Fintech South 2023: Mike Morris with Wipfli

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.

Sharon Cline: And we are broadcasting live from the FinTech South 2023 Expo celebrating the fintech leaders from around the world. And I am Sharon Cline so happy to sit here with Mike Morris. How are you?

Mike Morris: Doing great today. Thank you.

Sharon Cline: Sure. So tell me what company you’re with.

Mike Morris: I’m with a company called Wipfli. We’re a full service accounting firm based out of the Midwest.

Sharon Cline: All right. So what have you. You’ve obviously been to fintech before. Yes. How has it gone in the past? How have your experiences been?

Mike Morris: So I actually am part of the tag fintech society. And so we’ve been putting this on for almost 13 years now. Oh, no way. We started with a symposium about 90 people back in 2010, and it’s just grown over the years. It’s been a lot of fun. 90 people I know at how many are here, close to 1200. So really, really amazing how much has grown and just shows how great the ecosystem is here and how people want to get together and connect.

Sharon Cline: So what do you hope to accomplish while you’re here this year?

Mike Morris: I just want to make sure we’re focusing on showing the world how great the fintech ecosystem is in Georgia, why people should come here and invest here and be a part of this great ecosystem.

Sharon Cline: So what exactly does your company do?

Mike Morris: So we do a wide variety of industries, but I’m mostly financial services, work with financial institutions and the fintechs that serve the financial institutions. So that’s really how I got more involved with the fintech side of the House, but really helping them understand the regulatory requirements and the things they need to do to work with other financial institutions and also with investors and other people who are now interested in some of the things that show how how they get the controls in place and how they’re managing their businesses.

Sharon Cline: I bet you’ve seen tremendous changes over the years.

Mike Morris: Yeah, Yeah. Usually, especially on the fintech side of the House, they don’t quite understand what they’re getting into. They have great ideas. They know what their their specialty is. But when they get into the regulatory side and the compliance side, there’s just a lot of landmines to navigate as they go through that. And sometimes they don’t quite understand that until they get burned by it or their significant partners are figuring out, Hey, we really need to see what you’re doing here.

Sharon Cline: So what are some of the pitfalls that you see people tend to fall into?

Mike Morris: Well, a lot of it is not quite knowing the federal laws around some of the transactions that they’re performing, not understanding how to partner with the right financial institution and have the right account set up for them to to process legally the payments they want to make happen. A lot of it is just growing too fast and not having the right risk management teams in place to make sure we’re monitoring and managing that risk for us, our customers and our partners.

Sharon Cline: Technologically, what would you say are the biggest changes you’ve seen over the last couple of years? I mean.

Mike Morris: Really, it’s no surprise, but AI and machine learning, getting involved and taking some of the decisions out of the humans hands and making them a lot quicker, a lot more accurate. So those have been good. But also there’s a pitfall of, hey, we got to make sure their accuracy is there and that the AI and machine learning are learning the right way and operating the way we expect them to.

Sharon Cline: Do you find that people don’t even know how much they need you? I’m serious. You know, Are you finding that people are like, Wait, I had no idea. Yeah, I.

Mike Morris: Think I think usually I talk to especially early stage companies and you talk to them and they think, Oh, we got everything covered. And you just bring up a few items. They say, Well, we don’t think we have that. We don’t have that. So yeah, it is interesting to get in there and I just love helping people. I love helping them figure out how to maximize their businesses. You know, there’s a cost to compliance. How do you keep that minimal? How do you set a roadmap so you can’t do it all at once and you build your compliance program and your vendor management program in a way that’s going to be something you can handle because it is a lot of work and you don’t understand the compliance side of it. How much, how much work is really there?

Sharon Cline: So what is it like to network while you’re here? What are what are some of the things that you experience that you’re surprised about?

Mike Morris: I’m really surprised at the wide variety of the types of companies that come here and what they’re looking for, what they’re trying to accomplish. I mean, you have the early stage company just trying to to meet people, meet investors, have some of the later stage companies that have been around forever and have great products, just making sure they’re supporting the ecosystem. And you have kind of everyone in between, whether they’re the attorneys or the accountants or, you know, vendors that help with with managed services. Just there’s such a wide variety of people who really specialize in this. And that’s what’s really neat to to see those companies come together and have that opportunity.

Sharon Cline: That’s awesome. I mean, I’m thinking about AI in particular, how much that is so pervasive everywhere right now, how you had mentioned that that’s really important, but do you find that most people are using AI in a responsible way or not?

Mike Morris: I think they’re trying to. I think we’re still learning on how to use it And how can the decisions have bias in them? Can they have make problems? Can they get us in trouble? Is it learning correctly? Is it going to take over the world like in the movies we see? You know, those are all things that we’re not really sure on. And so it is take testing and time. And but people, I think, are using it responsibly. So except for the ones who are getting ChatGPT to write their speeches and presentations.

Sharon Cline: I’ve heard about that. I have. It’s interesting. I’ve I do voiceover work as well, and some people are using AI to write their copy, right? So but that some of that is actually not considered. It’s not public domain, it’s actually copyrighted by other people. And so it’s becoming more of an editor scenario. So anyway, I was just wondering how much that impacts your life? Well, it’s much.

Mike Morris: It’s different nowadays. Yeah.

Sharon Cline: Everything feels.

Mike Morris: Different. Yeah. Yeah. We actually had to get a library and look up references and, you know, to play catalog the old fashioned way. Yeah, He’s a Dewey decimal system.

Sharon Cline: It makes me so happy. You even know what that is.

Mike Morris: We’re probably a few.

Sharon Cline: I know this call. No one would understand that in my in my house, they’d be like, What? Yeah, but no, I mean, it’s very exciting what you’re doing. Then you really are trying to help people and protect them. Yeah, it is.

Mike Morris: Fun and it is fun. I just love connecting people too. I love making connections and meeting new people.

Sharon Cline: Is that what’s the most satisfying part of your job?

Mike Morris: That is. It really is.

Sharon Cline: Oh, that’s awesome. Well, Stone, I’m trying to think of some other really great questions, but I feel like I’ve gotten the gist.

Mike Morris: All right, so.

Speaker3: How are you going to attack the balance of the conference? You’re here, the balance of today and tomorrow, is that right? Do you have an agenda? Is not the right word, but do you have a plan? Like what are you going to what are you going to what’s going to have you high five and when you leave here?

Mike Morris: Well, I’m going to go try to talk to as many people as I can. It’s a great environment. There’s so many people I don’t recognize, which is good. So I really don’t come in with a plan. I just want to come in and have it happen naturally and just see what happens, you know, see where we go to dinner or we go get drinks. Do we go with, you know, just it’s fluid and it’s a lot of fun to do that.

Speaker3: Well, I want you to know there’s a table over there not 30 yards from here. They have purple I call them trade show socks. Okay. I got these last year and then I got the purple ones a little while ago. So make sure you hit that booth. Okay.

Mike Morris: I’ll get my. My socks. Yeah, It is like adult trick or treating here, right?

Sharon Cline: Like Christmas.

Speaker3: It really.

Mike Morris: Is. Yeah.

Speaker3: Hey, thanks so much, Mike Morris. We sure appreciate it. All right. We’ll be back in a few from FinTech South 2023. Thank you.