Vendor Dirt

Scott Hodgins

January 30, 2012

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GonzoBankers, I’m pleased to announce our latest attempt to keep it irreverent in our humble weekly spewing. Monthly, we will be running a new feature called Vendor Dirt, a stab at going deeper on the vendors we know, but more importantly scratching the surface of those we don’t know and unabashedly slinging hardballs, dirt and praise from all angles.

Think of Vendor Dirt as our industry’s TMZ – only with more underwear and fewer mug shots. Wanna hear it? Here it go…..

When we read about the major core players out there, it seems everyone has a much publicized opinion except for one key constituency – vendor employees. You have your four quadrants from the pointy-headed analysts at the research firms and your 100%, completely unbiased opinions from stock analysts. You’ve got from-the-hip takes from know-it-all, too-many-hyphen-using consultant types. Banks and credit union execs don’t hesitate to go on record about their vendors, and the vendor management teams themselves are nothing if not wholesale spin churners. But there sure isn’t a lot of public disclosure coming out of the vendors’ employees.

Methinks it’s time to change that and show our loyal readers what vendor employees (and former employees) are saying about the vendors as depicted in glassdoor.com. Among other things, Glassdoor anonymously polls employees (and former employees) on the companies they work for. Sure, Glassdoor probably attracts a disproportionate share of malcontents, and it doesn’t have what anyone would call a rigorous process to verify the authenticity of employee contributors or the validity of their comments. Its worry-free style and lack of statistical correctness is, frankly, part of Glassdoor’s seat of the pants coolness. Who wants to bog down a Power to the People site with antiquated fact checking?! That said, for example I read two reviews for Harland Financial Solutions that were clearly intended to be reviews of a bank or credit union employer, not HFS. So we’re not looking at SAS-approved statistical accuracy.

Glassdoor uses a five-point scale to allow employees to rate overall satisfaction with the company, and there is plenty of room for supporting comments. Here’s how some of the big boys in our industry fared:

High and low points for each vendor based on the Glassdoor questionnaire responses are as follows:

(To put the ratings above in perspective, some seriously misguided employees at Bank of America rated their company at a 3.1 and laid a mind-boggling 74% approval rating on Brian Moynihan, their Prince Charming of a CEO. And here I thought B of A adhered to strict drug-testing guidelines.)

So, what?, you might ask. Other than a prurient curiosity about employee gossip, it’s wise for bankers to understand vendors in the eyes of the people with whom you have the most interaction. Themes and observations for our vendor friends and the banks and credit unions that rely on them:

• Vendor employees most like the facet of their job that they can most directly control – work/life balance. I can get as mad as I want at senior management, but shame on me if I don’t manage the work/life balance.
• Leadership matters. As a company grows, it is extremely difficult to preserve the very culture that made the business successful in the first place. Hell, it’s a daily point of emphasis at our Cornerstone Advisors mother ship, and we are only 30-people strong. I saw countless comments deriding senior management’s apparent lack of recognition for the worker bee. Conversely, the company with the highest Glassdoor rating of the five under review here has had by far the most consistent culture over many years of growth. So, preserving culture through growth can be done, and your employees will value that.
• Leadership matters. For a variety of reasons, vendors struggle to communicate between senior management and the superstars in development, customer service, etc. who really make it happen at these companies. Absent that problem, Glassdoor would have been DOA. Whether it’s a generation gap, ego gap or an income gap, nothing spawns extreme discontent like a senior management team who can’t or won’t take the time to relate to their employees and customers.
• Leadership matters. Consider Jack Prim, CEO of Jack Henry & Associates, the most highly rated of these five vendors and the only CEO who garnered an employee approval rating above 50%. (Jack had a 77% employee approval rating.) Jack routinely answers his own phone, does not ride in a limo to his customers’ offices, and does not spend any significant time self-promoting. That is infectious.
• My experience with HFS employees wouldn’t have led me to predict they would be the harshest on their company and CEO. A few points on that:
  • There were many comments on the cratering of company culture/morale and the transformation into a fully bled turnip after the company fell into the hands of conglomerate M&F Worldwide. Rank and file employees feel like they work for a pretty damn good company that is lost in the M&F multi-industry complexity. In the eyes of many Harland employees who responded, the VC boys lived up to their reputation.
  • The numbers above refer to employees rating HFS specifically. Harland Clarke Holdings (parent of HFS, Harland Clarke (the check guys) and Scantron (the fill in the bubble with a #2 pencil guys)) was rated a more respectable 3.4 by its employees.

We’re going to keep our Vendor Dirt articles short and, well, sweet might be pushing it. Pleasant might fit the bill. Gallant? Know of a vendor making some noise but not making headlines? Seen a cool product that the rest of us really should know about? So damn pissed off at your vendor that you gotta get it off your chest? Lemme know about the up and comers and the free fallers, big and small. Share with me, my peeps. Share with me, and I’ll get it covered in Vendor Dirt. Shoot me an email or share with the world on my Twitter account – @VendorDirt.
-Hodgins

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