The Challengers – Andrew Moor, CEO, Equitable Bank

We run a regular series here at EQ that we call The Challengers. After all, we're a Challenger Bank, and we want to showcase some other incredible people who we feel live and breathe what it means to be a Challenger. This month, we talked to Andrew Moor, CEO of Equitable Bank, and the man who brought the challenger concept to EQ Bank.

We've brought on a couple of guests to help our audience get a feel for the Challenger concept, and now I want to hear from you; what does it really mean for our customers that we are a Challenger Bank?

We’re trying to do things differently and bring value to our customers. You’ll see us doing very distinctive things; we’ll never send you a paper statement or a chequebook for example, because we really want to save money to put back in your pocket as higher interest. That’s just one simple example, but we really try to bring that way of thinking to everything we do. It’s a lot of little things that add up to a challenger attitude.

Being a challenger truly is a mindset. Some banks don’t think much differently than they did 40 or 50 years ago which is truly amazing given how the world’s changed. It’s a matter of always thinking about what we’re trying to achieve and the processes to get us there so we can deliver value to our customers. Whether this is by saving them money, saving them time, or giving more confidence that the transaction happened properly. There’s a lot of things we can do to bring value to people’s lives in banking, and we’re really trying to bring that to life every time we think about a new product, a new process, or any new way of doing things.

When did it occur to you that some changes were necessary in the banking world?

You might think I woke up one morning and thought “I’m going to build a Challenger Bank”, but it didn’t work like that for me. I was already running Equitable, and then the main bank that I was banking with wanted to charge five dollars every time I moved money out of my savings account more than once a month. It infuriated me.  I started to think about other banks around the world. It’s all very well to be angry with a supplier, but what are you going to do about it? I changed it into a positive energy; “How can we build a bank that really drives and builds value for Canadians?” That led to the thinking that banking in Canada wasn’t necessarily leading edge. I spent a lot of time in Europe; they’ve got a lot of challenger banks. I started reading about banks all over the world, and trying to bring the best thinking we could from those jurisdictions into the Canadian banking environment, and executing it through EQ Bank.

What are the top three things EQ Bank does that you feel are challenger?

First of all, the whole EQ Bank experience is very clean and neat. I’m so proud of what the team has done to bring our ideas to life.

Number two is that all of the details have been dealt with. Even simple things like looking at our bank statements and trying to understand what they mean shows that depth of thinking. When I look at some other bank statements, they’re incomprehensible. You look at EQ Bank statements, and you can actually understand them. It saves time because you can scan your bank statement and just understand what it means.

Thirdly, and the one I am particularly proud of, is the way the team built the US dollar and Canadian dollar account and the fact that you can convert USD to CAD and vice versa at such great rates compared to what’s normally available in the market. Then, you can send funds around the world with Wise. It’s so much a part of what we were trying to achieve, and it’s been done so elegantly. I think it really represents the culmination of many of the skills we’ve built inside the bank over the past few years.

As a leader in a challenger atmosphere, what do you do differently to encourage your teams?

What I do want to do is make sure that the people who are bringing these ideas to life are given the authority to run and make mistakes. Those would be the two things that I think really empower and hopefully excite people. Bringing insights from people who have worked in banks in other countries, or other industries into our bank, and allowing their minds to challenge the orthodox I think is the key to it. Also recognizing we don’t have all the answers. Having people on the team with ideas you may not immediately understand and providing them capital to explore those ideas and see where they can go – that's certainly what I hope I’m bringing as a leader, and I’m trying to learn all the time. This is the first time I’ve been CEO of a Challenger Bank, so I’m sure there are things I could be doing better, but by assembling great people around me and giving them the chance to allow their creativity to flourish is how I think about it.

From a hiring perspective, how do you look for employees who are going to adopt this frame of mind?

You are looking for that attitude – the people who are excited by the idea of working for a smaller bank where we’re doing new things. There’s clearly a bit of self-selection that comes into that as well. The types of questions I like to ask when I’m interviewing; how do they think about the challenger mission, does it excite them? You’re going to find people lit up by different elements of the concept, or the fact that we’re very strong in providing a diverse and inclusive environment for them to flourish and bring those ideas to life. Whatever it is, I think somebody that wants to embrace change and make things better for Canadian society is what I’m looking for. And those people can look completely different and feel completely different in how they express that. Then the job is how do we get people who have that instinct and hunger within them to express it as a business outcome.

What are you challenging outside the bank?

So many things have been challenged over the past while, and frankly some of the ideas that I’ve had about the way we work have had to change, and it’s turned out to make us more productive. The way the internal guts of the bank work in this new environment has dramatically changed and we’ve challenged old precepts. I’m not sure we would have gotten there without the pressures of Covid-19, and that’s kind of interesting. Historically, somebody could have proposed an idea about more employees working remotely, and we would have had all kinds of legal, compliance, and my own concerns about that. It’s forced us to see how clever we can be when circumstances throw challenges at us. Sometimes within our own day to day business, we need to push and say, “what if?” or “what could be the better way of doing it?”. That allows you to find solutions to problems you don’t even recognize because you only see the process operate in a certain way. I think it’s forced a lot of creativity on society. It’s been incredibly tough, it breaks so many personal relationships, and has caused a lot of mental stress, but it’s forced us to rethink our lives and we’re probably more adaptable as a result.

What's the next unnecessary banking aspect you want EQ to defeat?

It’s very clear to me, and I speak about open banking all the time. Most Canadians deal with more than one financial service provider, and it’s incredibly complicated to knit all of those pieces of financial data together so you can make better decisions to run your life. Should you pay off your mortgage or should you put more in your RRSP? These are decisions we all have to make and they’re actually strangely complicated. So open banking is a route forward that can unlock that mystery a bit and allow us to see all our financial data in one place and effectively make better financial decisions. I’m a strong proponent of that, and Equitable is going to continue to be at the forefront of the open banking journey. I hope that when I retire eventually, leaving Canada with a better financial system promoting open banking will be the keystone of what I’ve achieved. Helping to modernize the financial system for the rest of this century to help Canadians from all walks of life, and people who face financial challenges. Open banking creates a more inclusive banking environment and better services for everyone. I think that’s a worthwhile purpose within the banking sphere.