Building an AI Culture Without Losing Control — Wendell Bontrager, CEO of Sonata Bank

Um, when, when we connected and I started to learn a little bit more about what you guys were doing at the bank.

One of the things that I found really interesting, and a lot of community banks are starting to think about ways to focus on a niche and be more intentful in serving a particular segment or a market.

I'm part of a global franchise organization called WSI.

We've got offices in countries all over the world.

And when you mentioned franchises, when we were talking about, My radar went up and I was like, huh, I've not really talked to any other bankers that have a focus on franchises, particularly in the restaurant space.

That's one of the personalities that your bank has.

So talk a little bit about how that was selected beyond just being a traditional community bank and what areas within that, you call it the QSR, expand on that, how far of a reach is it and how all that's going.

Yeah, so really the original thesis of Sonata when we started came from our board chairman, Farzeen Ferdowsi.

Farzeen is a large Taco Bell franchisee.

He wanted to create a bank that would really serve the industry.

And so I kind of took that and ran with it.

And what that developed was very distinctly the question, what can we be really good at, right? We're small, we're in a large market in Nashville, major metro.

So based on our capital base and based on our asset size, how can we become relevant and grow in a quicker fashion besides just competing against the dozens of banks in Nashville? So when we raised capital, about 60% of our original capital base came from franchisees coast to coast.

So I'll give you some numbers.

20 brands represented, 1,300 locations, 100,000 employees strong.

So we said, okay, it's a huge industry.

There's 5 million employees throughout the U.S. There's billions in revenue every year, and they're constantly growing.

There's a lot of banking activity.

That's a space we can really grow in.

And based on the fact that a lot of our investors come out of that world, a lot of our board members are in that space, we figured we can really become experts in the field.

And that's why we decided to go after that particular niche as a starting point.

I mean, pretty cool, right? Because it's not just the QSR franchise owners.

You went a layer deep, right? And went also to help the employees, which I think is a really big deal.

So walk us through that moment where that niche really clicked as more than just a lending vertical.

Where it really clicked is because you have such a diverse customer base on the B2B side, right? So lending and treasury.