Insourcing Finance as a Revenue Stream in Manufacturing with Michelle Katics

Connect with Michelle Katics: Email: Michelle@BankersLab.com. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellekatics/ Website: BankersLab.com Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. Our guest today is Michelle Katics. Michelle is co-founder and CEO of Bankers Lab who provide lending simulation tools to the financial sector for the last ten years in over 30 countries. Bankers Lab is making these financial simulations available to the manufacturing sector, which can benefit from the world-class solutions used by banks for years. Bankers Lab is working to disrupt finance in the manufacturing sector, reduce the time and friction required to finance manufacturing equipment, and enable more rapid innovation. Michelle, welcome to the show. Michelle Katics: Thank you for having me, Lisa. Lisa Ryan: Michelle, please share with us some of your background and what led you to do what you're doing with Bankers Lab. Michelle Katics: Well, I'm a recovering banker who was solving problems. I was working internationally in banking, we were trying to teach people across our banks' footprint in 57 countries how to optimize their portfolios, which was no easy feat. My background is very much mathematics and economics. It seemed like everything I had done till that point came together. We saw that simulation was a way to solve those problems to help people see things that you can't see from a textbook and to see how the world works through simulation. Lisa Ryan: So, share with us a bit of that process. When I think simulation, I think video games and I think of flying a plane and trying not to crash it. How does that look like in the banking industry? Michelle Katics: Well, the concept is the same in a sense. We use the analogy of a flight simulator. We say to people, okay, that's great you can drive the plane, but do you know what to do in a storm? Do you can you do a water landing? It is pretty comical if you Google how to do a water landing in an airplane. It gives you ten steps, bu