Welcome to the new monthly Financial Services newsletter. This newsletter is our commitment to you, to keep you informed, improve your understanding of the dynamic businesses we have throughout our ecosystem, and provide commentary and detail on the “what” and the “why” of our strategy so that you can contribute, support and challenge. We know this will be a work in progress and we welcome your feedback.

As we embark, I wanted to reiterate What Matters Most for us in Q1 of 2023. As I hope you all know, the Financial Services ecosystem strategy is aligned on three core deliverables.

1. Accelerate differentiated value and innovation and improve go-to-market
2. Drive process, system technology and organizational alignment
3. Improve learning outcomes and extend opportunities throughout the student lifecycle

These goals and the initiatives tied to them will drive our actions throughout the year. For Q1, it is critical that we meet and exceed our revenue targets. To do this, we must be laser-focused on commercial execution in each line of business, we must extend B2B and B2C strategies, and we must think to the future in aligning our systems and people. All of these cannot happen without your support, engagement, and insight.

We must execute on core initiatives to drive incremental revenue, accelerate B2C and B2B sales and improve our overall go-to-market execution

• Our sales teams will realign to support each other, share common goals and plans, and begin to use common practices across sales operations and systems.
• We must focus on B2C efforts across the enterprise, with focus on doubling our XCEL B2C business, growing share in mortgage, and improving our digital marketing strategies and execution for banking webinars.
• Insurance has become the #1 growth driver for the FS ecosystem; continued growth of that B2B engine is critical to our success. For STC, while new logos remain a core part of our plan, another critical lever for growth comes from key accounts, both in product expansions such as IAR CE, and in extending wallet share. BCU (bank and credit union) subscription growth is also a material part of growth in 2023, with both retention and new sales expected to accelerate, and leveraging of cross-sales between STC and OCL.
• In a down market, we must remain the provider of choice in the mortgage industry, identifying new solutions for our customers, sharing expertise between OCL and LEARN Mortgage and aggressively gaining share

Integrating our various businesses within FS not only drives quality and effectiveness but also creates a better overall experience for our internal employees and customers/students. The integration of LEARN mortgage with OCL creates a better overall offering and allows us leverage strength across the teams. Migrating XCEL over to OCD (OnCourse Direct) from Absorb in 2023 is a critical step in our vision to create a one-stop-shop for financial professionals, provide best-in-class B2C and B2B experiences for our customers and students, and drive efficiencies

At our heart, the various companies that make up financial services are all focused on student success, differentiated student experiences, the highest past rates, and highest student engagement. We will continue to build out and improve libraries for GRC, improve our STC and XCEL core content, and build new revenue-generating courses in P&C, IAR CE and Insurance CE

We should be proud to be part of such a strong ecosystem. I am also extremely proud to be part of Colibri Group, and I hope you are as well. Colibri’s vision is to be the most admired learning company in the world. That’s a tall order.

• First and foremost, we must be admired by our employees and colleagues, and that starts with you. I encourage you to share successes, opportunities and challenges and have fun working with some of the most expert learning colleagues in the world.
• Second, we must be admired by our students and B2B partners. That comes down to having the best content, the most expert solutions, and the most engaging learning. It also comes down to building and maintaining relationships of mutual trust and success with our partners. 
• Third, we must be admired within our markets and peer providers. This is all about the market expertise you bring every day. It means being ahead of the curve, understanding market dynamics, trends and legislative changes and acting on them in an effective and proactive way.

In a nutshell, you are the key to success for both the Financial Services ecosystem and Colibri. We can’t do this without you, and I would like to thank each one of you.

Please enjoy the newsletter and let us know how we can improve. We look forward to your insights and contributions.

All the best,

Josh

As we move to 2023, let me start by thanking you all for the effort, patience and positive attitude you brought to 2022. 2022 clearly brought a lot of change and challenge given the OCL acquisition, integration, and overall market climate. With those changes moving into the rearview mirror, we can approach 2023 with clarity of goals, commitment to our customers and a data-driven performance discipline to win in this challenging macro-economic market. Josh articulated well the “what we are trying to achieve” in 2023. I encourage you to get clear on “what success looks like” for you or your team in achieving the goals Josh laid out about.  Unclear or differing definitions of success is what causes confusion on the work required, lack of alignment of what we are trying to achieve or stress when you are unsure of how you win personally or professionally.

 

I encourage you to be bold in defining your success, work collaboratively as a team to align on the definition of success and your individual responsibilities in achieving the team success and find joy in celebrating the progress we make in achieving our goals both as an individual and as a team.

 

Looking forward to Winning Together with you in 2023!

Product management entails a lot of different functions and meanings across Colibri, as it does across the financial services ecosystem. A product sometimes means a course, sometimes means a software solution or even a service. Ultimately, it is the right combination of these that address a customer’s need or want; solves a problem (solution).

A product is any item or service you sell to serve a customer's need or want.

Over the past couple of months, the various product management and development teams have been working toward alignment around a standard product lifecycle management framework and set of processes and artifacts tailored to fit the uniqueness of the specific markets, customer demands, and internal capabilities. While the journey is ongoing, the teams have spent time listening, understanding, and sharing how a product is managed and developed currently while adopting standard tools as opportunities arise. Each team and team members have a unique skill set and valuable perspective we are incorporating into our forward model.

As we continue our product management integration journey, we will be leveraging the diverse sets of talents and experiences throughout the teams to materialize synergies and maximize our efficiency and effectiveness to deliver great customer solutions through great customer experiences. While we see this as meaning great things for our customers, we also see this as a great opportunity for the product teams and the other teams we interact with on a regular basis.

As we head into 2023, we are looking at the financial service ecosystem products from a comprehensive perspective. This will allow us to shift resources in the direction of the greatest opportunity to support our growth targets and meet opportunities where they exist and can be realized with the greatest confidence and outcome. We will be sharing updates through this newsletter and other communications in the coming weeks and months.

We are very excited about our journey ahead and our continuing effort together as we advance on our mission to become the most admired professional learning company in the world!

In early December, the webinar team and marketing team joined our State Banking Association partners in New Orleans for their annual Educators Conference. At this event, all of our state banking partners come together to talk about best practices in their industry. It also allows us to spend time with all of them at once instead of constantly going from partner to partner. This event was a huge success for our organization.

We were able to continue building on our relationships with our partners while entertaining them all. The marketing team hosted an amazing open bar with “New Orleans fare” for everyone. We were hoping to get around 20 guests and ended the night with about 50. We used this time to also work on new partnerships, including the Tennessee State Bankers Association – which is one of the few state partners we do not currently have. After spending some time with them, I am happy to report we have already been able to schedule a call with them, and all signs are pointing to a new partnership between our two organizations!

Overall, the event was a home run, and the sales and marketing teams did an amazing job! Thank you to everyone for all your hard work, and keep striving, Colibri FS!!

Financial Risk Manager Professional Designation - Recognized worldwide, FRM is the leading certification for risk managers. It is consistently in demand by nearly every major bank, brokerage, and accounting firm. In January, we will be expanding our offerings and helping customers earn this designation, in addition to CFA, with our corporate partner Analyst Prep! This expands our reach beyond exam prep and will help our clients achieve more in their careers.

Farewell, WebEx & Hello ZOOM! As the last virtual classes in 2022 end, we say farewell to WebEx. ZOOM has invested in security and some game-changing features, which made its platform the go-to choice for firms in the financial services industry. We conducted focus groups and surveys with our users, and ZOOM beat Webex hands down in usability and convenience. We pivoted and will migrate all of our virtual classes in the new year to ZOOM. Congratulations to the instructors and the migration team for making this happen.

Migration of Insurance Courses to Absorb – After successfully migrating five insurance courses from the common platform to Absorb in November, Ashleigh said, “Hey, why not another ten in January?” In January, CO, CT, HI, IN, MS, NC, ND, SD, VT will join AL, CA, FL, IL, MN, NV, NY, OH, OR, TN, & WA and only be offered on XCEL's platform, Absorb. We will be on one platform for insurance by the end of Q1, which will improve the customer experience and make for a more efficient migration to a new platform in 2023 for insurance.

IAR CE – The Curriculum team apparently isn’t celebrating the holidays and is heads down writing 12 new courses, which most will be launched by February 2023. In addition, we will be offering certified financial planners the ability to earn FREE CPE credits for many of our courses. The ability to earn extra credits is a huge perk for our CFP clients and will make STC the destination for IAR CE.

Qualtrics Implementation - STC just deployed a new software application that provides us with the tools to ask the right questions, anonymously listen to what customers say they need, monitor the student dashboard, and gather student NPS data by course.