Text and email are not digital versions of a letter or a telephone call. There has to be a strategy that includes consumer consent but also a willingness by that same consumer to continue the conversation. Enter Quanta Credit Services, a new innovative digital-first solutions provider that manages communication strategies. Aleks Whitchurch, CEO and Co-Founder of Quanta stops by the next episode of #creditecotogo to talk about the nuts and bolts of the digital communications journey and the many paths that journey can take. Aleks tells us this is not a volume game but a problem-solving game. Quanta’s data shows that how you treat the consumer and customize the conversation can make a measurable difference.
DISCLAIMER – No information contained in this Podcast or on this Website shall constitute financial, investment, legal and/or other professional advice and that no professional relationship of any kind is created between you and podcast host, the guests or Clark Hill PLC. You are urged to speak with your financial, investment, or legal advisors before making any investment or legal decisions.
DISCLAIMER – No information contained in this Podcast or on this Website shall constitute financial, investment, legal and/or other professional advice and that no professional relationship of any kind is created between you and podcast host, the guests or Clark Hill PLC. You are urged to speak with your financial, investment, or legal advisors before making any investment or legal decisions.
Text and email are not digital versions of a letter or a telephone call. There has to be a strategy that includes consumer consent but also a willingness by that same consumer to continue the conversation. Enter Quanta Credit Services, a new innovative digital-first solutions provider that manages communication strategies. Aleks Whitchurch, CEO and Co-Founder of Quanta stops by the next episode of #creditecotogo to talk about the nuts and bolts of the digital communications journey and the many paths that journey can take. Aleks tells us this is not a volume game but a problem-solving game. Quanta’s data shows that how you treat the consumer and customize the conversation can make a measurable difference.
DISCLAIMER – No information contained in this Podcast or on this Website shall constitute financial, investment, legal and/or other professional advice and that no professional relationship of any kind is created between you and podcast host, the guests or Clark Hill PLC. You are urged to speak with your financial, investment, or legal advisors before making any investment or legal decisions.
DISCLAIMER – No information contained in this Podcast or on this Website shall constitute financial, investment, legal and/or other professional advice and that no professional relationship of any kind is created between you and podcast host, the guests or Clark Hill PLC. You are urged to speak with your financial, investment, or legal advisors before making any investment or legal decisions.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Clark Hill's Credit Ego2Go, curbside thought leadership for financial services. My name is Joanne Needleman and I am a partner at Clark Hill as well as a member of the firm's banking and financial services practice group. So our topic today is talking about communicating with consumers using digital channels, which we know is the future, but where do you start? There has to be a sophisticated and targeted strategy that must be created before you hit that send button. And to talk about that topic today, I am thrilled to be joined by Alex Wittkirch, CEO and co founder of Quanta Credit Services, an innovative new digital first collection solution provider that develops and manages clients digital first omnichannel communication strategies. Prior to starting Quanta, Alex spent over a decade at Capital One, uh, in various strategies. Uh, involving credit and technology roles as well as digital as well as being a digital marketing leader for her for their credit card business. She has a wide ranging experience leading growth focus, digital response initiatives and is an expert on strategies, data and technology that work when it comes to reaching consumers today. She is a graduate of Harvard University. I get the smartest guest. I have to say, uh, with a degree in economics and sociology, Alex, it's so thrilled to have you on. I'm so excited about your product. Um, and it's a great topic. It's 1 that we have talked about on this podcast since day 1. My, my first podcast was about, hello, we're all in, uh, we're all talking digitally now and, and what's that going to mean? But now I really have a great nuts and bolts guest who can talk about it. I mean, it sounds great on paper, but you got to implement it. Right? So. What are the components of what's a digital strategy? And what are those components? Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all, thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be part of this conversation. Um, and as you mentioned, uh, it's the nuts and bolts that are really the complicated part of having a great digital first strategy. So, the 1st thing I will say is that without a doubt. it all starts with consent. So if just a little, just a little, you know, it's, but it's not just a regulatory issue. I mean, using emails or phone numbers that you do not have consent for. Is honestly almost a guarantee that you will go straight to the spam folder, right? And so it's, it's actually helping you from a performance perspective, not just from a regulatory compliance perspective. So once you have that foundation, right, then there are, you know, just so many different things to think about, but I'll try to simplify them to three main focus areas. The first thing to remember is that Email or any digital channel is not just a digital version of a letter. You cannot just take, you know, an existing piece of communication, port it over and hope to achieve positive performance. You're going to need to design and execute in a way that is specifically aligned to the channel you are using, right? Email and text. And in app push notifications. They're all very different. And you're going to need to design the communications very differently. The second thing to remember is that you have a lot of levers at your disposal. So you have creative levers, such as the actual content of the email, the design, the subject line, preheader, call to action. How does the email just look and feel? You also have strategic levers, things like cadence, frequency, what time of day, what date of the week, right? These are all components that you have at your fingertips to play around with to maximize the likelihood that your email or your text message or your push notification is going to be seen. And is going to be considered for a response. The great thing about digital channels is that you will very quickly get data on whether your combination of these levers is working or not. And if you have the right infrastructure, you can very quickly test your way into a winning strategy. The last thing that I will say. That it's important to remember is that customers are not all the same. So they are unique individuals with different motivations, behaviors, the circumstances that brought them into collections might be very different. So you're going to need to have segmentation. You're going to need to have targeting elements of personalization. And then over top of all of that, a robust set of metrics and feedback mechanisms to make sure you're quickly understanding What's working for your unique population and what's not right. Um, and then as if I haven't already overwhelmed you already, you have to solve for all three of these things in an integrated fashion because they all interact. Right. And then as I mentioned, you have to keep iterating and refreshing these on a regular basis. Um, I tell our clients all of the time, You know, collections and especially digital collections communications are not just set it and forget it. And our clients very quickly, they go in thinking, yeah, I'm sure that's the case. But as soon as they see how quickly we have to test and retest and refresh things, it becomes very clear for them that this is a living, breathing, Dynamically optimized strategy that you always have to be on top of. Yeah, no, you've made some good points. I want to unpack a few of them. You talked a lot about, you know, the beginning of the conversation, you know, how, how do you get consumers to respond? Can you talk a little bit about. What the conversation is going to look like afterwards, because I think what I see the benefits of digital communications are a couple things, especially like let's assume an email for a second number one is extraordinarily private, more so than a telephone call. And it can, and I think the element of who's got leverage in the conversation tends to be even doubt. Right. So you, you're on a level playing field. You, you can, you have a better chance of responding, being very clear about what you want to say. There's no misunderstanding, but talk about how to develop that conversation. Because to me, I think that, and I think number one, that's the most complicated because if you, you have their attention, how do you make that conversation productive? And two, I always see it as a real training issue of how to make sure that people who are communicating with consumers. Are having that conversation in a positive and productive way. Absolutely. Absolutely. So you hit on one of the most, uh, exciting things about digital communications, right? Which is, um, you, you talked about it in terms of leverage. We often refer to it as in some ways, it almost empowers the customer more, right? Right. And that is a huge mindset shift to go from. I feel like I'm out of control. I know I'm in debt. I don't know what to do about this to say, at least for a tiny moment, I get to make the decision of whether or not I respond, how I respond, how I engage. Right. One of the critical things that needs to happen is a, you need to plan out. These conversations, right? Right. Um, and so when we develop a digital contact strategy for a client, right, there's an entire process on the front end where we map out what is the customer journey likely going to be and what types of information are we going to provide at different points in that journey. Right. So it's not just you're not just throwing out an email that's beautifully designed that says, hey, contact us. You're thinking about, hey, if they're, you know, in early delinquency, that might be a very different message and a different set of information that I'm giving them. then if they've already been two, three months past due, right? And really being thoughtful around that. The other piece you mentioned is, you know, continuing the conversation, right? So two way communication, which is, um, you know, the end goal, right? Especially in those more complicated situations. Cause One of the beautiful things about digital communications is that it allows you, um, to almost take out the need for that interaction for those really simple cases, right? For when people just need a reminder or people just need to feel like, okay, you know what? I just need to log into my online experience. I need to make that extra payment and I need to get back to current, right? Um, but then after you get those really simple, um, situations out of the way, that's when you get the more complicated, the more nuanced interactions, right? People need to go on a payment plan and they don't quite understand what that is, or they might be wondering if there's some sort of an offer out there for them. So the beautiful part about digital communication is that even though It feels very real time and very dynamic. There's actually a lot of room on the back end to plan things out in advance. Not just your first, your first email attempting to get someone's attention, but also You know how you're going to respond what the different paths that the customer might take are right and then through the use of personalization and using your data and the variables that you have you can make it feel like it's highly customized to that customer but in guesswork right and then what that leaves is All you're going to have left are your most complicated, most nuanced situations. And in those cases, that's where, you know, to your point, you're going to have to think about training a little bit differently, right? This is no longer a volume game. This is now a strategic problem solving game. Do you have. The right associates, the right agents who are equipped with the right information to problem solve together with that customer. If you do, you're going to be in great shape. If you don't, if you're still thinking about it as a volume game, you're just not going to get very far in this digital first world of ours. Wonderful analysis. I really, I love that. I really love that. Um, you guys did a white paper, uh, which I was reviewing, uh, before when you sent it to me. And then before we jumped on this podcast, I really it's, I love it because it's succinct. Don't give me a 30 page white paper. I'm not interested. I don't have time. Uh, this was a really nice. was set up at like, you know, here we are in the digital world, why it's important. Here's the data that we look that looked at and, and, and here, you know, look, it's a white paper to promote your product, which that's fine. And, and here's why quanta is important. But there was some really interesting, um, data in there because I think That we're all kind of still stuck on that. Okay, we're doing email and text because we got to hit the 25 year old set. No, no, no, no. Your data was really interesting about a more broader base type of consumer, uh, that is actually using data. Digital channels, and I have to tell you, it surprises me. We, I bumped into a friend of mine's, a friend of ours parents recently. And, you know, she's in her seventies and we bumped in the street and let's get together. Okay, fine. Just text me. I'm like, what? But yes, you know, they all have fun. Everybody's got a phone and everybody's using texts and, but tell me some of, as you look at the white paper, what were some of the other interesting fun facts that, that you learned? Um, When putting this together and let me know if there's going to be more because I thought that it was very well done. Yes, together. Yes. So, um, you know, when, when we first started quanta, um, because I came in very new, um, I have a lot of credit background, but not necessarily collection specific background, right. We really wanted to make sure that we grounded ourselves in the realities of. The collection space and what better way to do that than to talk with customers who are or have been in collections. Um, and so we went in with a number of sort of assumptions, or you could call them hypotheses that we were going to test, right? Um, and to your point, we worked hard to make sure that we had Um, a wide range of ages and incomes. Um, and just a really representative set, um, to get us started and make sure that we're really understanding and not missing any sort of critical insights here. Um, and so you mentioned one of them already, right? Which is just realizing like, hey, guys. The digital digital revolution is is not coming. It's here, people kind of sped this up even more people are just much more comfortable using digital channels. But there are also other things that we learned and we're actually just, you know, uh, shameless self promotion here. We're actually sharing some of these on LinkedIn, um, in a little bit of a myth busters series. But a big one for me. Um, was I definitely went in having been new to the space. One of the the adages, if you will, that I was very quickly introduced to was, Oh, collections is a question of willingness and ability to pay, right? And one of the insights we found is that the first part of that, the willingness, almost everyone that we interviewed in our research made it very clear Yeah. that they want to pay back, that they understand there's a contract that they've signed. And there's no concern. They're not standing there being like, I don't think I want to pay this loan back. Right. Right. Um, what we found is. If someone has a problem with their willingness to pay, that's likely more of a fraud problem than a collections problem, right? The crux of it is really the ability to pay, right? And really thinking about You know, what is going to given their constrained resources, what is going to, um, allow the customer to say, I have limited resources, I have to prioritize what I pay when given my current ability to pay and how you influence that structure. And one of the things that was just a huge aha moment for us, um, was that. you know, how you treat a customer, how they feel in their interaction with their creditor, their lender, whoever it is that they're interacting with, um, with regards to, to their loan. does make a difference in terms of how they prioritize payment, right? The idea of treating someone with empathy and respect and honesty and recognizing the moment that they're in and the fact that it doesn't define them, you know, those Feel and sound like very sort of, um, fluffy types of, of, um, ways of looking at the situation, but the reality is that they make a difference in terms of how people decide what they're going to pay first in any given moment. Um, time and time again, we heard customers say, you know what? I know technically this product gives me more rewards. But in the past, when I've gotten into trouble, this company has always treated me like a human being. And so I tend to pay them first, you know, that's, that's a huge insight that these things that we normally think of as very emotional, um, make a big difference in the decision making process. That collections customers go through. It's interesting. And do you think that the type of channel has something to do with that, too? I mean, I'm getting the sense because it just I mean, you're right. The pandemic just exponentially made digital so much more relevant. But I also think that in some ways, and maybe this is just me being Pollyanna that I think consumers now, you know, the days of Oh, my God, I'm not going to answer the phone. I don't know what this, you know, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to be harassed. The horror stories that you heard about, you know, one on one telephone conversations. Do you think consumers now feel better when they get an email or text? Do they see that as the olive branch that they didn't have before? Yes. If done correctly, right? Absolutely. That's a gift. Yes. Text message. Um, if not done correctly, you can feel almost as bad as getting that phone call. Maybe less so with an email because as we talked about, there's just more choice, right? The consumer gets to decide. Am I going to look at this email? Am I going to open it? Am I going to read through it? Am I going to respond to it? Right? They have a series of choices that they can make in that moment. Um, and so that might be a little bit less, you know, uh, egregious if you will. Right. But yes, if done, right. Um, you know, it just, it opens up the lines of communication with customers because they see it as. Okay, you know, they're giving me a chance to kind of respond the way I want to. They recognize that I'm busy, that there's, you know, a number of different ways to reach me. And then they're giving me a chance to sort of think about it and react. And then take action, right? Um, and so there's just a lot of, as we talked about, it's, it's more of a sense of empowerment, a sense of control. And so if something comes through one of those channels, they're just much more likely to see it in a positive light. Now, again, if used in the wrong way, it, it can be very bad. Um, and in particular, you know, we heard things like. You know, I love text messaging, but don't send me a novel of information via text message, right? That's not helpful to me, right? Um, really use the text message as whether it's a reminder or a reinforcement or, you know, think of it specifically how, what. Little bit of information. Do you want to give me? Don't overwhelm me, right? There's a number of nuggets that we got like that from our consumers about using those channels in the right way. But yes, in general, to your point, it just seems to open up the possibility of engaging with the customer much more naturally. Then a phone call, which can feel highly invasive in today's day and age, right? What are you looking at for future white papers? What other absolutely? Yeah. What other considerations are we thinking about? Yes. So both in terms of white papers and research, right? Yeah. Yeah. Hatching the surface here. So, um, we are actually going to be launching our next white paper in about a week or so. Um, and in that. Um, we're going to kind of take the next step. We're gonna, um, help people go through a little bit of a self assessment of where they are on their digital collections journey. Um, and then start laying out some of the foundational building blocks of, you know, when we started this conversation I talked about. all the different levers you can pull. And that can feel a little bit overwhelming when you're first coming into this space. So in our white paper, we simplify it a little bit around what are the critical building blocks. Um, and that will feature some more insights from our existing research with consumers. Um, but as I mentioned, you know, if you're doing research, right. You know, you do your first round of research, you get a number of insights, but it also raises a number of questions that you then want to chase down. Um, and so an example of, uh, an insight that we also want to dig deeper into was, again, we went in with a little bit of an assumption. You often hear, you know, these are folks who are struggling to understand budgeting. And their personal cash flow. And so if you can give them tools, um, you know, to, to deal with that, right, you're, you're gonna give them a leg up. Um, and what we found is that almost every single person that we interviewed already has, um, a very thoughtful, often highly sophisticated budgeting scheme, right? They are not, these are not people who are unaware of it. Okay. Money coming in and out. They are, if anything, hyper aware of every dollar that comes in, every dollar that goes out, right? Um, and so that was an interesting insight because, you know, oftentimes when we talk with clients, we talk about in our communications, what else can we offer them? Right. That that may not, let's say, allow them to pay right away, but could help them in the long run and also continue to strengthen the relationship with their lender, with their creditor. Right. And it turns out that, you know, budgeting tools, while they are nice to have, and I will certainly never tell anyone not to offer those, right? They're not quite the silver bullet that I think the industry thought they might be, right? Just offer a budgeting tool and that will solve a number of their problems, right? There's clearly other types of support that are going to be necessary to help. the customers through this scene. Um, and that's something that we're going to be digging into with our next round of research. That's interesting. No, I think you're right. And again, I hate to keep going back to, uh, COVID because that was just been overwhelming us for two years, but you know, we saw so many things about it. And one of them is. Consumers do really care about their finances. And the minute a lot of them got stimulus, what did they do? They didn't go out to Best Buy to buy a TV. No, they, they sought it as an opportunity to, you know, to help their financial wellbeing. And they used it, which was, I thought, very refreshing because I think that consumers are given, are painted as not wanting, you know, as, as being not concerned about finances. And that's why they get quote, taken advantage of. And I don't see that at all. And I feel a lot more sophisticated than we, we give them credit for. So interesting. Well, I can't wait till I loved your first white paper. So I can't wait till the subsequent ones come out. So in rounding out this conversation, Alex, we can not. Overlook our, our, our, the friendly reg F that came out almost, uh, you know, it'll be six months, uh, which was a game changer for the collections industry, especially digital communication, where it did kind of give some framework. I'm not going to say the framework, but it gave. Some framework about, uh, digital communication and that, you know, I think you were thinking about this well before reg F was implemented. Um, but having worked with so many clients in in this space and looking at how. And the forefront and what the frontier of, I should say, of digital communications is going to be, where are the gaps in reg F that we need to be focusing on? I'm putting you on the spot. Yeah, no, absolutely. I will 1st, put out my disclosure that I am, you know. I'm not a, a lawyer or a compliance expert or a regulatory expert, but we all play them on tv, so it's not Yes, that's right. That's right. Um, having said that, yes. Um, you know, I think in some ways Reg F. was a game changer in that it clarified, you know, a number of, um, you know, concerns out in the industry and just provided some very tangible tactical guidelines around what is and is not acceptable, both in traditional channels and when it comes to disclosure and customer Preference and customer control. Um, you know, in digital channels. So that's great. Um, I really do think though that it's, you know, in many ways, just the beginning, um, purely because to your point, there's, there's still so much that's unanswered there, you know, uh, first things first, you know, this was largely a framework for third party. And while, um, a number of our first party clients. you know, want to proactively try to adhere to reg F, they don't have to, right? Um, and so you see a wide variety of acceptance, um, and adherence to, to reg F, right? And so I think there's probably a lot of opportunity to say, okay, this was great from a third party perspective. But what are some of the more general rules right of the road that we want to provide to everyone. And I suspect that that's going to be coming down the pipeline. Again, I am, I'm not, I'm not a, I don't have a crystal ball, but it seems the logical progression. Of what this is, of what this is about. Yeah, I think the other piece here, um, is that, you know, there was, well, in some places it clarified some things around digital communications. I mean, there is still a fair amount of, of vagueness in there, right around frequency and what's acceptable. And I mean, What do you consider excessive or harassing behaviors? Right? As we know from from the phone channel, there's going to be a wide variety of interpretations around what that actually means, right? Um, and I think is more and more. organizations start to get comfortable with using digital channels, um, I think it's inevitable that some of them will try to really push the boundaries of what is acceptable, um, in terms of frequency, in terms of types of communications, um, and, uh, I really do think that over time we're just, we're going to need to see more clarity there, um, because again, While I can confidently say, you know, we never counsel clients to do anything that we wouldn't want to experience ourselves, right? Um, we're certainly not counseling them to email folks, you know, multiple times a day or even every day or anything like that. Um, I do suspect that it's only natural that some folks it will be a little bit of a slippery slope, and some folks will will try to go down that path. Um, and I think there will need to be more clarity, and it's inevitable that I think as regulators get more savvy about what is happening in digital channels as they see the data, as they see customer response, they're going to add more clarity to. You know, some of those, those currently a little bit opaque. Right. Well, I agree with that. But I think the one thing that the digital channel has that the traditional phone call doesn't well, to some degree is the opt out. It is, you know, it's extremely powerful, right? It's, you know, you got to really read the rule to understand it. I mean, there's a lot of misperception and misrepresentation about what the rule and rule cannot do, but you're not, you really need to sit down and read it to understand not just the rule itself, but the thousands of pages involved, which, you know, unfortunately I make a living doing, but it opt out is extraordinarily powerful and, you know, and it has to be disclosed to the consumer. And, you know, I think once a consumer. Understands the power of the opt out or the unsubscribe, whatever you want to call it. Um, that will be the challenge that your clients are going to have to ensure that that communication is productive so that they don't hit the delete button, the opt out button, stop, stop, stop contacting me, which they, you know, they do have. Um, you know, with phone channels, but that doesn't, you know, that just breaks down the communication and that's going to be the end of it. And so, um, it'll be interesting to see, you know, I agree with you. How does this morph into allowing. better communication, more productive communication. And I think we, we don't know the answer to that question. I think time is definitely going to tell. Um, so what is the B being in the forefront of all of this? What's the next channel? What's, I mean, there's texts, there's email, there's chat. I know there's a lot of bots out there, you know, whether that's going to work. What, what's the, what's the next way. that we're going to be communicating with consumers aside from the phone or the letter? Yeah. So, you know, I don't think of it maybe specifically as a channel, but I think of it as the integration of all of these various channels and the integration back into The experience, whether it be a web based experience or an in app experience, uh, for the consumer, um, you know, you often hear the word omni channel kind of thrown about, but the reality is in our industry. That's not really the case. I would argue. Um, even, uh, folks who have multiple channels, it's a multi channel strategy. They happen to be managing communications in a number of different channels, but not in an integrated fashion. Um, where, you know, data from one impacts the decision you make in another, right? And so I think the next big thing is going to be the connection of those different channels. I think consumers are going to expect that if they gave you a piece of information or they took some sort of action via one channel, and then that is not. Basically immediately reflected in a different channel, you know, that's going to be a no go for consumers, right? Um, the example we always give is we, we sometimes see clients who will, let's say, allow a consumer to fill out a form online and then they'll want to verify by having a phone call and have, you know, an associate, an agent kind of read out The exact same questions. Um, you know, to make sure that those answers are correct, and they can say, yes, we've had a live person kind of verify this, right? From a consumer standpoint, that's going to be one of those things where they're going to say, I gave you the information. I gave you the data. Why are you wasting my time doing that again? Right. All you should do is acknowledge that you got it. And if there's something incremental you need to do via the phone. Fine. Right. But I don't, I don't want to spend all this time on the phone with you kind of doing the thing I just did myself. Right. Right. And so I think it's going to be really less about, you know, Oh, is it going to be, uh, you know, uh, folks are using things like WhatsApp and signal, which arguably are just another version of text messaging. Just a new flavor of that. I think it's more going to be about how does it feel seamless from the minute you send that first communication all the way through. Ideally, the consumer, you know, paying back and going back to current right. That whole process is going to need to feel like it's one experience like a All of the data is being shared appropriately and the consumer feels like there's no gaps. They've never left your ecosystem. They've always stayed within your ecosystem. And, you know, once they're back there, you know, it's It's like they never left, right? Well, I appreciate that. I think, I think that is correct, but as a, in doing these podcasts, I'm always looking for the next thing, but terrific. Well, Alex, this was a terrific conversation. Thank you so much for educating us on this, but before I let you go, um, couple more questions that I do want to ask. One is that I ask all my, all my guests is, um, Tell us, you know, when we started the podcast, we were all sheltering in place and we picked up hobbies and started knitting and doing jigsaw puzzles and doing all these things to keep ourselves occupied. But was there something that you did while you were sheltering in place? Um, that. You wouldn't have done but for COVID that you're doing now. Yeah. So, um, I, there's a hobby and then also a skill that I feel like I've picked up. So hobby wise, um, I became an avid gardener. Um, so I live in the city, so I don't have a, a huge garden, but I historically was one of those people who was just sort of like, is it watered? Good. Great. That's fine. Um, and during the pandemic, I learned to really appreciate and love my garden and the joy it brings me the opportunity to be outside and doing something active. Um, gardening teaches you patience. It teaches you, um, to to the plants. They'll tell you if they, if they like where you put them or not, if they like your care or not. Um, and so, you know, it was just a delightful experience to get to garden. Um, on the skills front, uh, this is, you know, Maybe not something we often think about, but because the pandemic forced me to say no more often, I've gotten much better at saying no, right? Very good. Very good. Which I think we all as human beings who are eager to do as much as humanly possible, it can be really powerful to be able to Take a step back and say, Do I really have to do this or or do my Children really have to do this? Is this really going to make a difference? Um, and so I feel like the pandemic forced me to say no a lot. And so it's a lot less scary. Um, and I've gotten much better at. Thoughtfully saying no to things as opposed to just saying yes to everything. Well, that's a wonderful story. Uh, there are some, there was, there was some upsides to COVID. Not a lot, but there was some upsides to COVID. We got to look at the silver lining. That's exactly right. And finally, Alex, I ask all my guests. to identify, uh, an organization, um, that is helping your community or could be a nationwide organization or a regional organization. Initially, when I started the podcast, it was all about food because I saw car lines. People waiting for food, which I never saw in my lifetime before this pandemic. That was just kind of really upsetting to me. But since, you know, we have come out of this and we're getting back to the proverbial normal, um, I still love the charity element of the podcast. So I always ask my guests to identify, um, an organization that you have an affinity for and a credit ego to go. We'll make a smoke. Donation on your behalf for your time coming onto the podcast. So hope you have something you can something you can identify. Yes, that's, that's wonderful. Um, and I would love to highlight an organization that, uh, both I personally and quanta as a business kind of very much believes in it and that's girls for a change. Mhm. You can find out more about them at girls for a change dot org. Uh, but their mission is around empowering and lifting young women. Um, and they have a particular focus on black girls, um, girls of color who are most vulnerable at the margins of society. Um, and involving them in, uh, planning for developing and executing social change projects, um, which then gives them, you know, critical life skills around problem solving community. Budgeting basically all the foundational skills and tools that they need, um, in order to, you know, really become independent, successful young women. Um, and it's an incredible organization. It started. Um, we're based in Richmond, Virginia. Um, it started right here in central Virginia. Um, and Angela and her team there are just doing an incredible job, really thinking about how to get, uh, young women off on the right foot and giving them, uh, the right start to their, you know, very promising lives. Wonderful choice. Thank you so much for recognizing them and we will certainly support them. Um, and we appreciate you. We can learn more about them. Thank you so much. Um, so Alex again, thank you for coming on to the podcast and many thanks to our loyal credit ego to go listeners for tuning in and logging on all episodes of credit ego to go can be found on buzzsprout Spotify. Or any platform in which you access your podcast information on our podcast can be found on my clarkhill. com bio page, as well as on my LinkedIn page. If you'd like to be a guest on the show or have ideas for future show topics, please email us at credit. He go to go at clarkhill. com. Thank you. Be well and stay safe. This podcast is intended for general education and informational purposes only, and should not be regarded as either legal advice. or a legal opinion. You should not act upon or use this publication or any of its contents for any specific situation. 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