Arvest Bank is kickstarting a full-scale digital transformation with a new five-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud.

The tech giant is looking to speed operations for the $26 billion community bank.

“[T]he faster that we can help [Arvest] get out of the traditional architecture and into a modern cloud platform, the faster you can get the data and analysis you want to do the change and improve the customer experience,” Janet Kennedy, North America vice president at Google Cloud, told Bank Automation News.

The Lowell, Ark.-based Arvest has already started the cloud transition and is analyzing within its own applications to configure its migration plan, Laura Merling, chief transformation and operations officer at Arvest, told BAN.

“Our new core banking platform and technology is designed to operate in the cloud environment, which gives us some of the scale that we need,” Merling said. “We want customers to make informed decisions about their banking relationship, and Google Cloud allows us to do that.”

Arvest, which also partners with core banking platform Thought Machine and consultancy Accenture, is leveraging Google’s technology, data and resources to streamline processes — something its clients have desired, Merling said.

Along with enhancing speed, Google Cloud also allows the bank to lean into artificial intelligence (AI) to automate back-end processes and move away from paper documentation, she said. “You can automate, scan, tag and do interesting things … use cases in the beginning will be in commercial lending.”

As part of the partnership, Arvest has access to Google’s technology engineers, Kennedy told BAN. “It’s not just our platform, but we’re also bringing people,” she said.

The tech giant has already launched its cloud services at other financial institutions, including $1.4 trillion Deutsche Bank, $2.96 trillion HSBC and $186 billion KeyBank, and expects Arvest’s migration to be adopted faster than its larger counterparts due to the absence of legacy IT architecture, Kennedy added.

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