Larissa Padden 00:06

Hello, and welcome to Cogcast, Cognito’s podcast, where we talk to journalists and media pros on everything that’s happening in the world of media and PR. I’m Larissa Padden, your host, and a former journalist turned PR professional.

 

For today’s episode, we are joined by Steve Cocheo, senior executive editor at The Financial Brand. Steve has been covering the banking and technology industry for most of his career, so he was kind enough to join us this week and discuss how the industry has evolved over time, who’s standing out in a crowd, and are banks are facing technological parity. Please enjoy.

 

Larissa Padden 00:34

Hi, Steve. Thanks for being with us here today.

 

Steve Cocheo 00:43

Hi, Larissa. Thank you for having me.

 

Larissa Padden 00:46

So, as always, I like to start with you telling us about yourself and your background, and what you’re focused on now in your own words.

 

Steve Cocheo 00:43

Well, let’s see. A lot of ground to cover, and I’ll try and keep it short because I don’t think people tuned in to hear my history. I’ve been reporting one way or another since the mid-’70s. Eighth-grade newspaper, high school newspaper, college newspaper, stringing for The New York Times, interning at Newsday, and then into trade publications because I thought that would be a nice easy gig.

 

Larissa Padden 01:19

Yeah, right.

 

Steve Cocheo 01:20

I’ve been in banking basically from the beginning of my professional career, since 1979. ABA Banking Journal, Banking Exchange, a startup that I started with a man named Bill Streeter and my editor at ABA Banking Journal for most of my career, and now, The Financial Brand.

 

Larissa Padden 01:38

I’m sure there’s a lot we can talk about in terms of how things have changed and technology’s role in that, and I do want to get into that in terms of the press. But you’ve been covering the banking space, as you said, for your entire career, for decades now, and technology is a big part of that conversation.

 

Particularly, I’ve seen that grow over the last 10 years as it’s become more of a competitive space. So around 2014, you know, you had fintechs competing with big banks and that was the big story. How have you seen banking and technology converge over that time?

 

Steve Cocheo 02:11

It’s been an evolution and it’s not, it’s not all one thing even now. When the fintechs first came along, a lot of them would brag from the podium of events, “We’re going to shut you guys down, banks. We’re going to eat your lunch.” And bankers in presentations, even at stock analysts meetings, would talk about fear of becoming dumb pipes that just, served as a conduit for fintech business.

 

And that’s been playing out on different levels in the period that you’ve described, right through to the present, when one of the big controversies right now is data sharing, under the Dodd-Frank Act. It took over a decade for the regulations to come out, and then they lapsed for a very convoluted set of reasons.

 

And now, the latest battle is JP Morgan Chase saying, “Hey, fintechs, you want this data? It’s going to cost you. And we’re going to charge the data aggregators,” those are the go-betweens, “and they may charge you.” The first act of that is playing out. Plaid has agreed to pay Chase for the data.

 

And more of that will come. Where that ends up as the regulation is rewritten, no one knows at this point. So it, this is a back and forth that’s been going on ever since. But there are also a lot of partnerships between fintechs and banks, often to the mutual advantage of both parties.

 

So you’ve got enemies, frenemies, allies – whole gamut.

 

Larissa Padden 03:40

Yeah. It’s interesting because I feel like it went in phases because there was the fintechs are going to take over and banks are going to be no more, and then it became the story of, like, partnership, because that didn’t happen. And now all of that kind of, as you said, led to open banking because, you know, the majority of Americans, they’ll complain about their bank, but they won’t switch their bank because they make it so difficult.

 

And now we’ve kind of seen that reverse. So, it’s been an interesting journey, and I guess interesting to see where it goes next. I know banks have been investing heavily in technology themselves over the years, JP Morgan being the leader in that. And, you know, when you talk about innovation in this space, and I know that there are publications dedicated to, just to the innovation and technology that goes into banking now.

 

At the same time, you recently wrote a story entitled Banking Apps Are Trapped in Digital Mediocrity and It Shows, and in particular, it touched on how banks are in a situation of parody when it comes to the technology that they offer. So, I guess I wanted to get your thoughts on now, at a time where people talk about tech being as smart as it’s ever been, if banks are yet again kind of in danger of being left behind.

 

Steve Cocheo 04:50

Some of them are. Some of them are right on the leading edge. Some of them may be a step back from the leading edge because, you know, banks are, are cautious by nature because that’s part of what we want them to be.

 

fintechs can maybe play a little faster and looser, but I think increasingly they’ve realized they can’t do that either because this is people’s money we’re talking about. This isn’t an app for booking movie tickets. This is if Chime or another fintech has problems and people can’t touch their money for a week, that kind of thing has happened, people don’t like that.

 

Larissa Padden 05:23

Right.

 

Steve Cocheo 5:24

So money is, is where the reality kicks in.

 

Larissa Padden 05:27

There’s a generational divide to that, too, where you have the younger generations who are more willing to, you know, go with these digitally savvy fintech non-banks, and then you have people that, you know, technology scares them, AI scares them, and they want what’s been proven. And to them, that’s the traditional banking system.

 

Steve Cocheo 5:45

That’s true. Some people don’t realize that they’ve been dealing with AI for a long time.

 

Larissa Padden 05:27

Yeah. I mean, yeah, and I’ve heard, solutions providers that work in the banking space say that, that AI conversation has exploded but AI in some way has been used for years and years and years. It’s just becoming; It’s more developed and it’s being talked about more. And that –

 

Steve Cocheo 6:05

much more visible.

 

Larissa Padden 06:06

Yeah, exactly. And so that’s obviously a huge part of the conversation within banking. Can you tell me how you’ve seen that even in just the two to three years’ time span from when that exploded, how that’s kind of changed within your beat, and what stories are you looking for now in regards to AI? What interests you?

 

Steve Cocheo 6:25

I think a lot, a lot of what’s gone on is, so far as what the public is seeing, where it touches the public, is experimental and what I would call toe dipping. Behind the scenes, a lot more is going, going on, but that will change. That will evolve. If you’re familiar with the virtual assistant, Erica, that Bank of America uses, offers to all of its digital customers, that’s pretty sophisticated already.

 

It’s kind of the state of the art in the industry, that and one or two other virtual assistants offered by banks. Even there, when I last spoke with Bank of America, they had not implemented, gen AI as part of that yet. They were looking at it, weighing it, testing it, but they weren’t ready for it to touch the public yet. They wanted there to be a buffer.

 

So that will come, there’s no, no doubt, doubt about it. It’s coming just as so much of other technology has been adapted quickly by the banks once they got comfortable with it.

 

I think you’ll also see since, there’s much less tech reticence among the regulators right now. I think that will accelerate things.

 

Larissa Padden 07:37

And I think one term that I was hearing over the past year is AI fatigue in terms of, you know, we’ve talked for the last two years about what AI can do, and so I’ve spoken to other reporters, both for this podcast and then just in general, that they’re now looking at, they want to talk to people about how they’re actually using it, where they’re actually investing money in AI.

 

And so is that kind of the same for you when you think about how you write about these topics? Have you moved on from what’s possible to what banks are actually doing?

 

Steve Cocheo 8:07

Yeah, so I’ll give you an example, a story I did about two months ago, concerning Capital One. Their auto division is a big user of AI for a lot of things, but recently they unveiled a service that is designed to help cut off, auto loan fraud at the dealer level, both to the dealers’ benefit and the consumers’ benefit.

 

And that was very interesting, to write about, and I, hope it all works they planned because that will keep a lot of people out of trouble.

 

Larissa Padden 08:43

Yeah, that’s interesting. I spent a lot of time covering the auto finance space. I think it’s a really interesting space, but I do think it was, in some areas, a little behind the times with technology. I would talk to some providers and they would say, “Yes, you know, there’s all this innovation around, you know, scoring for auto loans, but in terms of payments, payments are just payments, and you know, people just want to pay their auto loan.” So I think you’re seeing a little more innovation, and I hadn’t heard that about Capital One, but I remember dealer fraud was a huge problem, and there’s not even a network, amongst dealers where they can like share and talk and, you know, innovate together.

 

There’s no kind of… Not support group, but like,

 

Steve Cocheo 09:21

Clearing house.

 

Larissa Padden 09:23

Yeah, clearing house, or an association, or anything to kind of deal with that. So that is interesting to see that that’s where AI is targeting and can help. It’s an interesting use case.

 

Steve Cocheo 09:31

I’m hoping, at some point to follow up with them and see, how it’s worked out. Because it’s literally just out of the gate right now.

 

Larissa Padden 09:37

So in general, how do you find and source your stories? Because I imagine you have multiple deadlines, stories to publish at least once a day.

Steve Cocheo 09:47

Not necessarily once a day, but three or four times a week.

 

And there’s usually things I’m working on currently, things I’m chipping away at, things that I’m reporting on speculatively, thinking there’s a story there.

 

But I mean, an example of a long-term piece is, I’d done a series of stories about branching in other regions. The southeast is very hot right now. Banks from outside of the region are coming in, in some cases in a big way.

 

Fifth Third, out of the Midwest, hopes within the near future to have as many branches in the southeast as they do in their traditional footprint, which is a major change.

 

Others are coming in the same way. The big banks are all over the place.  but then as I did that and some stories about isolated things in the northeast, I realized, you know, there’s trends going on right where I live; I live on Long Island New York, New York and I thought, you know, sometimes you can be so in a market that you don’t realize what’s going on until you rise above it a little bit.

 

So over the course of a couple of months, every time I was in the city, I would take myself on a branch tour. Some of them were pre-announced, “Can I meet with your branch manager? I’d like to see what, you know, branch looks like.” Others were just stealthy drop-ins.

 

Larissa Padden 11:11

Right.

 

Steve Cocheo 11:11

And, sneaking around. But I wanted to see what was actually out there and said, “ I hate reporting just from a desk,” and I like stories best that reflect something I discovered out there that means I own it because I was the only one who saw it, and I don’t share.

 

Larissa Padden 11:28

Yeah, I think with technology making it so much easier to never leave your desk, that kind of, you know, is considered more old school, and I think that there are some beats within journalism that just require that. Like you just have to get out in the world and meet people.

 

And the last couple years that I was in journalism, the pandemic hit and I was working from my living room, and I was, at that point, covering more esoteric ABS and securitization, and I found everything through conversations at conferences and meeting sources, and it just kind of, it just halted everything, and it, you know, I, I think that getting out in the world gets lost sometimes, and so it’s nice to hear that that’s still a big part of your reporting.

 

Steve Cocheo 12:10

I don’t do it as often as I’d like, but every time I do, it pays dividends. Goes back to the idea of finding the story that you didn’t know you were going to find, instead of the story you so set out to find.

 

 

Larissa Padden 12:22

Right. Yeah, and we were talking about that a little bit before we started recording, which, you know, when I was a journalist and someone would pitch to me, and I would be upfront, “I may not write about the thing that you’re pitching to me, but this person sounds interesting, so let’s have a conversation and let’s see what stories, you know, are in, in there that maybe you’re not pitching to me.”

 

Speaking of pitches, though, do you accept pitches from PR people? How do you like to interact with PR people? And one question I always ask people, if you had to quantify how many pitches you get, about how many pitches do you think you get a week? So there are about three questions in there.

 

Steve Cocheo 12:56

To take the last one first, without exaggeration, I think I probably get between 70 to 80 pitches.

Now by pitches I include requests to do a byline. Requests to set up an interview. Pitches, “Can you do a story about this release? Coming out of this release or this study…” That type of thing. They can all be useful. A lot of them are not. Right.

 

I would say the biggest problem is I’ve never been on your side of the desk, so I don’t know the pressures and demands that are on a public relations person, but I’m just often amazed at how frequently I’m pitched by people who have never looked at the site.

 

They have no clue what we cover, how we cover it, or who our audience is, and they’ve taken the time to craft a pitch that is completely useless.

 

Larissa Padden 13:45

Right.

 

Steve Cocheo 13:46

And doesn’t reflect what we do. But I’ll, I’ll throw in something that might have been in, in your other questions. But it’s a, call it a pet peeve, and, but it’s a, I think it’s a good case study example. We’ve gone through bouts where people will, like three or four people a week will pitch me on a story that’s designed to appeal to CFOs, chief financial officers.

 

And here’s the thing, we don’t cater to chief financial officers. Initially, I thought it was the name, “The Financial Brand”. Maybe they think the finance brand, the finance department.

 

And I would ask people, “Okay, we don’t… this is a CFO story, we don’t do that. Can you tell me, are we showing up in a directory or something?”

 

I’d never get an answer. Then one week, I got two answers.  The one that was most memorable was someone who explained to me that they had asked ChatGPT for publications that cover CFO issues.

 

And, ChatGPT had analyzed us and said that we cover CFO issues. So she came back to the pitch and I thought, “My god, you’re talking to a human being who’s been here for eight years.”

 

 

“I think I would know whether we cover CFO issues or not.  This is not something to argue about. We don’t. Thank you.”

 

Larissa Padden 15:03

Yeah, that’s a disappointing answer; that they asked ChatGPT, and I know a lot of people are using it for research. The reason I ask this question is because I like to put into perspective for people who aren’t on the journalism side just how many pitches they’re getting, and how you have to really think about breaking through that noise.

 

You know, if they’re getting 70 to 80 to 100 pitches a week, how is yours going to stand out? And I don’t think asking ChatGPT… I mean I, I commend them for being honest with you, I suppose, but I don’t know if that’s what I would recommend.  I’ll give you an example, we were looking for reporters who cover ABS, because it’s –  in terms of media, it’s a narrower field than it used to be. And the number one answer was me, and I haven’t been a reporter in, in four years. So, you know, you can’t always trust ChatGPT without doing some manual labor, I think.

 

Steve Cocheo 16:00

I have a colleague who used to work for one of the buy-side type websites, and even though she has a completely different email address now, she has a Financial Brand address, she still gets pitches for “Can you include us in your roundup of beef jerky?”

 

Larissa Padden 16:18

Wow. Wow.

 

Steve Cocheo 16:19

Nope, we don’t do stories about beef jerky either.

 

Larissa Padden 16:22

I don’t think in all my time as a journalist, and I was a journalist for about 10 years, I ever saw a pitch miss the mark that badly. But that is, that is very funny. I did want to ask you about AI in the broader conversation of journalism. You see a lot of publications, you know, replacing reporters with AI or experimenting with AI in some way, and you know, this is an industry that’s always suffered layoffs, it’s always suffered its difficulties over the years as times have changed.

 

As someone that has seen the industry change over time, what are your thoughts on how publications are using AI, and how do you think they should be using it?

 

Steve Cocheo 16:59

Going back over time, the advent of search engines and being able to research things quickly was a godsend. I mean, I go back to when I was trying to cover things out of Washington from New York.

 

And you would, you would hear about a regulation and you would beg somebody in their agency to get a copy of the regulation and fax all 40 pages to;  Many a, a Friday night, night were spent getting those faxes so I could write a story for Monday, that kind of thing.

 

Being able to go to a website and download it and then read, is, is amazing. You know, just basic source documents, reports, that kind of thing.

 

So digitization has made a big difference in the volume of what you can get a hold of to make a story to get a story in the first place that might have been harder in the past. It’s also generated the need to do that much more. I do now in a week what in my early days on a monthly magazine I did in a month.

 

It’s just the nature of change. My concern with AI is that people stop thinking. A lot of AI summaries I’ve seen about- usually it’s an inverse ratio. The more you know, the less accurate what you read is.

 

And I’ve seen an awful lot of that. Not just about banking, but hobbies I have, that kind of thing. It’s like, this is not right.

 

There are people out there who don’t know this is not right, and they’ll act accordingly. You know I do a lot of home repair, and YouTube videos are one of my go-tos when I get stuck.

 

Every once in a while with something electrical, you find two guys who seem to have equal qualifications. One says A, the other says B. Well, the nice thing about electrical work is there are circuit breakers in the world, and if you went with A instead of B and B was right, the circuit breaker will flip and, you know, okay, do it the other way around.

 

Lotta life doesn’t have circuit breakers, so getting it right is more important to me than getting it fast.

 

Larissa Padden 18:56

Sure. And also in journalism, where, you know, your accuracy and the safeguards you have to go through to make sure that what you’re reporting is accurate, like, that’s the real danger in relying on these, on these tools that maybe are giving us inaccurate information. So yeah, I think it has great potential in terms of research and being able to do things very quickly and have information at your fingertips, but there’s still, much like pitching, or building a pitch, some manual labor I think that needs to go into it, hopefully.

 

Steve Cocheo 19:27

There are things that it’s a wonderful tool for.  Transcriptions are an example. I cover probably many more technically complex stories than I did earlier in my career. Payment stories, very technical, and there’s terminology that sometimes escapes me. I record easily ten times more than I did earlier,  my career because I need to be able to hear back, read the transcript just in case, look, look up to see what a term I thought I got and context actually means. And being able to turn on a transcript quickly is invaluable.

 

Larissa Padden 20:02

I will say that was absolutely game-changing to me when transcription came instead of having to manually type notes. Well, I know you have to go soon and you’ve been generous with your time, so I just have one more question. And, um, you know, as I said when I was covering auto lending, I had to have an idea of what all lenders were up to in the space, particularly, you know, the, the major players.

 

I assume that’s similar to you, that you have to stay up to date on what the major banks, credit unions, and fintechs are doing. So in your opinion, who is doing something that you think is truly interesting and innovative right now?

 

Steve Cocheo 20:37

Well, I guess I, I’d give two examples, and one of them is from a small credit union, but it also has to do with autos, of course. And,  again, this is an example that came up from, initially, a conversation with a credit union person at our conference, The Financial Grand Forum.

 

 

We sat down, talked for an hour, and this was a small part of the conversation but it turned into a pretty good story. They have a program called the Auto Concierge.

 

 

Basically,  the credit union is Ardent Credit Union out of the Philadelphia area. What they realized was that apart from public speaking and dental work, one of the processes people like least is buying a car.

 

Steve Cocheo 20:22

 

The whole process.

 

And they thought, “Well, what’s part of the problem?” Dealing with the dealership, you feel like you’re entering a foreign country where they speak a code. They have all kinds of knowledge that you don’t. You feel like you’re going to be taken as just for how much.

 

So they thought, “Why don’t we help our members by hiring a couple of dealership guys? And they will be their guides through dealership-ship land.”

 

And people love it, and it saves them money, keeps them out of cars and other arrangements, aftermarket stuff, that would cost them money unnecessarily. It’s a program that I think a lot of banks could implement.

 

Dealerships won’t be happy about it, but consumers will love it.

 

Yeah.

 

So Ardent’s program is great. There’s also something else that I wrote about recently that I think is fascinating, because a lot of banks’ best ally is consumer inertia in terms of holding onto customers.

 

That’s because traditionally, it’s so painful to move your banking accounts, particularly your main accounts, because you’ve hooked so much into it. Everything from your Netflix payment to your heating bill. And just the sheer thought of undoing all that and then redoing it someplace else is enough to make people say, “I’ll put up with it.”

 

Citizens Bank, recently, through a service that they’re the first ones to take it from Mastercard,  has introduced a service that basically says, “Come here. Get an account with us, and in about ten minutes, click, click, click, we can switch all of your autopays to our checking account.” And that, if it takes off, is gonna be game-changing, because inertia is suddenly out of the picture.

 

Larissa Padden 23:12

Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s really interesting,  because just know from personal experience, the only time you think about changing your bank is when something goes wrong, and in those moments, you’re so upset you’re going to change, and then when things are made right again, you don’t want to go through all the effort and the pain of changing, changing banks until the next time something bad happens.

 

You know, and I think that’s true for a lot of people because there’s so many, like you said, things attached to your bank account. So that would be, that’ll be really interesting to keep an eye on.

 

Steve Cocheo 23:22

Those two stories are an illustration that – Citizens is clearly a tech solution and technology that didn’t exist, that is solving the customer problem. Ardent’s Auto Concierge program, that’s human, that’s people, people with specialized knowledge that only that credit union bringthose members. So there’s still room for the human being in banking.

 

Larissa Padden 24:04

Right. Interesting. All right, Steve, well this was great. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope you’ll come back and update us on,  you know, what, what you’re seeing in this space as things continue to innovate, and,  this was a great time. Thank you.

 

Steve Cocheo 24:16

Thank you, Larissa. I appreciate you having me.