It's hard to build a successful company. It's even harder to build a scalable one.
Mac Thompson knows that better than anyone.
After more than three decades in the banking industry, he had left his job at Bank of America in 2006 to found White Clay, then a custom software consulting company, to provide community and regional banks with the same technology national banks used. It proved to be a successful venture, but 10 years in, Thompson said he and his leadership team started thinking about what the next decade would look like.
Around that same time, Thompson was invited to go to New York to meet with entrepreneurs from around the world through the Endeavor network. The formation of the local Endeavor office, which supports high-growth entrepreneurs in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, was just getting started.
That one weekend changed everything.
"We came back and on Monday morning, I told everybody we were basically going to decompose the current company [and] start over from scratch," Thompson said. "We were going to build a scalable company that could grow and take care of more regional and community banks with products that would help them to care for their customers."
It took two years — and millions of dollars — to make the transformation. Thompson said White Clay went from a profitable company to a lean one in that process, knowing the change was necessary if it was going to continue to grow.
"We basically rebuilt the whole company from scratch ... every line of code, every process, just everything we did," he continued. "While Endeavor was an inspiration for that, I think it was what we were intending to do originally. We just didn't understand what it would take to scale."
But the effort has been paying off, Thompson said. While he declined to disclose revenue figures, he noted that since 2017, White Clay has averaged an annual growth rate of more than 50%. It has 38 employees, the majority of which are at its Louisville offices on Story Avenue, and it's preparing to hire across its operations within the next six months.
Today, the Louisville-based company's platform offers seven independent software modules that cover the following areas: relationship profitability, relationship pricing, client management, sales management, performance management, banker incentive and a new artificial intelligence (AI) service, just launched earlier this month.
"We're trying to help banks do three things: help their customers win, help their shareholders win and bring humanity to the digitization of banking," Thompson said. "How we do that is we take all the information a bank has — every checking account, savings account, loan, wealth product, mortgage, every transaction — and put it all in one place. We layer lots of intelligence from behavioral segmentation to AI, to identify opportunities through their transaction behavior, to profitability, to understanding how you help customers.
"We then deliver all of that directly to the retail banker or the commercial banker in the branch. Our primary audience who receives our information are actually bankers interacting with clients, whether they be virtual call center or in a physical presence."
The new AI service takes that same data, which is stored within the bank's firewalls, and presents opportunities for bankers to better serve their clients through relevant products and services. For example, a customer's credit card data shows several trips to Home Depot for remodeling supplies. The AI will alert the banker that there's an opportunity to offer the customer a home equity line of credit to pay for that remodel, instead of maxing out their credit card.
Thompson said the AI creates actionable insights from the massive amounts of previously-unintelligible data, which is what makes banks interested beyond the desire to help their clients. The new technology also creates a challenge, though, as it is a culture shift for most banks to take that proactive approach, versus waiting for the customer to come in with a problem.
"You're talking about rewiring banks from a historical model to something that's much more information-driven," Thompson said. "It's not like putting in a new loan system — it's really talking about what you want your bank to be. This is C-suite level strategic decisions."
The AI service is currently being used by First Keystone Community Bank, a Pennsylvania-based bank with $1.3 billion in total assets. It's also in a beta test with a larger bank.
“As the first client to use the AI tool, we’ve already begun uncovering new opportunities to positively affect our bottom line," said Jonathan Littlewood, chief lending officer and vice president of First Keystone Community Bank, in a news release. "Moreover, our bankers can now dedicate hours to nurturing our most impactful client relationships."
