The National Bank of Indianapolis is automating aspects of its wealth management division and mortgage process after a recent core migration that upgraded the $3 billion bank’s core for the first time since the late 1990s.

“There’s no way to avoid it: A core system conversion is painful,” bank President and CEO Mark Bruin told Bank Automation News. Work started in earnest in February for the Memorial Day weekend migration, he said “We had people working about every weekend from February until the weekend after conversion.”

In addition to the upgrade, the bank added Jack Henry’s Banno Digital Platform, which provides customers with more self-service options, as well as a chat service, and Workflow, a product that manages processes such as account opening. Workflow digitizes documents and stores them in Jack Henry’s Synergy imaging system, and automates the transfer of documents between departments, creating an audit trail. This allows the bank to automate wealth management account opening, Bruin said.

The bank migrated from Jack Henry’s 2020 to its SilverLake system, which supports more customization and allows the bank to automate in new ways, Bruin said.

“Candidly, we had outgrown it,” Bruin said of the former system. “When we bought it, we were probably less than a $500 million bank; today, we’re almost $3 billion. Plus we’ve got another $2 billion on the wealth management side.”

The biggest hiccup was poor communication to commercial online clients about a new sign-on methodology, Bruin said. The bank quickly created a how-to guide that it emailed to all clients, and within two days, the phone calls stopped, he said.

Another reason the bank opted to upgrade is to receive support for more complex account analysis for treasury management, Bruin said. Under the 2020 system, a human had to calculate account analysis for billing at the end of each month; now that calculation is automated, he said.

“We can build an almost unlimited number of products; we can create tiers within those products much easier,” Bruin said.

The recent upgrade also will automate aspects of the mortgage process that were previously manual, such as managing payments and escrows.

The bank is now considering a move to Jack Henry’s cloud, a common trend in the core industry, said Stacey Zengel, senior vice president of Jack Henry and Associates and president of Jack Henry Banking.

“We have a lot of banks transitioning to our private cloud as well,” Zengel told BAN. “I would say the needle definitely is probably 90 to 95% there today.”

The National Bank of Indianapolis made a seven-year commitment to SilverLake for a reduced price, Bruin said. Are there future conversions on the horizon?

“After I retire, you guys knock yourself out,” Bruin said.