What is the culture at Cross River and how does it balance traditional and modern approaches to building a profitable fintech business?

I’d start with the culture, and I think it comes from the top. So Gilles, our CEO, every time you hear him speak—and I've been here for a few months—it’s very clear what the culture is and was and will be. We are always customer first, but I think it goes beyond that because everyone will say that. It's really about our focus. If you're in meetings in our company internally, we always think about how do we make things better for the customer? More so than even ourselves. We would do whatever it takes to get there. The key to that is relationships.

If we call it old school or not, to me, it's an important part of us. It’s the relationship piece. We want to know our customers, we want to understand their needs, we want to work with them, and we get to know them personally, too. Like I said, we have had some great relationships over the decade that we've been around. In terms of profitability in this space, I think we all learn. Diversification and thinking about what's coming and taking those opportunities to address what's there are the reasons why companies like ourselves are surviving and usually thrive. It’s because we hear the pulse of what's happening, and we make sure we work with our customers. We listen to them, but we also provide them with some guidance. Or, I would say, not guidance, but more giving them insight into like, "Look, this is what happens in this kind of situation. These are the things you may want to consider." That puts us in a different spot than probably a lot of players in our space—we’re really focused on that. 

Secondly, the technology is critical. You don't have to have as many people and resources doing some of the manual work on the back end when you have an API-focused and a very great technology stack to support the clients on a day-to-day basis. Having that makes you more efficient and makes you get things done in a quicker, better way. I think, too, compliance plays a key thing. Everyone thinks of compliance as business killers. It's not fair to them.

They're, first of all, very good people. We all give them our time as businesspeople. But really, they are so critical to what we do and to our success, and our folks are solutions to people. We don't go in and say, “No.” We go in and say, "Hey, you may want to think about doing it this way, or can we do it another way?"

Our job is to make sure we get the job done. I will say what we are focused on is, it's technology, it's the relationships, the people, it's compliance. It's a foundation of all that and a diversified product set that addresses needs.