With all the talk about TGG and changing the Financial Industry, some people might be led to believe that work is all we do. While we love what we do, it’s not all we do and the last two weeks have been super active on the personal side of things for us. What do I mean?

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“Do you have a sample policy we can have?”
“Who would you recommend for managed security?”
“What is the best way to build a technology steering committee?”

These are questions we get quite often and we feel comfortable answering, but there are LOTS of other questions that we have no clue about. Human Resources, Construction regulatory requirements, the list goes on…

As I look across our industry I see financial institutions doing a lot of the same things. Same IT systems, same processes, same strategic goals but a lot of that information is being kept to themselves. Closed. Proprietary. Locked up. I think doing this does nothing but hurt our industry which is already hurting today. That’s why I built Banktastic.com. I wanted a place that was free and viewable to anyone to be able to access information, learn from it, and pay-it-forward to others that need help in hopes to improves the overall knowledge share of the industry. We have begun to do that and every day are getting new people, from CEOs to tellers, becoming apart of the community and this conversation.

Banktastic allows FIs, associations, leagues, and financial services companies attach themselves to a community and share amongst themselves as well as the collective. We are providing a service that is connecting people to each another and allowed everybody to learn from each other. We think this web-based service will allow people, both internally and to outside parties, to have a centralized place for information (get it out of the single persons email box) and leverage the power of the community to deem what is most important. We’d love for you to come join the conversation!

When I was a kid I spent countless hours collecting, trading, playing with (and sometimes blowing up with firecrackers) Star Wars action figures. They are the toy that defined most childhoods in the late 70’s and early 80’s. That is until Transformers toys came out. You remember those right? It seemed like over night my precious Millennium Falcon and every single action figure I had were completely out of vogue. I had a few Transformers as well, but they never held my attention like the Star Wars toys I loved so much. Because my friends had completely converted I was left in the middle. Why couldn’t these guys have a Resees Peanut Butter cup moment? You know what I mean… “Two great tastes that taste great together?�? You guessed it: they finally did. I was in Target the other day and saw something my childhood brain could only dream of: A Star Wars Tie-Fighter that was a Transformer-Darth Vader! Where was this when I was a kid?

I guess now you’re wondering what nostalgia for toys from my childhood and Star Wars versus Transformers has to do with banking. You’d think nothing- other than the money exchanged for said action figure was processed through a bank, but dig a little deeper… Around here at The Garland Group we talk a lot about “old�? versus “new�?. New bankers, old models of interaction, Banking 2.0, checkbooks versus debit cards, proprietary versus open source, the list is almost endless. It’s inevitable that the old guard becomes defensive, the brash young guns seem to take over. Polarization is a natural effect of change, and if you haven’t noticed the financial services industry is changing. Like the predicament of having your favorite childhood toy suddenly go out of vogue, financial institutions face the challenge of adjusting to all these new things: sharing information (securely), providing new services (that line up with strategic plans), attracting new customers (that move beyond ‘free checking’) Will every bank become a Transformer? Nope. There’s a population segment that the “new banker�? won’t appeal to. Will all banks become the hybrid Darth Transformer? Maybe.

Hopefully if you are a banker you’ve found out how to incorporate new tools into your financial institution, (and if you aren’t a banker, your FI has found tools that reach out to you in meaningful ways). Either way that’s what we’re all about here at The Garland Group. Connecting FI’s with tools and people that will change the way you pay for your action figures!

Last week everyone here at TGG received a terrifying internal message.

Wanted to ask everyone (san Dave who’s needs to clean his own office) to come into the office on Friday for a summer cleaning. All three offices in the back are trashed and need a good cleaning of each of our spots. Now, if you guys want to take the opportunity to rearrange, improve, make it more awesome, you can definitely do so and you imagination is your guide. Has to be `room approved’ but do whatever you want to make your room more enjoyable for you.

Having been with TGG just over a year, I must of missed the last cleaning and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. When I arrived, I noticed half of the guys are walking around in their undershirts. Ok. I get it. This isn’t some cleaning with your pinky out affair. This is all in, clean up/rearrange and get it done.

Of course, now that I think about it, that shouldn’t have surprised me at all. That’s how we handle pretty much everything around here. The work comes first, frills a distant second.