Somebody recently asked me what I love about working at Celero, and I thought of an answer much as you’d expect a veteran marketer to give.  Anyone and everyone in the marketing world has accepted the basic foundation of the profession as the “Four Ps.”  The concept that balancing price, product, promotion, and placement is the secret to managing your marketing mix has been marketing canon since 1960, and it’s just as relevant today.

For anyone interested in knowing what working at Celero is like, I’d like to advance that we have our own Four Ps.  The first P for me is People.  From our CEO down to our newest employee, everybody brings something special to work every day. Everyone here is committed to building a high-performance culture, where we set new standards for customer-centered innovation and our commitment to be a high-tech, high touch company. We are a diverse group of women and men, people fresh out of school and industry veterans with decades of experience, from all sorts of socio-economic backgrounds, and as my colleague Abigail Lucier has so eloquently noted, we take that diversity and unify with our sense of purpose to make our company great.

My second P is Productivity.  Our people are driven, and I love working with people who are determined to be successful and are willing to live by daily measurements of success. Those measurements could put a bad P—pressure—on us at times, but at our company, we have a highly collaborative culture. We have big goals, but only because our customers and partners have big needs to fill. At Celero, we want to become the household name for small and midsized merchants looking to grow quickly and sustainably, which is a monumental challenge as we enter year two of our existence. But here’s the rub, and it’s good: You never feel like you’re in it alone, because this team always has your back. We succeed together, and we sometimes fail together, but in all things, we produce together.

The third P of working at Celero is Passion.  We have people who seriously love what they do. We have multiple people at every level of the company who have been working in payments and fintech for decades, and they act like it’s their first day on the job. They love making a difference in the success stories of our small and medium-sized business customers.  They love making our various partner financial institutions more effective for their merchants as well. This passion isn’t just palpable at our offices across the country, it’s also contagious, and it drives you to give your best, too.  

Perhaps most exciting is our fourth P, Possibilities. A driving ethos of our team at Celero is to never accept that we’ve “arrived.” When you’re in the business of technology and working to solve problems for customers, applications and challenges will continue to evolve. Being arrogant about our success will be the first element of our failure, so we are committed to being humble and go about our work each day creating possibilities for the future, for our partners, our merchants, and our people.

I’m sure others could come up with their own ways of expressing why they love working at Celero, but the Four Ps work for me!

Kevin Jones - August 22, 2019 As I look across the banking industry, I often see trends that I find disturbing. Over the last few years, I’ve observed a widening gulf in the amount of deposits that community banks attract versus the loan dollars they generate, mostly to small businesses.

A specific statistic that illustrates this point comes from a market study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) a nonprofit dedicated to helping communities grow sustainably from several angles, including banking, broadband, energy, and waste. According to the ILSR, community banks issue a whopping 52 percent of all small business loans, while they hold only 16 percent of the nation’s assets.  

There are many contributing factors to this dynamic, which isn’t in itself sustainable, as banking is predicated on a balance of maintaining appropriate levels of deposits, both demand and time, with the issuance of loans and lines of credit to individuals and businesses.  The community banking conundrum is driven by multiple converging factors, among them competition from big banks for deposits—especially those of a commercial nature—as well as geographic limitations (many community banks have operated more consistently in less wealthy communities, going to places the big banks have avoided). The localized lending that community banks do is a cornerstone of enabling financial inclusion and energizing the American dream.

As a fintech leader, I find it disturbing that one of the larger perceived pressures of community banking comes from our sector. Technology companies in areas such as lending are threatening areas of profitability for community banks. It’s one thing to have your deposit base eroded, but it becomes difficult for community banks to survive this phenomenon in tandem with the erosion of their loan base, especially in small business lending.

I see this differently.

One person’s threat is another’s opportunity.  While I’ll let other fintechs speak to their own models and motivations, I can tell you with complete authenticity that Celero and its brands are developing leading-edge technology, in payments, software-as-a-service, analytics, business intelligence, social monitoring, and sales tools, and we are doing so to fulfill our commitment to help our community bank partners and their small business customers compete and win.

And we don’t limit ourselves to simply selling our own products and services. In our role as strategic partners and advisors, we not only help our community bankers realize a more expansive relationship with their clients, but we also help them connect the dots with regard to all of the tools at their disposal. My colleague and co-founder, Jeff Brown, exemplified this ethos recently, as he explained how our bank partners can increase fee income and deposit balances through payments and funding accounts earmarked for asset-based lending. Deposits are the launchpad for lending capability, and community bank loans provide a significantly healthier injection of capital than alternative lending options. As I stated before, these loans fuel innovative small businesses in towns all across America.

We are convinced that in order for community banks to fulfill their mission and continue to better serve rural Americans, as well as those in small towns and underserved urban neighborhoods, they need the right strategic partners, the right products, and the right tools to succeed.

Last year, when I began acquiring the strategic pieces of Celero and combining that with my dream team of executives, managers, and performers, I was grateful to find that our stakeholders completely embraced our vision to bring enterprise-level technology in terms of best-in-class payments capabilities and consumable technology tools, to small and mid-sized companies across the country. It’s obvious to me that when you give community bankers—some of the smartest people who are driven to help their business clients as much as they can—the tools to help their customers succeed, you can achieve your own bottom line goals, while helping your partners and their customers achieve theirs, too. Accelerating the growth of our partners and business customers is the core focus. Combining community bank products and services with our fintech offerings creates a formula that positions these small to mid-size businesses to not only survive and compete, but to lead and thrive in a sustainable way.

Aligning your own success to that of your partners and their customers isn’t original, nor should it be particularly noteworthy. But at this point in our history, our community banks need all of us operating on this principle, doing everything we can to work together to serve American business. According to the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, firms with fewer than 20 employees account for more than 89 percent of American businesses. That statistic alone tells you the magnitude of what we’re facing here, but I’m glad to know we are partnering with some of the most capable people in business, and commit that Celero will strive to hold up its end of the deal, passionately cultivating the success of our bank partners.

Jeff Brown-July 25, 2019 If you read anything by or about Celero, you’ll see the word “integration” in lots of places. That’s one of the hallmarks of our company, a diligence we take into everything we do. It’s about delivering value on multiple fronts for our partners and merchants.

We normally speak of integration with regard to helping small and mid-sized merchants get a competitive edge, by merging payments with SaaS solutions, analytics, and other tools for financial management, operations management, and business-building. And while we are laser-focused on developing the ultimate one-stop commerce solutions shop for SMBs, that doesn’t mean we’re not looking for similar synergies for our partner institutions, chief among them community and regional banks.

That’s where our recent acquisition of Elmhurst Financial really makes sense.

While we really liked everything about this company—the exclusive focus on community and regional banks, the white glove service, great technology, and their ability to walk in their partners’ shoes—what I liked best about this team was their ability to bring all of that together and deliver an experience that makes doing business with Elmhurst easy.

Perhaps the best example of how Elmhurst approaches solving challenges for financial institutions is their BANKMAX program. This team seems to take nothing for granted. While I know we have competitors with good pricing and solid training programs, Elmhurst’s BANKMAX is the most comprehensive approach to partnering we’ve seen in this industry. In addition to competitive products and services and access to an elite inside sales team, what’s special about this program is how it helps regional banks create an ethical sales culture.

How do they accomplish this? Technology. When you’re able to help your merchants find real savings in the payments ecosystem, giving them real data in contrast to the smoke-and-mirrors approach they see in other quarters, that’s a commitment to doing business the right way for both merchants and the banks they trust, day-in and day-out.  

BANKMAX is all about putting our partners in position to win, since their victories are aligned to the success of their merchants. Happy merchants—those who have the payments capabilities they need at competitive prices they can understand—will see their bankers as partners who share in their success, rather than simply trying to maximize their own income at product level.  

If you’re into the numbers of this business, like we are at Celero, it’s hard to look at the tools and reporting included in BANKMAX and not geek out at the insights available to financial institution partners. The level of detail captured in sales and merchant reporting, as long as the ongoing portfolio analysis, is certainly equal to any technology that commercial bankers enjoy at large banks with in-house merchant departments.  That’s precisely our value proposition, and why we’ve felt so aligned to our teammates from Elmhurst from day one, that quest to give community banks the technology and tools to compete with much larger competitors, so that they, in turn, can equip small merchants in ways only large companies take as routine.

We welcome the Elmhurst team to Celero, and we are excited by all of the possibilities for us to all grow together.

Jim Harris-July 11, 2019 My long-time friend and our CEO, Kevin Jones, talks often about the importance of integration when it comes to helping small and mid-sized businesses compete and win. What he’s referring to is a natural fit that occurs when great financial technology from different corners of the market—payments, SaaS, and analytics—comes together to bring a one-stop shop for SMB management, both from financial and operational perspectives.

While Kevin’s vision is unmatched in the industry in this regard, I focus my role on something that’s even more foundational, and I’m pleased to tell you that what’s behind every great integration is a great partnership, whether it’s a collection of brands like UMS Banking, Elmhurst, Tandem, and RazorSync, or you’re talking about partnerships of the external, strategic variety.

For me, there are many great partnership opportunities for a company like Celero and its subsidiaries like UMS. We’ve seen a wonderful partnership develop internally as we integrate our teams on a shared services platform that will offer incredible value to SMBs. We also see this dynamic in our work at local community banks through UMS, as well as larger community banks and regional banks through Elmhurst.

At UMS and Elmhurst, we work through commercial bankers and the many teammates who support their work, from branch managers to tellers. Partnerships work and only work when both sides can win. When a community bank brings in a payment processing partner like UMS or Elmhurst, both teams can do what they do best, share the revenue accordingly, and give their mutual customer, the SMB, the tools they need to compete. Commercial bankers are at their best when they can focus on building client relationships and leave their partners to simplify otherwise complex aspects of their clients’ businesses.

The same can be said for software providers. There are many SaaS providers out there that are focused on specific industry verticals. A great example is our own RazorSync, but there are many others out there, too. Again, the developer can stick to what they do best—writing great software, while we can come in with a frictionless integration and onboarding experience for the SMB that’s as easy as clicking on the browser icon on your new computer’s desktop. While I suppose it’s possible that you can build a great app without payments integration, having the revenue stream connected to your financial and operational management means a lot more data and a lot better decision-making along your business-building journey.  

Another great value proposition is that of associations. Again, a partnership must deliver value on both ends. When we can engage with associations, we have the opportunity to grow exponentially the number of merchants we serve. In exchange, the association—a member-driven organization that needs to think of new ways each year to deliver greater value to its member companies—has a program that offers competitive rates and terms that help its members grow.

One of the things I love most about our industry is that it’s full of people who are collaborative by nature. That doesn’t mean that we’re not competitive, but rather that we’re able to focus not only on what we need in business, but what our partners, be they financial institutions, software developers, associations, or others, need as well.  What we are building here at Celero, while it may not be unique, it’s nonetheless special. It’s special because of the integrity we have in aligning our success to that of our partners. They find out very quickly that if we are going to invest ourselves, our financial resources, and our capabilities into a partnership, it’s because we’re betting on them to win.

When you base your partnerships on being fair to your partners and positioning them to win big, you can expect great results for your own team as a result, too.