As independently owned and operated small businesses, fast-food restaurant franchisees have unique business needs. They have mobile and often part-time workforces, complex inventory management and the constant challenge of managing both a small business and being the face of a major brand. On the latest episode of the ABA Banking Journal Podcast — sponsored by Bix2x — Wendell Bontrager talks about how Sonata Bank is working with this unique market segment.

For example, “we can come in at fractional costs to provide them things like telehealth, mobile phone insurance, pet insurance, in a way that is free to the employee but is done and sold through the franchisee,” says Bontrager. He outlines Sonata’s business of lending to “quick-service” restaurants, as they’re often called in the trade, paired with employee benefits, treasury management and a software-as-a-service platform for QSRs.

Bontrager also talks about the health of the Nashville, Tennessee, market where Sonata’s community bank franchise is headquartered and how the organization has been able to capture talent with hybrid and remote workplace offerings.

Government-guaranteed lending requires special expertise and back-office functionality that grows increasingly expensive for smaller banks. On the latest episode of the ABA Banking Journal Podcast — sponsored by Bix2x — Chris Hurn and Jeremy Gilpin of Community Bankshares, a bank holding company in La Grange, Georgia, discuss how they are tackling that challenge.

“To start one of these departments is very expensive for a lot of rural banks and credit unions,” says Gilpin, “It’s very prohibitive to enter the market space if you are a rural bank or even in an urban market where you do you know, maybe 5, 10, 20 of these loans a year.”

Hurn and Gilpin are part of a team that has built Community Bankshares, parent of Community Bank and Trust of West Georgia, into a network of Small Business Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture lending subsidiaries that work on a nationwide basis. They developed a model that allows the “the holding company [to] serve as a source of strength for the bank, not just the other way around, which is typical,” says Gilpin. Gilpin and Hurn discuss the company’s role as a white label lender, referral lender, participation partner or servicer for smaller banks that want to connect their clients to guaranteed loans and the strength of the bank model for supporting these businesses and agricultural enterprises.

Quantum computing is an entirely new way of processing information, and it has the power to solve extremely difficult computational problems much more quickly than binary computers. As the technology continues to advance, the latest episode of the ABA Banking Journal Podcast — sponsored by Intrafi’s Banking with Interest — explores how payments and banking might be affected by the technology. Among other topics, the episode addresses:

• Applications for quantum computing in liquidity management and other complex payment and settlement chains.
• The risks quantum computing poses to current encryption technology and the timeframe over which current encryption might be compromised.
• The emergence of “quantum-safe cryptography.”
• The risk of decryption quantum computing poses to data harvested in past breaches.
• Emerging regulatory expectations for quantum computing-related risk management.

This episode is presented by Intrafi’s Banking with Interest.

Resources:

• Nacha’s report on quantum computing and payments
• FS-ISAC podcast on post-quantum cryptography