Help Me With Sign North Carolina Banking Presentation

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To date, financial technology companies -- Square, Venmo, you name it -- unless it's actually a service provided by a bank, guess what? They need a bank. They need a bank to access the payment system, the ability to clear and settle transactions, whether those are payment transactions or loan transactions. So Square uses a bank in Utah, Celtic Bank, that is its partner bank for certain transactions. OK, well the money's going into a bank. Well, yeah, but it's going in different ways, as I described earlier. Sometimes it's going in with special accounting so that individual depositors' deposits are insured. Sometimes it's not, and that does create some ambiguity for the consumer and I also have to tell you I'm not sure some consumers care, but that's a story for another day. Right now they need banks. That's not the only option they have though. There are financial technology companies that have said, "You know, maybe we just should be a bank," and we do have a handful of those across the country, technology companies that have become banks. So I was out on one on in North Carolina not too long ago -- Live Oak bank, which is a tech campus. It has no branches. You go out there and -- see these guys here in the front row? It's like, I don't know, a thousand of you guys sitting in this big open room, and it's a tech company. It's called a bank. It's a tech company. It's all electronic services. But that's an option for financial technology companies, not a favorite option, because my folks over there are called bank regulators, and they're always looking at these darn banks and saying, "Are you safe and sound and are you complying with consumer laws and regulations?" So we don't see tech companies running to be banks, but some are. Of course, there's another option, and this is actually when I can use Square, and that is to look for a quasi-bank. So there's a couple of options available to these financial technology companies. The one that's not really open right now, it was called a special-purpose charter offered as a national bank charter. It's in litigation. We don't think that's moving at least in the foreseeable future. So the other option is what Square did, and in the state of Utah, there's a special charter called an industrial own company charter, and the reason that some companies like Square are looking at that are largely because the structure of it doesn't have all the same prohibitions that banks are subject to under the Bank Holding Company Act. "I don't know, you know, you -- something that doesn't feel like a level playing field. We'll see how that all works." But we'll see how that Square application comes out. The reason we're watching that with interest is because if that special entity is, if Square is allowed to open it, we expect a bunch of Fintech companies to follow suit, and then -- Chris Reichert. You have a different challenge on your hands. We've talked for years... Why are there not new banks or very many new banks? It's because there are new fintech companies and they are really becoming the different bank in the competitive environment.