Stories

Deepening business relationships and creating simplicity through digital tools and services.

Dave and Sara Specter’s Bells Up Winery in the heart of Oregon’s Willamette Valley wine country offers private wine tastings of its vintages to one group at a time – promising customers that they are never double-booked.

The Specters make good on their promise of exceptional customer service in part by using U.S. Bank's talech point-of-sale software, which frees them from operational tasks like payment processing and managing inventory.

“The flexibility of talech allows us to stay close to our customers during our wine tastings, helping us maintain and build relationships with our customers,” Dave Specter said. “We’ve found this to be a differentiator for us while competing against 600 different wineries in Willamette Valley.”

For Toni Garden, operations manager for the U.K.-based restaurant group Spitroast Chicken, U.S. Bank's talech offering means that managers can spend more time interacting with staff and customers rather than taking care of paperwork.

“The service and tools from talech help us do our job more efficiently. You can get back out on the floor, work with your staff, see the customers,” she said.

Such testimonials about the power of talech’s integrated payment processing bring to life why, after many years forging a successful relationship together, U.S. Bank acquired talech in 2019 to enhance how it brings banking and payments together for small business clients. The combination is proving to be powerful, with the number of clients using talech increasing more than five-fold from 2020 to the third quarter of 2022.

Talech has become an integral part of how U.S. Bank makes the day-to-day financial aspects of owning a business simple and efficient – so business owners can put their focus on running their business and have time to get home earlier to their families.

Moving forward, U.S. Bank sees even more opportunity to deepen current relationships and serve new small business clients. The bank has 1.1 million small business clients today and CEO and Chairman Andy Cecere emphasized the recent growth and success in serving small businesses during the bank’s third-quarter 2022 earnings call.

“Business Banking continues to gain traction with steady progress both in growing accounts and expanding wallet share,” Cecere said.

U.S. Bank further expanded its payments and banking capabilities in 2022 with two additional acquisitions: TravelBank, an expense and travel management solution, and Bento, a provider of payment and expense management services to small and mid-size businesses.

The acquisitions tie into the broader U.S. Bank strategy to serve clients with a holistic set of solutions from across the bank.

“One of the reasons U.S. Bank acquired talech was because they believed in our mission,” said Joy Ghanekar, chief product officer and business lead for talech. “But more importantly, the bank saw what we all see: increasingly, software, banking and payments are all coming together.”