an email, which may be challenging if you didn't know that this person was interested in that. I'm not going to take away from that, or the fact that we're going to have dinner tomorrow night and chat up. They didn't know that. But I think the essence of pulling together an initial draft of what are some of the contents of communication, I think is relatively easily done with some of this new technology. And I think Will not I think I know that we will incorporate some of that, again, to reinforce the time efficiency and time saving aspects of what RelPro is all about.

Jack Hubbard  39:02

Well, you did talk about the last couple of minutes, you did talk about some of the new things that you are about to embark on but what do you see down the road? Martin? What's gonna happen late 23,24 as it relates to RelPro?

Martin Wise  39:17

Yeah, I thank you, Jack. As I mentioned, one big theme that's going to unfold over the next couple of months is the expansion of our value proposition for bankers who are involved in wealth management as well. We mentioned the 5500 data and retirement benefit plan information we put in last year that was the first step in that direction. These wealth profiles that we're bringing in soon will be another part of that and so, that will significantly increase our addressable market both within existing clients who, most of whom have a wealth division that we can talk to and as well as having bankers who want to do more in the wealth space generally so. 

So that's a big thing for us. But you're gonna see as well, it's funny the more data that we bring in, you get these sort of tangential side benefits that come in as well. So for example, when we brought in the when we brought in the government contract award data a few months ago, maybe I should have known but I didn't, that included within that every government contract award that is issued also includes the names of the top five compensated individuals in that particular company. Well, that's not that sort of added level of detail that you will get in a public company proxy statement. But it's pretty valuable information about senior decision makers, who at the end of the day, are the people that banking clients want to get to? 

So I think that you'll see us kind of repurpose some of this. The data that we're putting in, do different things with it. You'll also see, again, driven by client requests, we're going to be releasing the first pass of net zero emissions type of data. Because what we find we've already got some ESG data within the RelPro platform have done for several years. But I think this informs the banker conversation is another dimension of the banker conversation and whatever you think about climate change and emissions and how all that works together. It's a part of the conversation. It's a part of how banks are as another part of the decision process.

RelPro Commercial 41:51

Are you a commercial or business banker looking to build relationships with small and midsize companies? RelPro is a business development and relationship management solution being used by bankers to find new prospects, learn more about them, and keep tabs on them. As well as your existing customers. Want to learn more? Go to relpro.com to schedule a demo today.

Martin Wise  42:07

The banks are factoring in when they make decisions. And so you'll see that kind of data coming in as well. I think the other thing, Jack, the other theme, which we were talking about is that when you come back again to time saving, we talked about the 18 tabs coming down to less. The other big trend for RelPro over the last year which will be on another plane in the year ahead is all around interconnections of the RelPro platform with the platforms that our clients are operating. 

CRM integration, we already have integration with Salesforce, we already have API's that integrate with Salesforce. But I think that one of the themes within banks right now is more digital enablement initiatives, whether it be related to marketing or whether it will be related to CRM, and so on. So you're going to see more, not so much new features of brokers but more leverage of existing API and other connectivity types of capabilities. Where we can connect to the core platforms that banks have.

Jack Hubbard  43:15

And I think I hope the listeners and viewers were able to pick up on a lot of what Martin said. Too often, I think bankers look at this as a commercial banking initiative. But now you're looking at Wealth Management, which means that people borrow for mortgages, finance, mortgages, houses, second houses. So in the mortgage area, branch managers are looking for personal deposits, always. So this is really a fully integrated system for the entire bank. And certainly without sales management, this will never work, integrating all of what RelPro does into your team meetings, and one on ones is really important. So at the end here, I just wanted to thank you for the opportunity to have us be sponsored by you. This program is sponsored by RelPro and Vertical IQ. And Martin we value that we appreciate that.

Martin Wise  44:08

It's a huge pleasure, Jack, you and Brynne are pillars of the banking community and the banking ecosystem, the middle market ecosystem that we love to be a part of. And I'm always grateful to Bobby and Susan for introducing us all those years ago. You're right we've built an incredible relationship even though we don't know whether we're 10 feet tall or two feet tall, right. And we know I deeply value it and my colleagues, my team that you've talked about deeply value our relationship as well. And we, we wish you a lot of success because the better the sales managers that you're talking to, the more intelligently they'll be able to leverage and get value from our information too. So we truly value our partnership and appreciate this opportunity to chat this morning.

Jack Hubbard  45:00

Thanks, Martin, and how can people get a hold of you? I know it's RelPro.com but people want to get a hold of you. How do they do that?

Martin Wise  45:08

Oh, so yes, relpro.com  and if they're interested in learning more about RelPro, there's a little button you can press to book a demo on one of our customer success teams will be happy to do that. If you want to get in touch with me specifically, probably honestly, the best way is to hit me up on LinkedIn and say that Jack Hubbard is a mutual connection. And I've met several people that way and happy to keep in touch that way as well. So yeah, that's, I would say that's the best way to do it.

Jack Hubbard  45:38

always proud to refer you, Martin, you have a phenomenal group of people and an outstanding platform, and every banker should have it. Thanks for joining us today.

Martin Wise  45:48

Jack, thank you so much for the opportunity. I love talking with you always. Thanks for everything you're doing.

Jack Hubbard  45:53

Thanks for listening to this episode of Jack Rants With Modern Bankers with my special guest Martin Wise. This and every program is brought to you by our friends at vertical IQ and RelPro. Join us next time for more special guests bringing you marketing, sales and leadership insights and ideas that will provide your bank or credit union that competitive edge you need to succeed. LinkedIn live shows also a podcast subscribe and get the latest episodes of Jack Rants With Modern Bankers Podcast and leave us a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google Play many others. 

Visit our website, themodernbanker.com for more details and don't forget to sign up for that public library that we have with hundreds of ebooks, articles, webinar replays and others. You can do that very simply for free. It's themodernbanker.com/publiclibrary. Make today and every day, a great client day!