MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — While cutting-edge banking transactions make life easier for members, the rub for IT departments is trying to marry multiple innovative solutions onto one platform.
"Our current online banking platform is reaching an end-of-life state requiring a lot of work to keep it running," said First Tech Credit Union's Chief Digital & Technology Officer Mike Upton. "It is currently difficult and expensive for us to deliver many of the new services that our members have been craving."
For any credit union, seeking the best overarching technology solution is a difficult process. Not only do IT executives have to look at the current market, but also determine the CU's future wants and needs as the process from discovery to fruition is a long road.
"We needed to find a new solution that delivers a modern mobile and online banking that leap-frogs First Tech ahead of the rest of the industry by delivering relevant and amazing member experiences," said Upton.
A 'Tech First' Leader
Located in the shadow of Silicon Valley, the $7 billion First Tech's 380,000 members are tech savvy and expect a lot of whiz-bang bells and whistles.
"We need a solution that can serve as a foundation for our innovation agenda of quickly integrating best-of-breed solutions at a pace that is in keeping with our member's expectations," noted Upton.
To achieve this goal, Upton explained that an in-house team was assembled. The first goal was identifying an "elite eight" of mobile and online banking providers. After RFIs and RFPs were reviewed, the field was narrowed to a "final four" and then a "championship" match was held between the top two potential partners, which included vendor site visits.
Key criteria included system and information security, product functionality, integration flexibility, technology architecture and development environment, and "a partner who could match our agile implementation and development model," said Upton.
The competition for first place went down to the buzzer. In the end, the CU selected the Plano, Texas-based Alkami due to its ORB single digital banking solution, which provides a "360" view of member banking needs.
"We rely heavily on the voice of the member through our digital, contact center, branches and social channels," said Upton. "We have adopted a lean startup test-and-learn approach that allows us to conduct member empathy studies, gorilla usability sessions, early stage proof-of-concept testing and a phase beta roll-out model."
Still in the early stages of formulating its strategy, Upton said he has outlined an aggressive implementation schedule. The first step is a preliminary employee and select member usability experience using production data. The target date for a limited employee only beta pilot is the second quarter of 2015.
And this is no small undertaking. With a total of 920 employees, roughly 135 employees from Development, QA, Operations, Security and Enterprise Architects will help tweak the solution.
"This model lets us test, learn and confirm that what we're delivering meets with what our members are really looking for us to provide," said Upton adding that he hopes for a full-scale production release in early third quarter of next year.
Debunking Tech Adoption Myths
With the all-important vendor decision behind him, in reflection Upton said there are a few myths that seemingly haunt credit union executives when approaching a similar operational change.
"One of the biggest lessons learned in seeking a new solution for our members was that we really needed to have the courage to liberate ourselves from common industry mythologies about creating truly amazing member experiences," said Upton.
Myths he noted included "innovation is too risky" and "we got time on our side." Upton said that "Too many financial services companies hide behind the false perception it's too risky to be innovative when in fact it's just the opposite."
With regard to timing, he said the CU didn't adopt the somewhat common "cluster by committee" approach. Instead, the CU employed a lean, agile style to the selection and implementation process.
"Being agile allowed us to stay hyper focused on solving for the highest member value and not overloading the process or the software with a bunch of shiny bobbles or solving for every edge-case that someone could think up," said Upton.
Happily moving forward, Upton conceded that one myth is true: change is hard. "Changing our approach and increasing our pace was really hard, but now that we've moved to an agile approach our team does not want to go back to the old, slow way of doing things," said Upton. "We are excited about all the great value that we can rapidly deliver to our members because we have had the courage to change our DNA."
