"What do you hate about your bank? What do you love about your bank? Listen for those pain points. Make lots of notes and look for the thread where they come together. That's the thing to go build."
That's Jonathan Patrick, and he's answering a question about his own daughter, who started at UT this fall. I asked him what he'd tell her if she came to him wanting to enter this competition with no idea what to make.
He didn't name a technology. He said go have a lot of conversations, and notice that asking someone what they hate about their bank is user research, done for free, on the spot.
Here's the rest of it.
Jonathan spent twenty years in banking, starting as a teller and finishing in the C-suite. Then he crossed the table and spent ten more building the software that banks, credit unions and fintechs run on. He's now Senior Director of Corporate Strategy at Jack Henry, which is in its 50th year, serves around 7,000 mostly small and mid-sized community institutions, and ships more than 300 products. Most people have used something of theirs today and have never seen the name.
The middle of this episode is the most practical thing we've put out. He walks through how he thinks about going to market, and it applies to three undergraduates with five Fridays as much as it does to a company with 7,000 customers:
- Total relevant market, not total addressable market. Nobody ever wins the whole TAM, so sizing it tells you nothing about what you should go do.
- Ideal customer profile, in real detail. "Small businesses" is not an ICP, it's a shrug.
- Market investment mapping. Which features actually help you win that specific customer, in that specific slice.
His warning, if you skip all that: "by the time they get done, they just have another me-too product."
He's also blunt about who kills things. I asked who's actually in the room when you take something new to a bank, and who says no. "It's usually the finance person who says no." Then he told me about the product he killed himself, when he was a chief lending officer, and the reason is the useful part: not the cost, but that his institution had no honest claim to being good at it.
And for anyone building something that touches money, the part to sit with: "It's an edge case to the financial institution, as a percentage of transactions. But to Eric and his money that now just disappeared, that's not an edge case."
Security, fraud and compliance are front-end decisions, not things you bolt on at the end.
If you're a UT undergraduate: no coding background is required, and there's a free prompt library on the site that teaches the building part from scratch.
The Idea Phase is underway. Submit your deliverables by September 25th.
Everything: https://fintech.ekkfinance.com
Resources and the prompt library: https://fintech.ekkfinance.com/resources.html
Reviewers, mentors and judges: https://fintech.ekkfinance.com/get-involved.html
Jonathan's newsletter, The Fintech GTM Report: https://thefintechgtm.substack.com
