The business lender Pacific Continental Bank of Eugene, Ore., was losing confidence in its online banking provider - satisfaction had plummeted in direct proportion to the vendor's rising focus on retail banking.
Pacific focuses on serving dental professionals, nonprofits and other community-based businesses from 14 offices in Oregon and Washington. The bank also operates a loan production office in Tacoma, Wash.
So shortly before the vendor contract was set to expire in May 2011, the $1.3 billion-asset Pacific began assessing six online banking providers, including the incumbent.
"We just wanted to make sure we were still with the right one, and also see what else was out there," said Laurel Horton, Pacific's e-business product manager.
To be included on the bank's short list, providers had to be able to work readily with other vendors, perform custom work for clients and integrate well with Jack Henry & Associates' Silverlake core banking platform, to which Pacific converted two years ago from Jack Henry's 20/20 system.
Two vendors were immediately eliminated because of their lack of integration with Silverlake, Horton said. So requests for proposals were sent to four prospective providers, three of which responded. A consultant the bank hired, who previously worked for the firm that helped Pacific convert to Silverlake, established a ratings system to rank the remaining vendors.
On-site demos involving bank stakeholders showed similar ratings for the three systems, but Q2ebanking's hosted solution edged the others out, Horton said.
Specifically, Pacific liked Q2ebanking's modern architecture. "They integrate their online banking with the mobile platform and the voice platform," Horton said. "So rather than having three separate systems to administer and make changes to, it's one system across those three. For reasons that shook out later, we ended up not using their voice system. But their architecture was really appealing, because with our prior setup, just between retail and business, we had two different administrative platforms and two different systems. So to have all of that wrapped into one was pretty exciting."
Q2ebanking, of Austin, Texas, is working on a custom adaptor that will let Pacific present online notifications like nonsufficient funds (NSFs) alerts to customers via a link that describes the type of notice, instead of just showing them a clickable date.
Pacific hopes to launch Q2Mobile in September to better enable "business clients to do some of their banking on-the-go," Horton said. Corporate customers, for instance, will be able to approve and initiate automated clearing house and wire transfers from their smartphones.
Also, some customers are testing a positive pay feature for check-clearing verification and account reconciliation from Q2ebanking partner Centrix Solutions. "The Centrix product has additional modules that we're looking at," Horton said, "like ACH reporting for returns or notices of change."
Pacific plans in the autumn to add a business bill-payment feature with executive controls from iPay Technologies, which is a division of Jack Henry's ProfitStars. "A lot of times a business owner wants to have somebody pay some of the bills, but restrict that only to a certain account or only up to a certain dollar amount or only with the owner's approval. This feature provides some of those functionalities," Horton said. ProfitStars also hosts portions of the bank's website, aside from the online banking, investor relations and careers pages.
The recent technology moves were made to buttress "both organic and possible M&A growth," said Maecey Castle, vice president and director of corporate communications at Pacific. "The online banking conversion is really one step in a very long process that began a couple of years ago when we went through the core conversion to improve our infrastructure, so that as we grow we're prepared to take on more clients and more activity in more regions.
"One challenge our CEO has given the whole bank is, instead of thinking in terms of the three regions that we have right now, to think in terms of five and seven regions," Castle said. "How can we take the systems that we have in place and make them more efficient and more effective, so as we go out to other regions and expand our Northwest footprint, we can deliver those services more efficiently?" For competitive reasons, Castle would not reveal which new states the bank has its eye on. "But with in-market and out-of-market loan growth, we really feel like we're preparing a good foundation and infrastructure for the future."
CASEFILE
BANK: Pacific Continental Bank
PROBLEM: The business bank's online banking provider shifted its focus to retail.
SOLUTION: Tap a vendor more dedicated to business banking.
