Marquis Acquires ZAG Interactive, a Provider of Website and Digital Marketing Services.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Marquis Acquires ZAG Interactive,

a Provider of Website and Digital Marketing Services.

March 31, 2023, [PLANO TX] — Marquis Software Solutions (“Marquis”), a Plano-based financial marketing and compliance software and services provider, today announced that it has acquired ZAG Interactive. Marquis is backed by Rockbridge Growth Equity (“Rockbridge”), a Detroit-based middle market private equity firm. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

ZAG Interactive is a leading provider of website design and hosting services, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and social media management services. ZAG helps community banks and credit unions execute their strategies to increase customer acquisition, engagement, and participation. It has been recognized for its track record of helping clients realize their marketing goals, winning a WebAward 27 times, and Kentico & Sitefinity’s Site of the Month/Quarter Awards 40 times.

Marquis is a leader in unique data analytics software and services that help financial institutions, primarily mid-tier banks and credit unions, identify marketing opportunities and meet complex and ever-evolving compliance requirements.

“We are thrilled for ZAG to join Marquis, as the combined companies will be better positioned to help financial institutions meet their full spectrum of marketing goals, from new household acquisition to deepening relationships,” said Steve Linden, Partner at Rockbridge. “Larry and his team at ZAG have built a market-leading company with a broad portfolio of website and marketing services. We look forward to working with the management team to accelerate ZAG’s growth, increase its range of services and target new potential clients that can benefit from ZAG’s solutions.”

“ZAG is very excited with the opportunity to partner with Marquis,” said Founder Larry Miclette. “ZAG’s goal is to make it easier for our clients to engage with new and existing customers digitally, by developing and executing marketing strategies via award-winning design, easy-to-implement technology stack, and a suite of marketing services. We believe the combined companies will enable accelerated growth for our clients across multiple marketing goals and provide clients with the ease of working with an integrated marketing services provider.”

360 Advisory Group served as financial advisor to ZAG.  Honigman LLP served as a legal counsel to Marquis and Rockbridge.

 

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About Marquis

Marquis is a Plano, Texas-based company that is focused on producing measurable results for financial institutions nationwide. Marquis sets its clients apart from their competition by providing expertise in data analytics, MCIF, CRM, strategic consulting, profitability, and direct marketing – along with CRA, HMDA & Fair Lending compliance. For about 35 years, Marquis’ focus has been to partner with their clients to realize provable results with its software, services, and consulting. Results. Nothing else matters. To learn more, visit www.gomarquis.com.

About ZAG Interactive

ZAG Interactive is a Glastonbury, Connecticut-based company that specializes in ADA conformant, responsive website design and hosting, and digital marketing services. For 20 years, ZAG has actively worked with over 200 companies to increase customer acquisition and engagement. To learn more, visit www.zaginteractive.com.

About Rockbridge Growth Equity

Rockbridge Growth Equity is a Detroit-based private equity firm targeting control and minority equity investments in lower middle market services businesses headquartered in North America, including Digital Media & E-Commerce, Technology-Enabled Products & Services, Financial Services and Consumer Services. Rockbridge Growth Equity was initially founded in 2007 to serve as a private equity firm affiliated with the Rock Ventures Family of Companies, which includes Rock Holdings, Inc. (the holding company for Rocket Companies) and over 100 other companies owned by or affiliated with Dan Gilbert. For more information on Rockbridge Growth Equity, visit www.rbequity.com.

The Path Ahead Featuring Marquis’ CEO, Susan R. Faulkner

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Video Transcription 

The Path Ahead

Susan R. Faulkner, CEO, Marquis

Are you ready for this next normal?

The unknown portion of this crisis may be beyond anything we’ve seen in our professional lives. But we need to do our best to find out what the issues are and then help navigate through them. The point isn’t to have a better answer. The point is to build the capability to learn quickly and pivot faster than your peers do. Resilience comes through speed. This may be a new capability that very few organizations have now and they will likely need to spend real time building.

There are still a lot of unknowns, but creating value and finding those pockets of growth are possible and absolutely essential. But it will also require an understanding your customers’ and members’ needs, behaviors and concerns and to quickly adapt to these consumers and market changes. This path ahead will require resilience. There will be continued ups and downs as lockdowns are relaxed and segments of the community continue to reopen; viral resurgences and unforeseen events will keep growth from being that straight line going up.

The reality is that most business leaders made choices over the past decades that traded resilience for a perceived increase in shareholder value. Now may be the moment to consider the error of chipping away at organization resilience in the name of greater efficiency may have reached its limits. Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t efficiencies to be sought or found. But more the tradeoff between efficiencies and resiliency needs to be defined far more clearly than it has been in recent years.

Innovation may have never been so important. Now, it’s always been essential to have innovation to solve big problems. But the world is looking not just for new shiny things, but also for new ways of doing things, especially on the people side, where we need new behaviors, long term rather than short term capabilities and work ethics. More than ever, a bias to take action is essential, which will frequently mean getting comfortable with the uncomfortable. Apart from all the operational focus needed for the return to work, it is even more important that teams take a step back to reflect upon these core themes.

Are you ready to set yourself apart?

How would you grade yourself on the ability to adapt quickly and respond to changing industry needs, innovation and destabilization? This ability to adjust or shift makes an employee nimble, and that’s important because most industries, including ours, are in a state of flux. Next, are you ready to be proactive? Doing those things that you need to do before you need to do them? Having the ability to help control a situation by causing something to happen, rather than responding to it after it’s happened?

For example, reaching out to your customers and members before they’re reaching out to you in distress and being agile to move quickly and easily. An agile company or team has the ability to quickly adapt to market changes. While yesterday compliance with TRID was a primary focus, now privacy has to be the focus given the sheer amount of remote workers. Risk and concerns definitely pivoted overnight, and we had to be agile to meet most of those heightened new risks.

Next is resilience — it’s knowing how to cope in spite of setbacks, barriers or limited resources. A measure of how much you want something and how much you’re willing and able to overcome those obstacles to get it. It really has to do with the emotional strength of you, your team and your company. And finally, take action. You have to act in order to get a desired result.

What will set you apart? Ask yourself: are you positioned to lead and pivot to a more sustainable business model as we move to our next normal?

At Marquis, we have the solutions and implementation teams to help set yourself apart. But our solutions and products only tell part of that story. It is our team who work tirelessly every day to bring you the very best in data assembly, analysis and action. We believe that if we take care of our clients and take care of each other, the rest will take care of itself.

Adapting to the New Normal Featuring Marquis’ CEO, Susan R. Faulkner

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The New Normal with Marquis CEO, Susan R. Faulkner

 

Video Transcription 

Adapting to the New Normal

Susan R. Faulkner, CEO, Marquis

“Now we’re almost done with three-quarters through 2020. For many of us, this has been an incredibly challenging, transformative and life-changing year. In some ways, life went on as usual. We were still expected to show up for work, whether in the office or at home. Babies were born. But in other ways, it was like no other year we’ve experienced in our lifetimes.

From the corner office, to the executive C suite, to the loan officer and call center employee, 2020 has been an exceptionally tough Black Swan event year and we’re not even through it yet. The sheer amount of disruption, both good and bad, has turned all of our kitchen tables into eight-to-five desks and conference rooms, and many parents into teachers overnight.

And with summer coming to a close and students adjusting to their new remote or redefined in-person schools, the new normal is starting to feel like business as usual. Now, I don’t know what the future will be like, and we’re pretty sure that there are many parts of our society and of our economy that will never be the same again.

So the best thing that we all can do right now is to be adaptive. The strongest organizations and leaders all share the same quality: the ability to adapt to circumstances that you can’t control and focusing energy on changing and improving the things you can. We can all find opportunities to use the mindset every single day, regardless of whether you’re a marketing or compliance executive, credit union or bank, or part of Marquis.

In many ways, I think this can be a great way to set the tone for the rest of this year, and 2021.”