Visbanking founder and CEO Brian Pillmore said that while banking has long been a relationship-driven business, especially at the local and regional level, relying solely on those relationships in a data-driven area leaves those institutions at risk.
Visbanking offers source integration, production data pipelines, modelling, application development, and decision-ready analytics that can be used alone or in combination. The company tracks FDIC, SEC, EDGAR, and SBA data, along with credit union, UCC, geographical, and personnel movement to provide comprehensive views of lending risk and competitiveness.
An engineer by training, Pillmore held executive roles at Wells Fargo, GE Capital, and UMB Bank before founding Visbanking in 2020. He knows the importance of relationships, but also sees the many isolated data sources that, if combined, would be a powerful asset for institutions of all sizes.
But few are aware of the benefits of data harmonization, Pillmore said. Many executives work their way up through banks, trained by people who followed the same path. They learned traditional banking ways and filled traditional banking roles.
Being smaller, those institutions couldn’t develop their own data incorporation systems in-house, if they even knew the value of doing so. The few that do may have learned about it from a peer who migrated to a fintech; they are likely unaware of the full range of transformative possibilities out there.
“Functioning strictly through relationships and trusting your gut isn’t good enough for the fintech era,” Pillmore said. “There’s a gap between the relationship people and the data-driven business now required.”
If done manually, how often does a bank check a borrower’s Paydex score? Monthly? At renewal? When does it hear bad news? How does it address material changes if it even hears of them? Many don’t even know what they don’t know.
“They grew up within a bank, so they never get a cross-functional and cross-industry view until a fintech pitches them,” Pillmore said.
How Visbanking works
Visbanking continuously collates data from many sources to provide a more holistic view of a client or prospect’s recent financial activity. That helps answer key questions:
Are they loyal to one institution, or do they farm out payments to another source?
Visbanking tracks routing numbers and ACH activity to see who gets that business.
Do they have business at multiple institutions and constantly shop around for better rates?
In such cases, one institution may be unaware of its client activity at another institution that affects its risk profile.
Pillmore cited the example of a community banker deciding which clients to clear on a daily overdraft report. Nine times out of 10, it’s a gut decision.
And if an institution does use data, how effective is the data it uses? How often is it updated? Is all data reported? Is the institution aware that bureaus don’t share all of their data?
“We see there’s a lack of continual monitoring,” Pillmore said. “It’s not like Generative AI or agentic AI is going to solve all your problems. You’ve got to have real source data for it to work on, and that data has to be refreshed regularly, be accurate, and have validation, cleanliness, organization…”
At some point, as banks seek growth, they face a reckoning.
“Many MNA decisions see a bank selling because it cannot take the next step,” Pillmore said.