Fintech South 2023: Mitch Rutledge with Vertice AI

Intro: Broadcasting live from the beautiful Georgia World Congress Center for FinTech South. 2023. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here live from FinTech South 2023 celebrating fintech leaders from around the world. Right now we have Mitch Rutledge with Vertice AI. He’s one of the Innovation Challenge finalists. Welcome, Mitch.

Mitch Rutledge: Thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: Well, before we get too far into things, tell us about Vertice. How are you serving folks?

Mitch Rutledge: So Vertice Ai is an analytics solution for community financial institutions, credit unions and community banks. And our vision is to empower these institutions to be able to provide a more personalized experience for their customers and members using advanced analytics. And without having these organizations have to hire a team of data scientists.

Lee Kantor: So how are they attacking this issue right now without your service?

Mitch Rutledge: You know, today most of these organizations are, you know, taking a scattershot approach where they send every marketing or product offer to to every customer or member. And that’s not what we expect today. We live in the Amazon, Spotify and Netflix era, where we expect a personalized recommendation in every interaction. And that’s our goal is to empower and provide capabilities for them to provide a more personalized product and recommendation experience.

Lee Kantor: So what was the genesis of the idea? How did this even come about?

Mitch Rutledge: Well, my co-founders and I were working with our first customer, which is Coastal Credit Union up in North Carolina, and they had a very visionary CEO that really wanted to find new ways to compete against the neo banks, the digital first banks and even the big banks. They know they have lots of data and they’re not using it to provide those personalized experiences for their members. And so we really came out of an engagement with them that we said there is a real need in this sector, in the community, financial institution sector to provide more personalized capabilities. They have the data. They just need a solution. And again, the gap is those organizations aren’t big enough to hire teams of data scientists. So we want to provide a solution that marketers and strategy teams can really understand and execute on more personalization for their clients and members.

Lee Kantor: And then when they plug into your services, this kind of a SaaS product where they just kind of as a new customer, a new interaction comes in, it’ll kind of sort them and put them in the right bucket so they can market to them effectively.

Mitch Rutledge: That’s exactly right. This is a software as a service solution that we’re putting in the hands of those marketing and strategy teams. You know, kind of first principles of our of our solution were B2B software with a B2C feel. Again, we’re this isn’t built for data scientists. It’s built for marketing teams that they can just easily go in and understand where their membership is, where their client base is today, and find opportunities to do more personalized engagement with them. We also another kind of core principle was we didn’t want this to be a big data project, right? We’re not creating, you know, a new data warehouse. We’re providing a member gross solution that we really can give these recommendations based off of a very small set of data that these community banks and credit unions already have. So we’re not trying to make this a big data project. We’re trying to give them a way to easily provide a more personalized experience.

Lee Kantor: And so does it kind of work as a dashboard for the marketers at these organizations where they can kind of see, okay, this person is a better prospect for this kind of service rather than this one. So we can only send them messaging around that 100%.

Mitch Rutledge: That is our that’s exactly your spot on to what we’re doing. We’re identifying groups or audiences of customers that they have that have a higher propensity for a particular product and service. And we have, again, recommendations within the solutions that say this audience is high propensity for a CD or a money market, but they also can do their own kind of querying of that data to understand, hey, we need to grow deposits, which is, you know, front and center for most financial institutions. And so we’re giving them an easy ability to understand where to do better targeting.

Lee Kantor: So when you piloted it, what kind of results were they getting? What kind of lift were they getting from your service?

Mitch Rutledge: Yeah. So we were really excited. You know, the initial results were between 4 and 10 times higher conversion rates for those. We have dramatic right and 41% higher new account opening values for those deposits, which again, critical for these institutions today. So we’re super excited about that. We’ve got we’re working with five credit unions today and we’re, you know, are expanding.

Lee Kantor: And how many credit unions are there in the country?

Mitch Rutledge: So there’s 4800 credit unions, 138 million Americans are part of a credit union. So we think there’s a, you know, strong addressable market within community financial institutions.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How can we help you.

Mitch Rutledge: You know, introduce us to your community, financial institutions. They’re all talking about this. They understand that they have. To do something different to compete against the big banks and the digital first banks. And we think we have a solution that can really give them real value quickly. This isn’t you know, we’re seeing getting value to these institutions in 4 to 6 weeks and really helping them provide a more personalized experience for their members.

Lee Kantor: And right now, being an innovation challenge finalist. How did that come about? How did this even get on your radar? Yeah, so.

Mitch Rutledge: We’re pretty excited to be part of this. So they did a selection process, got it down to ten companies. We had to do kind of a first round pitch competition last week and we were really excited to get down to the final three that are pitching today at some really innovative, stiff competition. So, you know, as we say, happy to be here, but, you know, excited to be on the homestretch. That’s right. You know, excited to be on the big, big stage this afternoon.

Lee Kantor: Now, are you bootstrapping this or is this you have funding? Do you have.

Mitch Rutledge: We are bootstrapped today. Yep. We’re a bootstrapped startup. We’re you know, we’re cash flow neutral so far, which is where we want to be and, you know, continue to grow our customer base and and see how we can really impact this industry.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to connect with you, learn more about the offering. What is the coordinates? Yeah.

Mitch Rutledge: So check us out on LinkedIn Vertesi. Our website is actually Vertis Analytics I or Mitch Rutledge on LinkedIn, we’d love to connect with you and share more about our vision and what we’re doing.

Lee Kantor: Good stuff, Mitch. Congratulations on all the momentum. You’re doing important work. We appreciate.

Mitch Rutledge: You. Thank you so much for having me on today and hope everybody is having a great time at FinTech South.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor back into for you at FinTech South 2023.