With the novel coronavirus forcing employees to work from home, banking technology and security infrastructures are being put to the test.  

“Today, if you are not a frontline employee, you are working from home,” said Jason Shields, vice president and loan operations manager at Gulf Coast Bank, which is based in New Orleans.

The massive work-from-home shift is requiring banks to lean heavily on their tech stacks to keep operations running smoothly and securely as banks deal with sensitive customer data.  

Shields said the bank has had about 20% of its 300 employees working from home regular basis, but the bank is stress-testing its system today, with all non-essential employees working from home. “Frontline” employees who still need to work at branches include tellers and some lenders.  

Gulf Coast Bank requires multifactor identification before allowing employees to connect to its virtual private network (VPN) from home. The bank switched from desktops to laptops long before the pandemic, so all employees are able to use work laptops from home and login to the bank’s secure network remotely.  

Gulf Coast also has two carbon copies of its data center, therefore, “If one of the buildings disappears off the face of the earth, you can flip a switch and it’s as if nothing happened,” Shields said.  

Gulf Coast’s key vendors are cloud-based, which facilitates employees working remotely, Shields said. The bank uses DocuSign for remote signatures and nCino for all loan origination and management. 

See also: Banks promote digital channels as pandemic keeps customers from branches

Large financial institutions are also taking measures to accommodate social distancing. Pentagon Federal Credit Union, for one, has implemented a protocol that has approximately 70% of its 2,400-person workforce working from home, Executive Vice President of Operations Jamie Gayton told Bank Innovation. 

In the past 12 months, the Tysons, Va.-based PenFed transitioned to new phone and CRM systems, a move that streamlined the company’s transition to remote work. Chief Information Officer Joseph Thomas implemented several IT systems, such as VPN capabilities and the soft tokens associated that allow employees to login from home and authenticate their identity, Gayton said.  

PenFed will continue to ramp up work-from-home measures and is working on “a handful” of digital projects aimed at reducing the manual processes that require employees to come into the office, such as opening and scanning daily mail, Gayton explained. PenFed has simplified its call routing to get members connected with agents quicker, and the credit union has transitioned some of its branch employees to assist members via telephone as a way to manage increased call volumes. 

Ally Bank has also initiated a policy, with the “majority” of its employees working from home, a spokesperson said, and “the company is making significant progress toward its goal of enabling its entire workforce to do so within this week.”  

In anticipation of the evolving pandemic, Ally last week upgraded its VPN system to ensure its systems could handle the additional traffic. It also deployed additional resources, such as laptops, headsets and monitors, in order to support remote work conditions. 

According to Gayton, the work of financial institutions can’t slow down just because employees are not in the office.  

“We are the financial first responders,” Gayton said. “The mission is critically important for us to be able to provide this service and support to our members right now. The financial engine must keep moving.”  

The Banking Automation Summit, which takes place from June 1-2 in Miami, is a unique opportunity to share insights, trends, strategies and best practices on back-office automation in financial services with the industry’s leading practitioners. Register here.