What

The Independent Community Bankers of America is Washington DC-based trade group representing approximately 5,000 community banks. Founded in 1930, ICBA conducts lobbying efforts, hosts trade conferences, and functions as an incubator for nascent community bank-focused technologies and businesses. 

Notably, ICBA is also home to its ThinkTECH Accelerator, a 10-week bootcamp for community bank-focused fintech solutions. ThinkTECH aims to foster bank-fintech partnerships, improve banks’ efficiency, grow deposits, and improve customer engagement. Six companies are chosen for each of ThinkTECH’s two annual cohorts.

Why

To Charles Potts, EVP and Chief Innovation Officer of ICBA, ThinkTECH represents a “key pillar” of ICBA and arose from community banks' drive to be “on par with the biggest fintechs and banks on the planet.” Crucially, Potts said, ThinkTECH is banker-driven, rather than a “classic ‘solution in search of a problem’-oriented accelerator program.” Concretely, that means solutions are heavily invested in from the beginning, and are designed with markets, communities, and customers in mind. 

ThinkTECH also helps “de-risk the stranglehold that the core vendors have had on their technology solutions,” Potts elaborated. Through ThinkTECH, community banks can also secure the kinds of solutions they specifically need, rather than receiving one-size-fits-all solutions from incumbents.

How

To create an accelerator program that suits community banks' needs, ThinkTECH works with an advisory committee of 35 bankers to name common problems and then filter through candidate companies for the accelerator. The committee and the accelerator tend to select early-stage or growth-stage companies, which already have revenue but are malleable enough to have their outcomes shaped to fit community banks' needs. 

“And so our accelerator program is specifically designed over 10 weeks to help take these companies through community bank bootcamp,” Potts said. “How do they need to think about working with community banks? What are the risk and compliance and third-party assessments they need to think about? Can we bring marketing accounting legal, compliance resources in conjunction with these companies and help mold what they're doing?”

Just last week, for example, ThinkTECH held a “regulatory and compliance week,” which saw regulatory agencies present to accelerator companies. That knowledge helps the accelerator participants moving forward to ensure that their pitches to community banks are relevant from a compliance perspective, and can sustain themselves legally once they’re up and running. Other parts of the accelerator help them refine their product, GTM strategy, pricing, integrations, and partnerships. 

Particularly successful accelerator graduates can secure “preferred service provider” status, which indicates ICBA’s especial relationship with the vendor over ICBA’s 200-plus other vendor partners. “When we think about innovation, we think about not just technology, but all of the ways we're going to help banks arm themselves with the capabilities to be successful,” Potts said. 

ICBA brought its accelerator in-house over a year ago so that it could react more tactically to important trends. Last year, for example, the cohort focused on deposits and faster payments in the wake of the SVB crisis, while the current cohort is focused on SMBs as well as data and analytics. ThinkTECH now has a permanent footprint in Atlanta through ICBA’s Center for Innovation, which, Potts said, was chosen as the Center’s location due to the financial expertise and leadership that can be found in Atlanta—from regulators, to banks, to researchers, to fintechs. ThinkTECH is now recruiting for its next accelerator, which begins in May and will continue to center data analytics as a core priority.