Page 14 - December 31 2017 Reporter

2018 League Chairman Travis Schroll

began their education initiative by presenting to his son’s first grade class. “We’ve done two
sessions in class and one where they come to the bank. We’ve offered the program to all age
groups of his school as well as to the public schools. It’s a way to teach young people about
saving,” he notes. It’s important to talk about the value of money. It has been a taboo subject and
now more than ever as a society we need to make kids realize that those plastic cards translate
to real currency. Kids need to be able to place value on money and realize it’s not a never-ending
supply. Behavioral economist conducted a game using real money to study children’s attitudes
about money in a world of little currency and how attitudes are reflected as applied to the use of
a debit or credit card. “It’s just good to open this topic up for discussion and education,” Schroll
insists.

Q: When you started at Beardstown Savings, what were the structure or policy changes you
first initiated?
“We had to address some rudimental policy changes to make us structurally sounder and now
that we’ve achieved the baseline we wanted, we get to look at ways of making our bank better
for our clients. Because home loans and consumer loans take the most time/effort and are hence
costlier, the trick was to get the efficiencies in place to provide those options, and technology is
part of the game plan. I believe the answer is either increasing employee efficiencies or switching
programs. We elected to switch our mortgage origination platform. It has made us more compliant
and more efficient. It gives us more direct interfacing with the client and subsequently our
employees are required to do less input work. We offer a full suite of products online. Our assets
are under $50 million, yet we offer person to person payments. We have Transfer, so our
customers can send money from our bank to other banks. There are banks much larger than us
who don’t have these offerings.” When asked why he thought other banks may not advance along
the same lines, Travis explained because it’s an expensive upfront fee and each institution must
have the policies to understand the risks involved with new ventures that include technology.
“Technology is not riskless, he maintains. It’s a big challenge as hackers become increasingly
more sophisticated and their threat more prevalent.” Bankers by trade are not schooled in
technology, so partnering with cutting edge vendors is key as is educating the workforce’s
responsibility to safeguard their employer.
THE MILLENNIALS ARE COMING, THE MILLENNIALS ARE COMING

Actually, they’re here and the banking industry has begun to pay a lot
attention to them. I asked Travis to share his perspective about this
Andrea is group. He reported that they have a new website and six months ago
a huge his bank rolled out electronic transfer as part of the modernization of
Nelly fan.
banking, acknowledging “it’s a demand placed on us in large part by
millennials”. Person to person payment, online transfers
including 1-touch icons on mobile devices is all part of the
new age of banking expected of their younger client base.
Nelly & Travis However, this way of attracting new business does not
meet after a
performance come without consequences. Shortly after implementing
at the St. Louis
Symphnoy! these new programs Beardstown experienced fraudulent
activity with a customer who got “caught up in a romantic
scam which cost us around $9,000. With that hit we
questioned whether to continue the product, but ultimately

11
December 2017 IllInoIs RepoRteR