This was our first year at the IBAT Annual Convention, hosted by the Independent Bankers Association of Texas, and I came home already thinking about next year.
Before we even got to San Antonio, IBAT's Beth Sheahan sat down with our team and gave us a piece of advice that stuck. Show up, she told us, and get to know the people who make up these banks and credit unions, not just the companies themselves. Little by little, that's how the inroads that actually matter get made. Not a slick ad or fancy pitch deck.
I loved that advice, because it's exactly how we prefer to do business at iDENTIFY… At the speed of relationship.
Four days at La Cantera in the Hill Country proved her right. The venue was great, and it gave the week room for the kind of conversations that don't fit on an agenda. Some of my best conversations all week happened nowhere near a session. I got to grab lunch with the team over at TransPecos Bank, a fantastic client, though I forgot to take photos. A few quick connects in the vendor hall that turned into twenty minute convos. A conversation at breakfast that had nothing to do with a pitch and everything to do with what's actually keeping a bank's ops team up at night right now. These conversations mean a lot to me and our team because we are passionate about solving problems and hearing those problems first hand gives us so much insight into how to connect the dots for our clients.
The agenda at IBAT’s Annual Convention was strong. Five breakout tracks, regulators from the Fed, the OCC, the FDIC, and the Texas Department of Banking sitting on panels next to the bankers they oversee, a Folds of Honor founder and a rodeo champion both talking, from very different careers, about what you do when the ground shifts under you. Good content. But the room mattered more than the stage.
Here's what I noticed when I looked up from those conversations. The vendor hall was a bit tight, yet traffic flowed to the booths nonstop, and the crowd was almost entirely banks in the $300M-$2B+ range we build for. IBAT's own members say the same thing when you ask how they pick who to work with: peer recommendation and an existing relationship beat an ad campaign every time. That confirmed what Beth told us going in, and it's exactly how we've always tried to work with our client base.
This won't be a one-time visit. IBAT is stacked with some stellar people. We're carrying real relationships out of this one, including a new bank leadership team we hadn't talked to before IBAT and are excited to explore solving some of their challenges with our products.
If your bank was at the convention this year and we didn't cross paths yet, that's just a matter of time. This is a community we want to be part of for a long time, not a box to check once a year. My calendar link is below if you want to get that conversation started sooner.
