Lumin Digital founder and CEO Jeff Chambers recently appeared on the Fintech Cowboys podcast to discuss how strong leadership, a culture of innovation, and a focus on disciplined execution have shaped Lumin’s growth.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Chambers shared what differentiates Lumin in a crowded digital banking landscape, how to build a lasting company, and why emerging technologies like AI are pushing the industry into its next era.
Explore key themes and takeaways from the conversation:
On the importance of fostering a culture of innovation and creativity
“Our company was founded on this belief that you could build a workforce, a community of smart, talented people who can come in and use cutting-edge technology to solve critical problems for financial institutions.”
“Finding problems to solve is not hard in the industry…people talk about the problems all day long. And they actually talk a lot about the solutions. But the execution is what’s really hard. So what we did at Lumin is we figured out how to proactively architect the DNA of the company so that we can hire smart people, get them committed to a common goal, get them going that extra mile for the customer, get them working cooperatively, and really build this innovation machine that can tackle these thorny issues for customers.”
“It starts with the employees. It starts with the culture. It starts with how you lead. It starts with the behaviors that you value and model and how you treat your people. And there’s a whole kind of playbook on how we manage that…it’s a participatory organization that has hyper-transparency, and we’re bottom-up. And we are just getting started.”
On what sets Lumin apart from its peers
“What Lumin is doing a little bit differently is that we come to market, we get our foot in the door with a bunch of new stuff that nobody else is doing. Cloud native, containerization, all of these new benefits. We’ve got really happy customers, fantastic app scores. We use iSky and all kinds of analytics to track how we compare on a service level, on an app score level, and on an NPS level. We have consistently led in all of those publicly available KPIs across the board.”
“Lumin is the only platform in the market that’s one codebase, completely unified technology. You open up a deposit account, you open up a new loan, it’s seamlessly integrated into digital banking, into your mobile app, into the back office tools, into the call center. So you have that parity of integration…we’ve reduced a lot of complexity and just made it easier and cheaper for financial institutions to bring on new deposits and new loans…. [We’ve] mastered the patience to do it the right way.”
On AI and other key industry trends
“The fintech banking world is going to look radically different in 15 and 20 years…the next two decades are going to be defined by AI in ways that we couldn’t see.”
“The industry is going to change quite a bit…financial institutions are going to have to recalibrate how they serve the customer…there’s going to be a lot of opportunity and there’s going to be a lot of disruption. And at Lumin, we feel pretty comfortable that we’re on the right path.”
“We could not have possibly anticipated in the mid ’90s where the internet was going to take the industry. And we’re in that same disposition today. At Lumin, what we are doing is innovating for our clients.”
