Devesh Khare of MeridianLink On 5 Things You Need To Succeed In The Modern World Of Finance & Fintech
An Interview With Jason Hartman
Demographics of loan servicing have changed. Millennials are now the largest originators of loans by volume, followed by Gen Z. Many of the people in these groups grew up with a smartphone in their hand and have only ever known a world that relies heavily on digital banking. The number of people walking into physical bank branches is lower than ever before. It’s clear that the model has changed, so it’s time for financial services companies to change too.
As part of my series about the “How to Navigate and Succeed in the Modern World of Finance”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Devesh Khare.
Devesh Khare has served as Chief Product Officer of MeridianLink since 2022. Prior to that, he held the role of Vice President of Product Management, also at MeridianLink. Since joining MeridianLink, Mr. Khare has led portfolio and market expansions both organically and through multiple acquisitions and has been integral in the launch and success of MeridianLink One. Over his 16-year product management career, he has worked in product strategy and portfolio expansion across several industries, including fintech, health IT, and mobile commerce.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1999 with my bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. My first job was at Nortel, the Canadian telecommunications and networking company, and I have been working in the technology industry ever since.
I joined MeridianLink as the vice president of product in 2020 and was promoted to Chief Product Officer earlier this year. In both roles, I led portfolio and market expansions, both through acquisitions and organic growth, and had a significant role in the launch of our MeridianLink One platform.
Prior to MeridianLink, I served as the head of wage payments products at ADP, the multinational human resources software company. Before ADP, I spent more than four years in various product roles at Kareo, a health-tech startup. Both companies taught me a lot about innovation in the financial services, technology, and software industries, knowledge which I’m leveraging at MeridianLink every day to ensure we’re providing the best possible solutions to our customers.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
When I started my first job after graduating from UBC, my manager gave me a long list of tasks to complete for the new semiconductor device my team was working on. In an attempt to impress my new colleagues with my knowledge and abilities, I set out to complete all the tasks as quickly as possible; I worked practically non-stop the whole week, including at night and on the weekend, to get all the tasks completed.
When I went to work the next Monday and told my manager everything was done, he laughed and said the task list was designed to be completed across three months at the company as a way for me to get oriented with the project and its workflow, develop relationships with my coworkers, and learn from those who were more experienced than me.
As a new professional, this experience was embarrassing, but as I look back on it with the benefit of hindsight, it taught me two important lessons. First, understanding why you’re being asked to do something is just as important as understanding the task. I completed everything on my task list but entirely missed the point of the exercise because I assumed I knew my manager’s intentions. Don’t do that, ask questions, and make sure you understand the context surrounding your assignment. Second, good communication is a critical component of being a good leader and manager. Thanks to this experience, I try to be intentional about erring on the side of overcommunication with my teams to ensure they have the right information and context to be successful with their assignments.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
MeridianLink exists to help financial institutions better acquire, retain, and add value to the lives of their customers. Pushing forward that vision means we often have really cool projects in the development pipeline. We’re constantly designing modern, digital solutions to help Main Street America increase their loan volumes and number of customers. I’m particularly proud of our new marketing automation product, MeridianLink Engage, which helps financial institutions personalize specific loan offers to consumers based on their finances and interests. This empowers the marketing teams at banks and credit unions to engage their customers with relevant, personalized offers that meet their unique financial needs. This is just one example of how MeridianLink is helping our customers increase the value chain at every stage of the lending process.
Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the central focus of our discussion. Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started what was its WHY, its purpose?
MeridianLink strives to help more Americans get rapid access to a wider array of credit-based products and services that meet their unique financial needs. Our platform enables mid-market banks and credit unions to offer competitive products for consumers through a personalized, digital lending experience that also helps the institution remain competitive in the constantly changing and rapidly expanding landscape of finance technology and financial services today. We’re proud of the success we’ve had using this purpose to guide our business, and we’re looking forward to continuing to push forward this vision for the finance industry long into the future.
Do you have a “number one principle” that guides you through the ups and downs of running a business?
Without a doubt, my number one guiding principle is to center every business decision, big or small, around creating value for the customer. For MeridianLink, this means not only considering how our decisions will impact the financial institutions we serve, but also how those decisions might impact the institution’s end users. This central focus on providing value for customers has allowed MeridianLink to grow to a company of more than 700 employees and establish itself as an industry leader in the development of innovative digital lending solutions.
If a fellow business leader would ask you for advice about whether to bootstrap or to look for VC capital, how would you help them weigh the pros and cons of that decision?
The first question to ask yourself is, “Why are you trying to raise the money?” For any entrepreneur, your starting goal should be to find a good product-market fit. Once you establish a strong fit, you should raise money in order to grow the business so it can more effectively pursue its target market. In short, money is how you scale, but you want to make sure that what you’re scaling is built on a solid foundation.
What measure do you use to determine the value of a company? What advice would you give to other leaders about how to get an optimal evaluation of their business?
My best advice would be to focus on product-market fit as you define what market segments you’re focused on and what value your product is creating for those segments. In my opinion, this is how you create value for a company; a strong product-market fit is critical to the success of any business.
What would you advise to a founder who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill. From your experience do you have any general advice about how to boost growth and “restart their engines”?
The most important thing you can do in that scenario is to pause and make sure you understand why the company stopped growing. Depending on the answer, you might need new leadership to bring a fresh perspective; to pivot your products or messaging in response to a macro change in the market; or you may have a product setback you need to innovate your way out of. If you don’t take the time to investigate and you choose the wrong response, you could make the problem worse. So, always take the time to determine the root cause of the issue, then formulate a plan to overcome the issue once it’s identified.
What are the most common finance mistakes you have seen other businesses make? What should one keep in mind to avoid that?
Throughout my career I’ve tried to focus on avoiding these three common mistakes:
Don’t assume you know more than the customer. Just like I talked about not assuming the intentions of your manager, it’s critically important to have the same mindset when it comes to your customer base. Spend time listening to your customers and understanding their challenges, needs, and strategies. You need to better understand your customers so you can meet them where they are and provide products that add the greatest amount of value to their lives.
Understand a market and its needs before investing. New markets (or market segments) can look attractive on the surface due to their novelty and potential to spark innovation. While this may be true, they can also be fraught with unconsidered risks. You need to spend time understanding a market’s dynamics, researching competitors in the space, and getting familiar with potential customers and their needs to make sure you’re making an informed decision that is strategically sound and pushes forward the purpose of your business.
Opportunities that seem too good to be true often are. Similar to my last point, a lack of due diligence and thinking through downstream impacts of a potential decision can have some very negative consequences on your employees, infrastructure, and company as a whole. When making any business decision, you need to focus on your strategic goals, prioritize mercilessly, and invest methodically.
Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to succeed in the modern finance industry? Please share a story or an example for each.
Demographics of loan servicing have changed. Millennials are now the largest originators of loans by volume, followed by Gen Z. Many of the people in these groups grew up with a smartphone in their hand and have only ever known a world that relies heavily on digital banking. The number of people walking into physical bank branches is lower than ever before. It’s clear that the model has changed, so it’s time for financial services companies to change too.
Customer loyalty towards financial institutions is diminishing. As the primary target market for loan origination shifts to people who are more comfortable conducting digital banking, competition has increased and customer loyalty has decreased. Banks and credit unions now need to compete for every product they sell or loan they underwrite because potential customers have access to a much wider range of competing institutions and products via the internet.
Banks and credit unions need to become digital marketing companies. Finance institutions need to establish a robust online presence in order to attract new customers, who are primarily exposed to advertising on the internet. Banks and credit unions need to take note of this and ensure they are focused on developing a strong digital marketing strategy and a robust opportunity funnel which converts prospects into paying customers.
As finance institutions go through digital transformations, they need to transform internal policies and processes as well. A larger institutional footprint online necessitates a strong set of processes defining workflows, marketing strategies, data security practices, and compliance considerations. Many banks and credit unions wrote their current policies and processes years ago when the industry landscape looked very different. Financial institutions need to modernize their processes to reflect the change in their business model and effectively compete against other finance and fintech companies.
Traditional credit is no longer as effective at identifying “good customers” vs. “not so good customers.” As I said earlier, MeridianLink exists to help more people gain and sustain access to credit-based products and other financial services. The number of Millennials and Gen Xers who are unbanked, have limited credit history, or have poor credit scores due to educational loans, deserve access to credit-based products, but the traditional evaluation method will not work. Therefore, banks and credit unions of all sizes need to find a better way to evaluate these customers using additional data points that give a more complete picture of the borrower. Financial institutions may consider employing tools that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning for some of these additional data points.
Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
Find strategies to compartmentalize your work and personal life that work for you. When you can, be intentional about taking time to unplug from work and be unavailable to your colleagues. I think some people have this mindset that immediate access through email, instant messaging, etc. requires immediate action, and folks get caught in a cycle of constantly escalating urgency that is neither healthy nor sustainable. Something that works really well for me is setting limits about when and where I’ll check my work email. I even have email notifications turned off on my phone, which helps me make sure I’m not getting sidetracked from personal responsibilities due to a stray work email.
My last piece of advice is to periodically step back from the minutiae of your work and think about the impact you’re having on your coworkers, your company, and your industry at large. I believe wholeheartedly in MeridianLink’s mission, so any time I make progress toward our goal, I take a step back to recognize it because that sense of accomplishment is what keeps me energized for the next task.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I would start a movement to include in-depth, practical financial literacy education in the curriculum of every secondary school in the world.
I still remember asking my parents to help me get my first credit card when I was a teenager. Before I opened the account, they taught me how to use my card to build my credit score, and they impressed upon me the importance of living within a budget and not racking up debt that I couldn’t afford.
Not every young person is fortunate enough to have parents or other adults in their life with the knowledge or experience to help them through this process, but they still need and deserve access to this information. Financial literacy is a critical soft skill that helps individuals to live and improve their lives. As young adults enter the workforce, they need to be educated on how to responsibly handle their new income just like they need to be educated on English, mathematics, and social studies.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn!
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
