Ryan Rackley: Cornerstone Advisors here talking about contracts, I’m Ryan Rackley this is Bob Roth, Bob what do you see in the field?
Bob Roth: Number one thing I’m interested in and making sure my clients take care of is vendor management, with the regulators really pushing them to understand their contracts at the board level all the way down through the executive team that’s got to be number one.
Ryan: Number one, vendor management.
Bob: And yourself, you’ve been involved in a lot of mergers lately what’s going on in the merger contract world?
Ryan: Boy I’ll tell you what merger and acquisitions in our environment these days is hot and heavy as ever, there’s a couple of things that always come up when you get into a merger event, one being speed. From the time you have the acquisition merger announcement to the time contracts need to be negotiated, that time span is typically five months, looking at how you do that is top of mind.
Bob: And you’ve got to pick the vendor, you’ve gotta negotiate the agreement, you’ve got to terminate the ones with a lot of work to be done. Now in the general contract negotiation world we’re
seeing a lot of work with customer facing contracts, what are some of the ones we’re negotiating here today?
Ryan: Between the two of us and everyone else at Cornerstone, we see a lot of activity around really the channel basis, online banking both consumer/commercial, we see cards being very active particularly credit cards, credit cards today are growing twice the rate of debit is in terms of transaction dollar ticket spend, those are just a few on the top of my mind, what else are you seeing?
Bob: You know the core, and it always has to be done it seems to be I wouldn’t call it an afterthought but it’s more like the tail waggin’ the dog; online channels are out there driving the decisions with the core being a necessity to keep the lights on.
Ryan: Alright everyone, thanks a lot for spending your time with us, three things from contracts this year: vendor management, merger and acquisitions, and customer facing activity, thanks a lot.