Video: Jill Castilla with Steven Ramirez: it’s about being authentically invested in your customers

Hi there, I’m Stephen Ramirez with Beyond the Arc and I’m excited. Today I get the awesome opportunity to speak with Jill Castilla from Citizens Bank of Edmond. Jill, this is great. I really cannot believe that I’m talking to you. Thank you so much. This is excellent. There is so much that your bank has done. I literally could take an hour and that’s really not an exaggeration. But what I want to hit on just sort of right out of the gate is the topic of innovation. I think that your bank has done a tremendous amount of being able to change the mindset. What did you do? How did that work?

A lot. It just really happened organically with us. We only have 55 team members and you see the turbulent waters in our industry and that the change is inevitable. And so how do you prepare for that? And we were really blessed at the time. It didn’t seem like a blessing, but we went through a turnaround ourselves. And so we were supporting bank in Oklahoma, the lowest rating that you can be from a regulatory standpoint. And we kind of stared death in the face and overcame it. And it’s just given us a lot of professional courage. So as we’ve consolidated bank branches and try to pivot to being more of a digitally oriented community bank, we’ve been able to do that with a lot of confidence and a team that knows that we can rally around on one another and kind of gyber things up to get a minimally viable product out there and then do that as a collaborative group and create something brand new for a small community bank.

Well, that thinking is very, it’s very common here in San Francisco, but it’s very different for a lot of bankers, right? The idea of a minimally viable reliable product, for example. That doesn’t roll off the tongue in lots of community banks. How did you get people on board? Were there any tips and tricks that sort of made that work?

Yeah, I mean, I think what really helps is having an all-in management team. I mean, we’re really fortunate that it’s not coming from kind of the groundswell of like we have to change and then foresee management to make that change. You know, I bought in really early and kind of went all in myself and just said, put the risk on my shoulders and, you know, I’ll chin it. And then And once the staff was able to see that I didn’t die when I failed and that I didn’t throw anyone under the bus and that we were still progressing, even though we may have been learning and having some small fails along the way, then they started stepping up and seeing and mimicking that leadership and to the point now where we, it’s very common where we’ve got staff doing their own side hustles and starting their own projects, contributing both to the bank, but also creating things new for their own professional futures.

So you really sparked some entrepreneurial thinking, I think.

Yeah, we’ve actually, yeah. Yeah, we try to formalize that. Even lately, we started a side hustle factory in our co-working space that the bank has. And so we try to even give a head start to some staff that want to do something different and really to provide some inputs into that entrepreneurial spirit of the bank and then some empathy to the entrepreneurs that bank with us, knowing like these are really challenging things that they’re doing, risks that they’re taking. And now as an individual entrepreneur, I can really identify with them.

Excellent. And now you’re also working with some FinTech tech, at least the tech new tech. technology. So what’s your take? There’s been a lot of discussion about partnering with FinTechs, some of the challenges. Any perspective on what you can do to make that easier?

Yeah, I really think the investment in building relationships in the FinTech community is worthwhile, even without having an end in mind. Really just being part of the community, listening, and then organically identifying the holes that you can fill, the partnerships that you can make, identifying with others that share your same set of values and where you’re trying to go as organizations. but they have a need of partnering with a bank and you had the opportunity to expand your horizons a bit. And that’s where I’ve seen the beauty is really coming together more organically. And I mentor a lot of fintech leaders and then in return I get mentored quite a bit by them. And so I would highly recommend if you’re a bank CEO, put yourself out there in the community, be part of the conversation, challenge even conversations that are happening in the community, but just try to become a part of it. And I think organically things can really kind of paths that benefit both companies, the fintech and the bank. We’ve worked with companies that kind of outside the normal fintech and just more in the technology community and then kind of joined together to create more of a fintech collaborative and then really pushing the norms with those like core providers and kind of the legacy technology companies in the sector to force them to really elevate their game so that we can all do new and wonderful things.

Now, for my team at Beyond the Arc, we’ve been advising banks to be very systematic about this, understand the universe of fintech companies, use a scorecard, go through this evaluation. Did you do any of that? Like, what was your real approach? Like, what did you actually do?

Yeah, so for us, it really hasn’t been that way. The latest thing we did is we really were searching for a specific technology and couldn’t find it, but it was finding that next best technology and then working with the technology company, the fintech company, to it to our needs and then to create something new that might be marketable. So you have to go through a more systematic process, at least on our end, when you’re doing your risk evaluation and making sure this is a company you want to do business with. But I think that being organically invested in this sector, both as an individual as well as being willing to make individual investments in FinTech companies, Then that’s really allowed things to happen in, I think, a better, more patient way for us. I have friends that have gone in early and just been… wildly successful and they have more systematic processes, but they have maybe hundreds of employees. When you’ve got 55, and where my hat is like I’m handling the investment portfolio, have HR responsibilities, trying to be a community leader, and they’re trying to spice it up with some technology in the mix and stay relevant for another 100 years, it’s really difficult to go through a long process. Now, we lean on collaborations like FinTech Forge and other association type of groups where they are able both to kind of bed through a more systematic process, so we’re not having to invest that time on the front end.

And you’ve obviously had a huge impact within the bank, but do you see some of your efforts also paying off in terms of impact on the community?

Definitely. I mean, it’s been really extraordinary. Once we kind of dipped our toe in the technology sector, it’s created a new way of how we work and then bringing new things to our community and how our community works. Really fusing community with technology. One thing we do is we only have one bank branch. And our goal is to make that just ridiculously spectacular. So every time you walk in, it blows you away with this experience is like no other. So we think kind of Capital One Cafe, which we were doing a couple of years before they were. but having super high speed Wi-Fi, interactive ways for customers to interact with the bank, but also the community itself, and then using social media to take the in-branch experience and really integrate it into the community. So the community is coming into the bank, but the bank is also going out into the community. So we have like this giant community calendar that we have an artist put together, but then that gets digitalized and put out on our social media with tagging everybody that’s involved, and then it creates this high, this strong network, but then all this interactions that’s occurring that’s making the community stronger and stronger. We also do a street festival in which we only use digital to promote the street festival. So it’s a bank event that we do 8 times a year, every third Saturday. So if you’re in Oklahoma City, you have to come. Every third Saturday. I’m going to come. I’m going to come. I’m going to come. I’m going to come. I’m a community appreciation day, like a bank normally kind of does, but we had 50,000 people show up to our last one. 45,000 went to the one before that. We consistently have over 20,000 people, and we’ve been doing it for six years now. And it’s just a bank, 55 employees putting something on, using kind of digital to promote the festival. But then you have all these interactions with an alumni of bands and small businesses that participated that then elevate the bank’s brand and awareness and just the cool factor by being associated with all these amazing people in our community. And then we started our co-working space, which wouldn’t have been possible, but for going to FinTech events and officing out of co-working spaces myself and bringing what’s in New York City and San San Francisco into our little small town. And now we have just this vibrant community of entrepreneurs who are collaborating and creating their own FinTech companies without this intention of really doing that. We don’t have an incubator. We didn’t say that this is what we want to do. But just the nature of the bank being around, the nature of the people drawn to co-working spaces have created new FinTech ideas just out of bringing people together. Again, kind of going more organic than saying like, this is the end we have in mind and then building towards it. I really think sometimes you can set ceilings as organization as saying this is what we want to achieve. And sometimes when you don’t do that, just let the universe collaborate and manipulate itself to your favor, and you achieve something that you could never have set the dream to be. And so that’s really our story, is that really bring your resources together, view your weaknesses as things you can flip into strengths, and then do something extraordinary. Know that if we have good intentions, if we were around the right people, if we have a team that really believes in the purpose, that we can really do magical, new, to invent a thing. So he filed for our first patent 4 weeks ago.

I was going to ask you, like, is there, like, I was going to ask you, do you ever sleep? But I already have figured out the answer to that.

I totally do. I really love to sleep. Like, it’s like how I deal with stress. Like, I think I’m going to take a nap. So I do, I do, but whenever I’m present, I really try to be all in present.

Well, you sound like you’ve been such a catalyst for so many. Like, that’s really what I think about a catalyst. Someone who really just sparks activity. I think it just must be sending sparks everywhere, right? There seems to be so much that’s going on.

And then when you do that a little bit, it draws other people that have that kind of catalytic mindset and community good. Like how do we collaborate for the most community good, whether it’s in the FinTech community or our physical community, geographic community. So like our little, we have this totally remote bank branch, it’s an electronic banking facility, but it can handle small business currency and coin transactions at a level higher than what an ATM can and integrates with our core. And that was something completely new. And it was just sitting in a coffee shop with an owner of the coffee shop saying she wanted to bank with us and then creating something brand new for her that we didn’t realize that we were creating something new until it was like a year later and like, oh my gosh, we probably should patent this. And so it’s, I think really being present, you know, putting down your phone, learning stories, really being authentically invested in your customers. You can find these gaps and these blue water kind of innovative opportunities where you can impact the industry and impact your community as cause away without striving to do that.

Well, Jill, I want to thank you very much. That was really, really tremendous and definitely look forward to the next opportunity that we have to chat. Thanks. Thanks so much. Thank you.