ROBERT CLARKSON: Hello, everyone. How are we doing late in the day on the second day? Good? Yeah? All right. That’s right. I like the way we tape the back chairs, so that everybody has to look like they’re really filling in. So, I appreciate you jumping up front on that. So, this is going to be a really interesting section, because we actually have a couple of guests companies here, talking about their specific journey. I’m really looking forward to having them share that with you. And it’s a little bit unique, because these are old line, very professional companies that have been in business for a long time and have seen a lot of ups and downs in the markets, and now are starting to transform their businesses with new technology. So, technology has essentially disrupted every single niche. And in some niches, it was a little bit easier.

Some companies that were born a little bit more recently had an easier time of it because they have less infrastructure. But enabling that convenience, efficiency, and delightful customer experiences is transforming no matter what industry you’re in. And no matter what growth cycle your business is in, or even the longevity of your business cycle, creating customer experiences that engage with those customers is always priority one. And so, whether, again, your technology is 100 years old or 1 year old, it’s something that you’re constantly reinventing. So, startups always invent a kind of a breakneck pace, and as they move along, they can adopt new technologies. They come with the latest and greatest opportunities to move their business forward. But one challenge that older businesses have is that they have years and years of infrastructure. And today, we’re going to explore that narrative, that different narrative of transforming not just an existing business, but an existing business with a lot of infrastructure.

So, today, we have two stories, Wiley and USAA, and they’re both going to come up here in a few moments. And there really is a difference between the innovation and transformation when you’re talking about these older and venerable companies. Both of them have been around more than 100 years. In fact, one of them has been around more than 200 years. So, back in 200 years ago, there was barely any internet at the time, I’ve heard. They had very little internet experience back in 1807.

But the bigger you grow, the harder it is to change. And in fact, there’s a big difference between engineering and reengineering. In fact, those use cases are very, very different. And building from scratch, zero to one, is very different from building from 10,000 and trying to back into the initial phase of innovation. So, that’s what we will hear today. How they embarked on this transformational journey, the challenges that they weathered, the things that they had to overcome along the way, the decisions they had to make in order to facilitate that change, and how they leveraged technology to reinvent the customer experience even after years and even centuries of a well-defined customer experience.

And more often than not, we’re going to also hear about the lessons they learned along the way, what actually occurred on that kind of transition. And additionally, what they had to either invest in the business to make that happen, or what kind of thought change they need to make to make sure that those changes not only were designed, but actually implemented effectively. First, I want to talk to my friend Sri, from Wiley. Sri, would you come up here for a moment?

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Hey, Robert.

ROBERT CLARKSON: So, Sri, I’d like you to give us a little rundown on Wiley. Not everybody may be up-to-date on a 1807 company. And I think when you’re 200 years old, you have a lot of history to go over. So, any information you can give us on the business and also what you do for it.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Absolutely. Hi, everyone. I’m Sri. I’m from John Wiley & Sons. Wiley is a company that started off about 217 years ago as a small print bookshop in Manhattan. And ever since, we have grown into a global knowledge company and a leader in academic and research across the world. So, Wiley’s mission is to unlock human potential, and we do that by offering a bunch of products and services to our customers across the world. We have students and instructors leveraging our academic products, professionals like us here, leveraging our trade books. We also offer a lot of products and services to our society partners and corporations in the research space. We enable authors to publish their research with us and researchers collaborate and contribute to that research. So, I’m a leader in the digital commerce space at Wiley, and my goal and my team’s goal is to really help our customers have an optimized experience throughout our commerce platforms. And definitely checkout and payments is a major part of it.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Excellent. So, the company started in 1807 and you are embarking on a transformation. Clearly, there’s some sense of urgency or need. And I assume that over the 200-year horizon, there have been many changes throughout Wiley. Why now and why this?

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Sure. So, I think a moment ago, we saw that we have about 100+ commerce domains. Let me talk a little bit about that. So, Wiley has grown a lot through acquiring smaller companies. So, we now have a pretty complex technology landscape with many different brands that our customers are interacting and engaging with on a daily basis. So, somewhere along the line, we’ve noticed that our customers’ journey and experience with our platforms had become quite fragmented, which led to a somewhat degraded user experience. And as many companies are, we are constantly reinventing ourselves and modernizing our digital commerce platforms. So, as a part of that, we really wanted to start with payments, because that’s where the final commotion really happens.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Well, they always say: “Nothing happens until something gets sold and nothing happens good until something gets paid for.”

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Yeah.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Payments are critical, I think. So, give me a sense, obviously in this process, you had a lot of decisions to make. One of which was evaluating potential partners on this journey. Can you give us a little sense of what the criteria was for that and how the process went and maybe even what were the push-and-pull factors that made you determine one or the other?

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Absolutely. So, I think it was about two years ago that we started to think about how do we modernize our payments platform? How do we create a unified platform that all of our commerce applications and our brands can use to convert our customers and help them make that final payment? One of the critical criteria for us was being able to abstract PCI, because we are not PCI experts, so we definitely wanted to partner with a company that has PCI taken care of, that has fraud monitoring inbuilt. And that allows easy integrations and easy enablement of new payment types. Because Wiley, for the longest time, only offered credit cards for payments, as did many other companies, I’m sure. But now, we saw a list of 100+ payments types that are now available through Stripe. So, we wanted a partner that can help us expand payment types for our customers.

ROBERT CLARKSON: That’s awesome. I can assure you that PCI compliance is really fun. You probably should have done it yourself, but we’ll do it for you. We appreciate the opportunity to let us.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Oh, happy to. Oh, thanks.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Thank you. That’s kind of you. So, earlier in the session, we heard a lot of large companies sometimes don’t use no-code or there’s a stigma to no-code being monolithic, inflexible. It’s kind of take it or leave it. And that may not necessarily be the case. And in some cases, there may be challenges to that myth. What’s been the experience at Wiley?

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Yeah, so at Wiley, just like at a lot of other companies, there are folks that believe in going with the no-code solution. And there are folks that believe in building things custom, so that they fit the problem that they’re trying to solve. In the digital commerce space, we have always embraced the philosophy of composable commerce. So, we believe in leveraging solutions when they’re already available on the market. We just look for something that’s easy to integrate with. And that’s how our unified payments platform at Wiley came to be.

So, we’ve leveraged Stripe for credit card payments. It was super easy to integrate with Stripe. And we actually had a few aha moments during our due diligence when we were looking at potential partners. Stripe’s Checkout made it incredibly easy for us to launch a brand new product using a brand new sales model and a brand new commerce engine in just a couple of weeks. If we were to embark on this completely in-house, it would’ve taken us a very long time. So, that’s one of the examples. We were also able to leverage Stripe’s Terminal for university book fairs for students to pay for books while they are there in person. We’ve used it in the US last year. We are kicking it off in the UK this year. Additional to that, when we talk about our payments platform itself, we are integrating with Stripe for credit cards. We are just about to enable digital wallets as well.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Excellent.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: But Stripe’s PayPal didn’t quite fit our needs for the business model we were offering. So, we integrated with Braintree instead for PayPal. So, we were able to stand up our platform, leveraging Stripe both as a platform and as a service. And that’s what we really liked about it.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Excellent. So, porting that information through…

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Yes.

ROBERT CLARKSON: To make it look one experience for the customer. So, you bring up some of the wallets. Are you looking at alternative payment methods or LPMs or APMs, depending on what you call them?

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Yes, we are starting to. We have enabled a couple of them, but we are still quite in the early stages of our journey in modernizing our payments landscape. Later this year, we’ll have a few more applications leveraging Stripe and that’s when we’ll start enabling additional payment methods. We are also looking into a POC with BNPL, buy now, pay later.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Nice.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: So, everything we heard at the keynote yesterday and today was incredibly valuable to us. Excited for it.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Well, I heard we do awesome A/B testing, in case you haven’t noticed.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA:I cannot wait to get to a place where we are A/B testing payment type.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Even for payments nerds, that’s super exciting.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: It is. It certainly is.

ROBERT CLARKSON: So, what is the dream state for you? And, A, what is the dream state? Or is there one, is it constantly evolving? And how close are you to achieving it either in your current journey or in your long-term vision?

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: So, our dream state would be where we have our 100+ domains leveraging the unified payments platform. We are a few steps away from it, needless to say. Our dream state would also be being able to toggle on and off these payment types, which is the way you can do it through Stripe Dashboard. To be able to do that for our applications, considering our customer demographic, considering the location of our customers, being able to A/B test quickly and make quick decisions. That’s where we would love to be. That would be our utopia. I think we will be able to start doing some of it this year with a few of our sites at least. But over the course of the rest of the year, our goal is to get as many of our commerce platforms and brands leveraging Stripe as we can, and the unified payments platform.

ROBERT CLARKSON: And the hundred domains that you mentioned, they’re going to remain a hundred domains, because those are recognizable experiences and you’re just supporting those.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: For a part of it. Yes, a part of it would be true. So, we are also evaluating to see in terms of a brand strategy, are there potential benefits from converging some of them? If there are, then we’ll probably try and converge some of them. If not, we’ll leave them be. We are also on a modernization journey with our commerce platforms themselves in addition to payments.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Excellent.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: So, payments is our first piece, and then we’ll start off with the commerce card and checkout piece of it. So, as we continue to do that, we will reassess our brands and sites.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Excellent. Yeah, good. As we unveiled a couple days ago, organizations will allow you to combine those domains for reporting purposes, but maintain them separately.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Separately.

ROBERT CLARKSON: For the identification of traction and within those domains themselves.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Indeed. And we are currently leveraging organizations in its beta stage. ’Cause although we don’t have as many sites on it yet, we are a global company. So, we already have multiple Stripe accounts for our currencies, various currencies, as well as entities. So, we’re already trying organizations. It’s working great.

ROBERT CLARKSON: That’s awesome. Well, I imagine in 1807 when Charles Wiley started the company, he was hoping that we would get to organizations and being able to…

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Indeed. I bet he dreamed about it.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Oh. Brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it. So, did you encounter any challenges along the way? Like whether it was on our side, your side, the vision. How did that work?

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: There were definitely challenges along the way. I’d be remiss if I said no to that, but… So, let’s get into some of the challenges. When we launched our first site with Stripe and the unified payments platform, fraud reporting and fraud monitoring was something that came up as a challenge that we had to address right away. Because our site prior to the Stripe transition was leveraging an enterprise fraud solution, which was kind of custom configured to fit our needs. So, we had to iterate a little bit with Stripe’s help and with our security team in configuring additional signals within Radar. So, we were able to turn that challenge into an opportunity and we continued to do it as we onboard more of our sites to the new payments platform. And honestly, for fraud, I think Stripe has a lot more data than a lot of other vendors do, just because of the Partner Ecosystem that you already have in place. So, we are able to leverage that.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Absolutely. Yeah. The advantage of detecting fraud across a wider net means you get more signals.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Yes.

ROBERT CLARKSON: And we don’t want you determining whether a transaction is good or bad based on that one transaction, but on all of your recent history and where that customer has been and where those transactions have been in order to make the right decision. Because you don’t want to… You don’t want to filter out good customers, but you want to make sure you don’t let in the bad customers.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Exactly, mitigating fraud is a collective goal we all have.

ROBERT CLARKSON: So, results so far, what’s your big piece of advice? What’s your… “If you’re going to do these things, make sure you remember…”

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: I’ll start with the second part of your question, which is advice. Please, consider the total cost of ownership when it comes to embarking on any transformative effort. Because as technologists, we are always tempted to just look at what’s the infrastructure cost, what’s the licensing or technology cost, maybe labor cost. But a transition also comes with quite a bit of cost. You also have to think about how you’re going to manage and evangelize this change across the organization. What worked for us was getting a couple of quick wins under the belt or lead on in the process and letting that success speak for itself and building on top of it. Definitely be thoughtful and intentional about how you manage change. And then, leverage Stripe’s documentation. Be in touch with your account manager and your partner. They’re always there to help. We were just talking backstage, we still have weekly calls with you guys, although we have stood up the platform and we are continuing to build on it and that interaction has been very helpful.

So, yeah, that would be what I would advise. And in terms of results, our legacy payments gateway was ridden with a lot of operational issues; it still is. So, it would need attention multiple times a week, let me put it that way. But with the new payments platform, there’s a lot of automated alerts that are in place, notifications. These are all features that are table stakes and have been for a couple decades now.

So, with all of these features in place, the number of operational issues we are running into have definitely been minimized. We have better fraud monitoring and we continue to make it better by adding additional signals. We also took this journey as an opportunity to automate some of our back-office finance reconciliations. A lot of that process used to be manual in the past. And what we noticed is that through this transition, we created a little bit of an overhead for our finance team, ’cause now they have to reconcile from yet another source. So, we took a little pause there. We automated everything from Stripe in terms of payout reporting and we are in the process of doing it with PayPal.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Mm. And so, one thing you touched on… Obviously, there’s a communication component to this. So, you’re making changes in the organization. Did you have like a communication cadence? How did you inform the domains, and I assume some kind of management structure, that these changes were coming along and how that was happening? Because I think everyone here in the room would, it’s not just the customer experience, it’s also the employee experience and how you bridge those two, so that it’s seamless to both.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Right. That’s a great question. We struggled with it initially for sure. A lot of the communications were happening in silos and organically. But as we got closer to launch, we realized that we needed a regular cadence and a forum, suitable forum for that cadence, for communications. So, we established something we like to call the Payments Guild, which is a group of leaders from across business and technology and some shared services. So, we have our finance partners in there, we have our back-office partners in there, application owners, if there are changes to specific applications where we communicate what our strategy and plan looks like, we invite feedback, and we work together to make this happen.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Awesome. And then, is there some kind of cadence afterwards with the results and how things are moving?

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Yes, definitely. We meet on a monthly basis for now and the Guild really meets on a monthly basis. We do have a lot of other meetings that happen on a weekly basis for the operational teams to collaborate in. But yeah, the Guild is where we communicate most of our efforts and the outcomes.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Awesome. So, in a big company and multinational, a lot of different brands, what problem are you excited to tackle next?

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: A/B testing, for sure. I didn’t have that on my list until we came here, for sure. But aside from that, Wiley partners with a lot of educational institutions to contribute to the inclusive access program. And we would like to explore leveraging Stripe and paving the way forward on the inclusive access program itself. We also… so the research industry, for anybody that knows it, has undergone a major transformation in terms of open access. So, as part of that, we have spun up a new solutions business to help our society partners and other smaller publishers achieve their research goals. So, as part of that, we offer publishing services, we host content for some of our partners. And there, we feel like using banking-as-a-service might have a value proposition. So, that’s another capability we are looking forward to try.

ROBERT CLARKSON: So, you’ll talk about that next year.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Absolutely. We’d love to be back.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Well, it sounds like you’ve done an amazing job and certainly a company that has such a rich history is a big undertaking. And it sounds like they picked the right person to chair the process. And we certainly appreciate you picking Stripe to be your partner in that. Any parting advice for the team here?

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: No additional advice. One of the things that I learned recently is in order to be able to communicate your intention or your approach for a change, having a mental model of it helps. Because then, you are putting down what your thought process is on paper, and then sharing that mental model, so that it becomes a shared paradigm is really helpful. So, helping people understand what you’re trying to do, why, and how early on will help you garner a lot of support. And it’s hard to implement any change without support from every area in the organization. So, try and get your partners lined up. Try and get your allies lined up.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Perfect. Well, thank you very much. You’ve been amazingly informative and I hope everyone in the audience also appreciates your advice and counsel. Thank you.

SRIVALLI SURUBHOTLA: Thank you so much. Thank you.

ROBERT CLARKSON: All right. So, next up, we’d like to have our team from USAA, another newcomer to the business world at over 100 years old, and has been in business and serving its members for many moons. They are rebuilding their enterprise payments. USAA has a unique challenge of managing payments both across a banking infrastructure and a insurance infrastructure. So, many of us know them for one or the other, but they’re actually two different businesses in one. So, please welcome Andrew, Lindsey, and Brad.

So, I certainly am glad that we got to spend a little time together. I’m also a member, so I have been a cheerleader of USAA for years and years and years. And each of you have played a very critical role in this kind of transformation project. Give me a little sense of what makes USAA unique.

ANDREW BATES: Well, thanks for being a member, first of all. But yeah, I think USAA is unique in many ways. First of all, just how we were founded. It was a group of 25 army officers who were exiting World War I and were basically looked at as uninsurable, because they were seen as too high risk just to even have auto insurance. So, they banded together and said, “Hey, let’s figure out how to get this to be affordable.” And it was working very well for each other. And that sort of foundation grew and grew amongst officers and then started across the different branches of the military. But it was really founded on a mission of serving that military community.

And that’s been our secret sauce all along. That member experience and being treated in such a special way by our frontline or even our back-office people who really value that mission. But yeah, you can talk about the mission all you want, but also what makes us really unique is that we are a very large bank and one of the 10 largest insurance carriers in the country. And so, that adds, just as you can imagine, a lot of complexity to our ecosystem from a regulatory compliance and process perspective. That has been challenging to navigate, to say the least as we have grown over the last decade or so, so tremendously compared to our first 90 years of existence.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Absolutely. Absolutely. And so, obviously, having a bank and nonbank arms makes pay-ins and payouts even more difficult because there’s two of everything. It’s like the Doublemint twins. Or OREO Double Stuf. So, challenging both from a regulatory perspective, but also from the compliance standpoint. Because your pay-ins and payouts’ in two different environments. What were these challenges? How did you tackle them, recognize them? How did they work?

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Well, yeah, we’re two separate businesses and we have to exist as two separate businesses, but we’ve also grown a lot. And because with the growth, the regulations and the people interested in what we’re doing, it has become quite a burden. So, one of the things with Stripe is moving off our old credit card processor. We have cards on site, like in our database with our tokenized and all PCI-compliant. But that’s a huge burden on our development teams and our business to constantly be responding to these PCI audits. They’re awful. So, we want to move it to Stripe so that we don’t have to participate in that level of regulation and have one less.

ROBERT CLARKSON: That’s awesome.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: And I think from an engineer perspective, the challenge was that they wanted to separate our bank and our nonbank businesses. So, as an engineer, we had to architect a way to how do we keep the experience from the member, our member, our customer in a sense, but still separate the bank and nonbank business lines and go to basically the Stripe platform. So, we implemented two Stripe platforms and I think that was the biggest regulatory thing for us and the challenge that we had as far as trying to figure out, how do we make this thing point to bank when it’s bank and nonbank when it’s nonbank. So, we put together a lot of different things and we drew on the board, we had lots of different challenges with all of that, but we implemented it really quick and we phased it into really two phases and it keeps phasing, but we’ve got the phase one down now.

ANDREW BATES: Three phases now, I think.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: Yeah. Well, you know, we’re up to three now, but we keep phasing more and more, because as you can tell, Stripe keeps adding new things.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: So, we were like, oh, “We could do that, too.” We’ll put that in phase three. No, but that was the biggest challenge for us. And Stripe helped us navigate that with their integration team. And we worked through that and it’s very robust. But the other aspect, like Lindsey was saying, was our PCI data. So, in our phase two approach, our PCI data that we have in-house is the next challenge for us. And we’ve got a pretty... pretty fast roadmap in getting that implemented this year.

ROBERT CLARKSON: You’re welcome for that.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: Yes, yes. Thank you, thank you.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: We’re going to retire millions of cars, millions. It’s going to be great.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Yeah.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Your turn to do that.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: We’re giving it all to Stripe.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Solid advice for everyone. Yeah. So, obviously, there was huge business impact for this and you were just referencing the infrastructure necessary to support this. And as you heard from Wiley, there’s a lot of communication within employees about the education of the process. But probably most important is minimizing the impact or maximizing the benefit to your members. And I think that’s a really critical element here when you’re dealing with a business that has literally millions of members and long-term members over, in some cases, multiple generations. How do you describe the impact on the member experience and how did you either minimize the friction or maximize the benefit?

ANDREW BATES: Yeah, so our goal with our Stripe implementation was really for our members not even to know at first. It was very surgical. We took out our old processor, we put in the new, and we needed to have zero disruption in the experience, because the expectation from our members, Brad kind of touched on it earlier, is a unified experience. Yeah, we’ve got a large bank. Yeah, we’ve got multiple lines of insurance, life, property, and casualty, but if I’m a member and I’m going in to pay my bill or set up my scheduled payments or whatever, it needs to feel like I’m in the same experience across the board. And so, that expectation drives everything that we do with our bank partner, with our life company, and our property and casualty partners. So that while we’re modernizing this very complex backend infrastructure, everything on the frontend looks and feels the same, a very unified experience.

We’re looking forward to the phase two and phase three capabilities that we’re going to be able to offer our members. We’ll talk about that probably a little bit more later, but just being able to delight them with some new things that they haven’t yet experienced. And as I touched on earlier, like our secret sauce has always been service to our members. And as we embark on a much more digital world that we’re in now, that experience is shifting from the phone channel or person-to-person banking, which no one really does anymore. Face-to-face banking. You really need to fill in that gap. And so, the onus is on us as changemakers to really drive that experience forward and keep that competitive advantage that we’ve built over these years.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Well, we know Brad loves a good phase, so there’s another phase coming.

ANDREW BATES: Phase four. Yeah.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: Yes. Phase four. There it is.

ROBERT CLARKSON: More phasers than Star Trek. So, we certainly appreciate the partnership with USAA and we also understand that USAA has many partners in many different areas of its business, both customer facing and internal. How did you evaluate potential partners for this?

ANDREW BATES: Yeah, so I think, Rob, our sales executive, and Diego, our current one, could probably attest that we throw you through a few hurdles to get on board. Our RFI process is-

ROBERT CLARKSON: We look at it as sales opportunities.

ANDREW BATES: There you go, that’s a much more positive spin.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah.

ANDREW BATES: But yeah, no, we look at the industry leaders, for whatever capability we’re trying to onboard and we send out a request for information and we evaluate their responses and we whittled down from there. And as we went through that process, it became more and more clear that while Stripe didn’t really fit the established, Fiserv, FIS been around 100, whatever, 50 years, however long they’ve been around, didn’t really fit that model. It became more and more evident that it was the right fit for us at the right time. And I think that we’re all reaping the benefits of that decision.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: Yeah, and I was part of the evaluation team for the vendors that we had. And it was pretty clear that Stripe stood out. We had some, and I think they showed the industry board on one of the slides in one of the meetings that had all of the players on the board. And we got to see that, too. So, we knew who they were and what they did. And we did a huge evaluation. USAA just takes their time and we really do our due diligence in that. But what really stood out for us and from the engineering side was having the documentation and the APIs all public for us, because we have contracting and legal and all of these red tape things that just… It’s like the Titanic, you can’t get it to turn fast enough to do something. And that allowed us and the development teams to really take Stripe, put it in a sandbox test environment, and start hitting payments. In less than a week, we were hitting payments.

And we’re talking like four engineers that did this. And we took this, put it in an enterprise test environment and we’re firing off Stripe Payments in our legacy platform, which is unheard of. We don’t even have contracting done. So, when contracting did get signed, we were less than 60 days into making our first payment online in production. So, we have never done that at USAA, and to have something like that and have the availability where it was right there in front of you, all the data’s there, really, I guess helped us get this out in a fast pace. We call it blazing speed at USAA, because nothing’s blazing speed at USAA. So, this one was really, really cool implementation that we did.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah. As far as vendors, there’s a lot of vendors… If you get an enterprise-level vendor from the time you actually close the contract to the time you can log in could be two months for a SaaS experience. And we had totally the opposite. We were already rolling when the contract ended, so we were able to get our 14 storefronts in 6 months, which just our little small team, and start our full load. Because we had a date, our date was not changing. Our previous on-prem solution was retiring. That was… yeah. It was crazy how fast we ramped. Within a month, we went from nothing to full.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: Yeah.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: And we have high and low days, military payday first 15th is huge. And we survived those no problem. We decided to open it up and take on the payday with the last one.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: We had a slow road. There’s a slow road approach to this, but… And we did see other, there were other vendors that had exposed APIs that we could see, but nothing was really as mature as Stripe was in any of their technology, the stack. So, they gave them a competitive advantage. So, it was just me trying to get them, I wasn’t the decision-maker, but I was like, we need to pick this person. We need to pick Stripe. So, it was cool.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: But yeah… What did it take, six, seven months for us to pick a vendor?

So, it was pretty-

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah. Almost the same amount of time as development to fill in. Yeah.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Okay. Well, I know where there are some efficiencies.

ANDREW BATES: Some opportunities there.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Yeah. Exactly. Those are opportunities.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: We’re risk-averse.

ROBERT CLARKSON: You bring up an interesting point. In fact, Lindsey, you touched on as well, which is, and Brad too, that people think of insurance as a constant, every month a certain number of policies are being paid and they’re being paid spread out amongst the month, but it’s actually very peaky within it. And whether it’s paydays or the 15th and the 30th or something like that. And I think that was probably an interesting challenge to overcome, which is you test on the low days and you have to test on the high days, because they’re not going to be the same velocity coming through.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah. Not even close.

ANDREW BATES: We structured our slow roll around that though. I remember-

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah, we did.

ANDREW BATES: Very vividly, like someone wanted to go to from 10% to 50% volume on the first of the month. And I was like, “No!” [laughs] “We’re going on the second of the month.” So, we’ll get… Anyway, but yeah, it’s just a lot of…

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah.

ANDREW BATES: Just added rigor that we have to put around our launches, because at our volume and scale, if something goes wrong, it really does snowball quickly.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Absolutely.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah. And you got to figure out who you’re affecting. A lot of these are automatic payments. So, the person that you screw up could be in the field in Afghanistan and you’re screwing up their payment and they have to call you or get somebody to solve their problem. You can’t do that. You gotta be careful and do it right and make sure it’s good.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Yeah, it’s interesting. Your business model is almost inherently empathetic to your members. In fact, you call them members, not customers, right? And because they don’t always have the same flexibility as somebody home being able to pay the bill or they literally have specific periods of time when they were available to make payments. So, you have to be available all the time for them. All the time. That’s really interesting.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah.

ROBERT CLARKSON: So, what has been the impact for your business or for the members? Where do you see the difference and where do you think they see the difference?

ANDREW BATES: From a business perspective, there’s a couple, I think, key… And of course, getting onto Stripe tokens has helped with our interchange rates with the networks or just network cost in general. But the actual impact that we’re seeing from a business process perspective, when we turn on data pipeline here in the next couple of months, once we get our internal infrastructure ready, we’re going to be able to do a lot of reporting that we can’t do today. We’re going to allow reconciliation to be automated. That is a manual process today. Lots of ways to just reduce and minimize or completely get rid of high-risk manual processes. So, there’s a lot of value there from the data pipeline. And then, excuse me, whenever we are able to fully store members and cards with Stripe and we can unlock card account updater and Elements and all these different capabilities. There’s lots of exciting things that we’re not offering our members yet today that we’ll be able to in the future. That’s very exciting.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: And I think for us, there was two things. We did settlement and we had disputes and chargebacks. Some of you may know some of those elements. We kicked off settlement and we handled settlement. We had in-house, had many, many batch files that monitored that settlement, made sure it kicked off, made sure it ended, make sure the payment happened. We gave it all to Stripe. So, Stripe handles all of our payouts now. And it really freed a lot of our engineers up to do more of what an engineer is supposed to do instead of managing, run the business side where it’s just this huge amount of overhead of batch files.

And then, the other thing was dispute. So, we had all of these manual processes. Andrew knows some of those. But we would actually have someone enter in the chargebacks and it was very manual. And now, with Stripe, it’s very organized, it’s neat. The business is using Sigma queries to send reports back to the business side to know what’s 0 to 7 out, or 7 to 14 days out or 14 plus out, just in a quick Sigma. And now, you can just type regular language and it does Sigma for you. But yeah, that really were the two biggest things for the engineering side, part of the business side that it impacted the backend processes, and then also the engineers.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah, the back office is now focusing on… You have to be correct. Once being able to look at those little pieces that are wrong and being able to find the bugs in our systems. So, our reliability is getting better, our defect detection is getting better, and people are enjoying their jobs a lot better.

ANDREW BATES: Yeah, SMEEs get to do complex research that are very basic…repetitive stuff. And so, we’re seeing a lot more, I don’t know, excitement from our back-office teams.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yes.

ANDREW BATES: Which is kind of felt like an oxymoron for a long time.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yes.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Yeah, well, I imagine that by offloading some of the more repetitive and mundane tasks, it allows the team to really concentrate on value add. Customer experience, understanding the market, whatever it may be necessary to grow the business or increase the member satisfaction. So, the final question. What were the big lessons learned? What worked? What didn’t work? What would you’ve done again? What you would never do again? So, any of those are open.

ANDREW BATES: Yeah. To put it succinctly, don’t modernize everything everywhere all at once.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Okay, that’s good. I think there’s a movie.

ANDREW BATES: There’s a movie about that.

ROBERT CLARKSON: It was very confusing.

ANDREW BATES: But yeah, that’s how it feels sometimes when you’re modernizing your ERP and your payments engine and your credit card processor and your check image processor. Not that we’re doing that, but yeah, it’s biting off the right amount of modernization would be my cautionary tale, because keeping all of those plates spinning at the same time can be quite a lot to manage. But yeah, I think that’d probably be it. And then, I think Brad’s probably got some, and, Lindsey, I’m sure you do, too.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah, our big one, having talked to other vendors, going in with a small pilot, like a small amount of people for an extended period of time, so you can like flush out all those things that you didn’t realize. Or you’re taking a race car and you’re putting it into an existing system and you’re trying very hard not to break anything else. So, you need some time to make sure that you really actually did what you thought you did. So, that was one of the big lessons. We ended up, we started with a pilot of just employees and we found the bugs and we fixed them pretty quickly. And then, we were able to ramp up very quickly, because we sat in that pilot and found some permutations, things that were wrong.

ROBERT CLARKSON: Nice.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: And I would just say from… We had about a year to figure out all of these things because of contracting stuff, but I would just say communicate, communicate, and overcommunicate would be the thing I would say. Especially with your leadership and make them understand what your roadmaps are and that they understand what the consequences are if you don’t make this deadline, because we did have some issues with that.

ANDREW BATES: Yeah, for sure. When you’ve got as many lines of business as we do, there’s so many interdependencies and aligning those roadmaps and getting stakeholder buy-in across the various parts of the company can be challenging. Because one executive’s priority is not the others. And so, getting everyone into alignment and seeing the value through overcommunication, as Brad said, is definitely something that we learned, because we got inevitably down to the wire there and there were some stragglers and we had to really escalate and push hard to not miss our date. Because as Lindsey mentioned, we had a very hard deadline to hit. Because our legacy system was being sunsetted, so.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: You have the bank and nonbank and you have 14 different lines of businesses and you’re trying to communicate: “Hey, you’re going here this date, you’re going this date.” And trying to effectively manage that and their leadership. And it was overwhelming.

LINDSEY FRAZIER: Yeah. To say the least. Yeah, I got to take a lot of blame.

BRAD SCHLEMMER: Oh, yeah, I know.

ANDREW BATES: For a period, yeah. I was really mad at you for a while.

ROBERT CLARKSON: You can all hug it out afterwards. Well, hopefully this has been informative for the folks in the audience. It has certainly been enjoyable to talk to you. Just thinking about the almost limitless number of edge cases that you work with. And by the way, a steeped and historic tradition of payments, pay-ins and payouts and reimagining that is really incredible. And both this team and Wiley have done an amazing job. We are proud to be your partners on this. We look forward to many phases to come. Because apparently, there are many phases coming.

And honestly, at the end of the day, despite the different industries, there’s a commonality of the message. There’s a commonality of the approach. Whether it was the communication, the empathy for your customers, the ultimate experience. I think those things are enormously important to keep in mind. And at the end the day, if you’re delivering frictionless customer experiences on their behalf, but without ruffling their feathers, that is a tremendously job well done. And I really appreciate your time today. I appreciate Sri’s time today and I hope that you’re available out and if they bump into you out there to ask any questions or answer any questions. Yeah. So, thank you very much. We really appreciate the time. Have a great day.