David Reiling, CEO of Sunrise Banks, on Values-Based Banking, the Entrepreneurial Spirit and Expanding Financial Access

Hello and welcome to the Do One Better Podcast in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Alberto Legi from London. Please click that subscribe button and follow us if you're not already doing so and do leave us a rating and a review. It helps others to find the show as well. Today, it's an absolute pleasure to welcome onto the show, David Riling, Chief Executive Officer of Sunrise Banks. Sunrise Banks is an entrepreneurial story, we're doing good and doing well financially are not mutually exclusive. And David's story is one of entrepreneurship. David founded Sunrise Banks and today we look at the close links that they have to the local community, we look at financial inclusion, financial literacy, and we also look at the fact that positive energy, positive thinking, a can-do attitude, feed the entrepreneurial spirit. So if you love the entrepreneurial spirit, if you love doing good and if you love doing well, then this episode is for you. And David, on that note, a big heartfelt welcome to the Do One Better Podcast today. Alberto, great to be with you today, I look forward to our conversation. Likewise, likewise. Now you're the Chief Executive Officer of Sunrise Banks, I'd love to start there. What Sunrise Banks all about? Hey, well, Sunrise Banks, first and foremost, it is a mission-driven bank and that may sound kind of sloganish in terms of banks, but that is we are really all about doing well and doing good. So our success is measured in yes and financial and sustainability. We are a regulated financial institution in the United States, but right alongside that we measure the impact both on a social side as well as an environmental side. And so those two things go hand in hand. A lot of people would say, hey, you need to make money in order to do your mission and I would tell you it's the exact opposite. We need to do our mission and that's how we are financially sustainable. What's the story like when did you guys start up? Where are you operating? Who's there? Who's alongside you? Yeah, well, sit back and relax on this one, but so I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota and in the United States and for your audience, some people may not know where Minnesota is, it's kind of flyover country between New York and Los Angeles. So we sit on top right next to Canada and yes, it's cold and dark in the winter, but it's beautiful in the summer. So having grown up here, I had work construction for my uncle every summer that I can imagine except for one when I was a bank teller and I got to tell you, I loved being a bank teller. Maybe it was just because there was air conditioning, but I don't think so. The bank that I was in that particular summer got robbed twice, once it was left to me, once to the right to me and as a young kid, I thought it was exciting. The banks have money, there's lots of people, there's these bank robberies. I just thought it was great. So I knew at a very early age that I was going to be a banker, I just really liked the context and how it engaged with the community. So you go off to university, the one thing I really didn't know about myself deep down is I'm really an entrepreneur at heart, had started a business in college, built it up and sold it shortly after I graduated, but there was one kind of defining moment I would say in college and that was, I did some volunteer work in Tijuana, Mexico. I went to school in San Diego and there was really this kind of epiphany of, I could build homes and I could help people and the feeling I got from doing that was kind of a paycheck like no other. There was that emotional paycheck of that doing good part that was like purposeful in my life and I wanted to figure out how I could both make a living and provide for myself and eventually my family, but also have that fulfillment of, this is a good thing and I feel good about myself every day and excited to go to work. So long story short there, I graduated from school, I find myself in Los Angeles working as a bank trainee in the bank robberies, come back in my history. The first two weeks I'm on the job, the bank I mean gets robbed three times. And so, again, my mindset and this is, banks have money, it must happen a lot obviously it's a regular occurrence. It just so happened that the third time this bank got robbed, there was not an officer on the floor, I took care of it, I worked with the FBI and you know do what you're supposed to do in a bank robbery. Well my manager's manager got wind of that, she promptly sent me to South Central Los Angeles the next Monday which was the bank cut robbery capital of the world as well as the bloods and the crypts, the two gangs were fighting a lot over drug turf, the Rodney King rights started just like two blocks away from where I was and it was a very, again from my perspective, you came to work 100% every day because you never knew what was going to go on or where risk was and so, but again I found it really exciting but it wasn't until I had, I'd gone to my head for the third time that I was like you know my luck is not going to last, there's no way that I can manage all of it. So I ended up, I decided to move, I went to work for Citibank, downtown Los Angeles, had a great experience there. My father who is a real estate, I'll say entrepreneur, he owned his own real estate company, he ended up buying a small bank back here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And I don't know if you did that in lieu of trying to get me back to move back to Minnesota but it worked, eventually he called and he said you know there's another bank for sale and I think you should take a look at buying it, it's in a community you know well my Italian grandmother who is an immigrant to the United States lived in this community and I spent quite a bit of time growing up and so sure enough I bought the bank with my father's help at that time, he's still my minority shareholder. And but this community, always a community of immigrants, it just so happen that the immigrants of this time were among lowation and they're basically refugees of the Vietnam War and it was clear from the very start that the only way this bank was going to survive is that the monger were going to be successful and I had to figure out ways in which to provide them capital in which to buy homes and cars and businesses and their success would be mine and if they failed I would fail and so a really interconnection between shared success in purpose in this case and that's where the beginning of sunrise kind of started. The mong did great, they were great people, half of my staff at one time were mong and half of my customers were mong and we just kept going and I found out that you know I thought people and banks had figured out this community and economic development thing but I realized quite quickly that no one had figured out, which I thought was fantastic because then I could just create and invent things and tools in which to provide capital to this community as well as as bank them and provide them I'll say the education and access they needed in which to continue to prosper both kind of professionally and personally and that was just uniquely rewarding. Ended up buying another bank that was in the urban community that was in trouble and so the story of sunrise banks that is plural is that we started out with really three separate charters relatively in the same kind of two cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul but I kept them distinctly different because they were so ingrained in the community ahead such a good brand and trust but as time went on they grew and it just became a little too cumbersome to have three separate charters and so we put them together came up with a name sunrise which is kind of maybe a not a funny story but I was on my way to work and I drive from Minneapolis to St. Paul and I drive into the sun every day and I'm like you know every day brings hope it brings a new sunrise and I'm like that's what this work is all about and so hence the origin of sunrise banks. It's great to hear about that both the immigrant story the entrepreneurial spirit and then also engaging with that local community and appreciating that if they're thriving you'll thrive as well and the fact that doing good and doing well financially are not mutually exclusive by any means right. Absolutely. Now in terms of that global flavor as it were your engagement and your interests also on the sort of social impact side go beyond the U.S. give us a little bit of insight on to that what are you up to outside the borders of the U.S. Yeah so one of my maybe it's a blessing and a curse is my ambition. So as we were having you know as that entrepreneurial ambition it was a little hard for me to rain in while we were having great social impact on the very local front I really wasn't satisfied with that you know we could help hundreds of people but I wanted to help thousands and ultimately millions of people particularly in that space where they're under under bank or underserved or they didn't have access to the financial system and so we kind of quickly got into the financial technology space which really helped us from a standpoint of being able to offer financial services nationally but then kind of pushing it one step further I was like you know to have a great national brand you should probably have a little flavor of the international and so that led me into an organization called the Global Alliance for Banking on Values. So think of an alliance of 70 plus banks in 45 plus countries that their authentic mission of their institution is around social impact financial inclusion quite frankly environmental impact and sustainability as well as I'll say profitability or prosperity. So all these are regulated financial institutions they have to run a safe and sound shop but at the same time measuring that social and environmental impact as key factors in the business and you'd be surprised on the statistics when we look at the various scorecards of the institutions they actually are more sustainable than your largest institutions in the world and you can look at this over time of over a couple decades. So what was really fascinating about this group was kind of their individual stories of these banks whether it's in Bangladesh or whether it's in Uganda or in Italy or these banks are really each one has its unique story in place and fits into a need of its community and as a result of kind of solving problems in its local community began to expand and grow and again it's that innovation and that willingness to listen kind of authentically to the people that they're serving that they really then began to find new and innovative products and services and what I've seen from a global standpoint is leveraging technology in a way that provides more financial access and capabilities as well as financial education but does so and kind of breaks down the barriers of distance as well as language and culture and it's just been fascinating. What are you seeing these days with a sort of global overview that you have in your engagement with financial services but also the technology that fit in tech and the innovative side? What is it that you're seeing happening these days in terms of the developing world, their leveraging of technology in order to improve financial inclusion in order to engage more women into the labor market into the financial system? How would you characterize things? How are things looking? Yeah, I can give you from a higher level of view to start with, it's interesting, given all the things going on in the world today, I'll call it the movement of values-based banking is growing. The institutions that are seeking membership and are seeking community as well as that ability to share not only stories and ideas together in innovative products and services is really finding its way and growing in momentum and so that part is really interesting and a good example of this is I recently had the opportunity along with a couple of members of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values to meet with the Central Bank of Ethiopia and for your listeners the Ethiopia is at a really interesting turning point in that they're opening their banking system up to foreign investment which means that they're going to require more capital in these banks but they want these banks to grow and they want their economy to grow. But I give the head of the Central Bank tremendous credit, he really understands the financial inclusion component of this and what it means to Ethiopia. So as an example, there's approximately maybe 120 million people in Ethiopia but only a couple hundred thousand have access to credit in the financial services system today. So as they open up the banking system to be able to provide financial services to the broader Ethiopian population, he knows that that is great for the economy. It moves the needle in terms of the GDP of Ethiopia and if you can do that systemically from the start, there's really a phenomenal opportunity here in which to include people in it really get the economy going but provide those things to folks both urban and rural access in terms of financial services in capital and really spur entrepreneurship, I'll say home ownership, but also the one thing that I found when we were on the ground in Ethiopia was really the empowerment of women. Women in a lot of cases there, they run the household and I'm probably it's no big surprise. I see this almost everywhere in every developing country and I see it in the United States as well, women kind of rule the roost and quite frankly giving them the tools and the power and the education and the access to financial services is really a powerful instrument in terms of the family unit, the children, they're well-being and so in the structure of the family ultimately. And so you think banking is kind of boring and it's kind of ho-hom but there's really power in being able to provide that access and the education and the ability for people to really manage their life. You know the one thing that I would say when we talk about financial literacy which I always kind of find a funny, especially the way that things get when we think of financial literacy, let me put it this way, it's always like oh I the banker I'm going to teach the student who is the client in this particular case about financial literacy. The fact is is I find myself learning more from them about financial literacy. I have the very standard traditional ways that fit into the box of the way I'll say traditional financial services are thought, but when you change the circumstances particularly I'll say the time frame. One thing that's generally misunderstood is people say well they just don't understand financial instruments, well financial instruments are generally designed for a more longer term like a retirement plan or a savings plan well if you need to eat and find food in a couple of hours because you're hungry, a savings plan is irrelevant. So the urgency in which you look at financial literacy has to be done in the context of speed, time and the priorities. If your children are hungry you're not thinking about next week, you're thinking about now. Financial circumstances that play into the communities that we serve are sometimes different than the traditional and therefore financial products and services response times engagement has to be different. And so when we talk about particularly financial literacy and technology it is really up to the banker in this case to understand the circumstances of the client they're trying to serve in order to design and innovate the right solutions and they're not always traditional. And so that's the place where I find financial literacy key and I can give you one example. I was talking about the mong and how we kind of built the bank from the origin. I was in the parking lot of our bank and I was watching three, I'll call them mongram others at our ATM trying to get cash out of our ATM and they were putting the card in and pushing buttons and they weren't having much success. So I went up to them and asked them if I can help, quickly discovered that they don't speak English and I don't speak mong so with a couple of smiles and gestures I showed them how to put the card in and press the buttons and get the cash out. They come back a week later with their granddaughter who might have been maybe 12 years old so she was the translator. They basically asked can you teach the community how to use this card and get the cash and it was their government benefits or county benefits for food. And so we eventually we just we held classes at the ATM in person with groups around to show them how to use the ATM a very simple type of way to engage in education but it was like holding classes and we did that multiple times. Well we taught a whole community how to use an ATM machine but we did much more we not only built trust with the community but we showed them how to use a financial tool in terms of a card and begin the road of digital education. How can you buy things online how can you use this at the grocery store. So it began to open up a whole another world so the financial education in this component was not you know you need to plan for your future it was how do you access this and how do you use this technology in a way that can be beneficial for you as opposed to carrying all your cash on your person every day. So again the circumstances of a financial education I find really interesting it circumstance driven and the more you can understand and put yourself in the moccasins of your of who you're serving the better the solution and the better the education you can deliver. It really you have to become a servant leader in that particular case. You mentioned it circumstance driven I'm curious when when you said to yourself okay we could probably hold some classes here by the ATM the cash point as it were. What did your chief people officer chief training person say this guy David what are you doing that's not in our budget that's not in our plan how did that happen what was their reception internally. Well I maybe I have the pleasure of being the president of the bank and so forth and so there are a few things that I can say you know we're going to do this and quite frankly I'm happy to I'm happy to be the teacher and in wasn't this particular case and the bank was very small at that time so there really wasn't a chief people officer that was probably me as well as one of my titles. So I again from maybe from an entrepreneurial mindset yeah we're just going to do this and we're going to see what happens now somebody could hold this up or whatever but the fact is is it was just a community need let's give it a try and so there are some things I think you just have to do in terms of that that training spirit as it were this week and you're flying off to Chicago you're a mentor you're going to do a little bit of training formula or informal tell us a little bit about that. I have been in a strategic coaching program for gosh over 17 years and I'm the student and I'm with a group of entrepreneurs from around the world and it's called the strategic coach and it is phenomenal. It is two days of the most optimistically crazy people on this planet and again their mindset about what is possible and the ambition that they have is just so inspirational and it's such a different way of thinking and with again you can kind of get maybe run down with all the news of today this group is just one big ball of positive energy that is like we're just going to we're going to solve the big issues of today and tomorrow and so it really helps you're thinking come back motivated fired up and again like any crazy CEO goes to a conference I come back with a zillion ideas and my staff or you know don't know what to do. Yeah I got to take an aspirin or two with with your ideas coming into the I mean you're an entrepreneur is that the key ingredients if there is one is that that mindset that positivity that can do attitude which I think is lacking in so many places but yes being grounded in reality but just having a positive disposition. You know you're preaching to the choir here so I would say yes I would really say it's not only positive but it's abundance it's that your future is going to be bigger than your past and things are not scarcity and running out things are getting better and bigger and you're a part of that momentum in that in that move forward to a better place and so again I think that ambition and that abundance of we can do things differently and we can do things better is really and again the every I think of the world like this like I came to work this morning in the US and I'm like you know every day up until now was just practice for what I'm going to do this afternoon I got all the skills and all it but it's just going to be better I one more today than I did yesterday and here we go let's see what we can do and it is contagious it is contagious oh I haven't had you attract crazy people too yeah fortunately it is contagious and so with that spirit that abundance that positivity and bigger and better going forward what's the what's the horizon what's that sunrise in that horizon for you what what what are you sort of hoping if you're not having a coffee in five years time it's 20 30 and we're looking back what are the sort of things you love to say look Alberta delighted we nailed these things over the last five years oh I can't tell you over how much I love this question because it is the way to frame I think your life in terms of if we were five years out what does it look like looking back that is really the way you measure things and so from that standpoint I would say from a sunrise our our impact is probably gone ten times again and I think of our our growth in ten times increments from where we started and we're on our third ten times so if we could get to that not only would the bank be I guess fairly significantly larger but our impact to people would likely mean that we have probably served anywhere from four to six million more people who did not have access to the financial institution before and now do as a result of sunrise and our activities and our engagement with with people and communities around the United States and and that would be a marker in addition to that our carbon footprint would be half of what it is today that's our marker for 20 30 and in order to do so we have to engage with our borrowers and our customers in a very meaningful way in terms of of climate and greenhouse gas reduction the the state of affairs in the U.S. you're based out there and it's it's a unbanked underbanked is that very much an issue in your operating environment? It is for us in the in the people that we focus on and that comes in in a couple of different flavors I would say one of that those flavors is folks and again I'll use the immigrants as an example because they're typically a cash based group of people that you can kind of get your head around you might end up in the United States you don't really understand the banking system but you understand cash physical either have it or you don't so you know the currency component to this and then moving people into digital and into a bank account type of world so that's one way to think about it the other is you'll find lower income citizens of the United States even young young people they need to build a credit history they need some financial education about how to do that what's proper and while stirring them away from predatory products that get them into trouble and so that access to small dollar credit which can build credit history in some cases smooth out income volatility or expense volatility to allow people to keep going without blowing up in a bankruptcy situation or losing their apartment or something like that so that financial inclusion is a significant issue in the United States and for example the your credit history your credit bureau or score in the United States impacts more things than just getting alone it impacts getting car insurance impacts getting a car impacts getting an apartment so many different things the saying that we have and it's a very common one is it's expensive to be poor you need a good credit history to save money in all these various kind of bigger ticket items and so as a result if we can help build a positive credit history helps people get a good stable apartment that's affordable in addition to that can provide them let's say access to auto insurance that's significantly lower than than otherwise and it keeps their their precious dollars in the service of the family or education or the household is that easy to do or is it easier said and done I mean it sounds like it's a challenge yeah it's always a challenge and I would say the challenge for this and maybe the enlightenment is the folks were serving just don't come to us we have to go to them we have to meet them where they are in their communities in their space and how they present themselves and what their issues are so again it's a proactive approach of finding pockets and niches of communities that we can serve understanding what those problems are and bringing the solutions to them so it does take a little it takes more work but the fact is that work is rewarding and it's beneficial for the people who are serving as well as the bank and the institution so there is very much a good win-win here but it's not a typical bank where you're going to sit back and wait for somebody to walk in the door yeah and they may not walk through the door right I mean unless you're proactively correct you know what there's not many bankers usually in the spaces that we're playing in so they're like you're from a bank and so it yeah there's there's a lot of people could see you now that I'm looking at you through zoom you're wearing short sleeves I think and you're feeling fairly relaxed you're you're I don't see any cufflings or or bright bright suspenders no not that kind of a banker if you will it is summer in Minnesota and it is delightful out right now so any chance we get to wear short sleeve shirts we'll take it but no again part of understanding our the people that we're serving is really the cultural sensitivity of yeah we're not going to look like a buttoned up banker listen David I've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation before you run off I'd love to ask you for a key takeaway what's that one thing you'd love for the audience to keep in mind after they finished listening to today's episode gosh if there's one thing that I would really love to share with your audience is that and I'm an example of this every day I really love what I do and I think the reason I love what I do is I get to bring my values and my purpose in life to my work every day and so that that purpose driven life to be able to do well and do good at the same time is not only possible but I encourage you to pursue it because your life's passion is where your energy lies and all good things will follow from that and so take a chance take that risk but but go with your go with your purpose and and lead with that energy because I'm telling you you'll find like-minded people the community will start to build and and you'll just have some great I'll say life success I love the positivity I love the great energy and David thank you for joining me and joining us on the Do One Better Podcast it's been an absolute pleasure hosting you on the show Alberto great to be with you and I wish your audience all the best perfect and that's a wrap thanks very much for tuning in as always you've been listening to a great chat with David Ryling chief executive officer of Sunrise Banks for information about this conversation and more than 300 other interviews and case studies with remarkable leaders in philanthropy sustainability and social entrepreneurship just visit our website at lege.org that's l-i-dj-i.org please click that subscribe button and follow us if you're not already doing so and do leave us a rating and a review it helps others to find this show as well thoroughly enjoyed producing today's episode for you now very much look forward to catching up with you again this coming Monday.