Rising Bank, the digital offshoot of St. Louis-based Midwest BankCentre, gained $130 million in deposits in 2019. With the success of the stand-alone digital bank, which launched in January 2019, Midwest BankCentre is now incorporating new technologies into its traditional online banking.

“[Rising Bank] is helping us learn to do business in this digital space,” said Dale Oberkfell, president and chief financial officer at Midwest BankCentre. “It’s really about being relevant in the five-, 10- or 20-year point of view.”

Rising Bank relies on Jack Henry’s SilverLake System core and Banno platform for digital banking experiences, as well as account opening technology from MANTL. Oberkfell said Midwest BankCentre, which has $2 billion in assets, will be incorporating both of these technologies to create a more intuitive banking experience for customers.

Stand-alone banking apps from large incumbent banks have largely struggled to gain traction. JPMorgan Chase’s Finn, for example, folded last summer while Wells Fargo’s Greenhouse remains in a seven-state pilot after a year and a half. 

Oberkfell said the bank treats Rising Bank almost like a mini lab to learn best practices that can be applied to both the stand-alone app and the brick-and-mortar bank. Although the bank is taking lessons from Rising Bank and applying them to Midwest BankCentre for now, he said it could go the other way around in the future.

Alyson Clarke, principal analyst at Forrester Research, previously told Bank Innovation launching a stand-alone product alone isn’t enough to make an institution more agile. “Banks might kid themselves that they are going to build the next Monzo, but you can’t run away from yourself if you are doing the same things with the same business models,” she said. “Most of these digital offshoots will not survive the other side of the recession.”

Oberkfell said a key reason for Rising Bank’s success is a human-digital approach to customer service. Customers can send documents and communicate through Rising Bank’s online platform, and also call a customer service line. According to Oberkfell, the customer service line provided peace of mind when one customer needed to deposit $750,000 but wanted to talk to a bank employee during the process to make sure the deposit went through. 

In addition to Jack Henry and MANTL, Rising Bank uses know-your-customer technology from Alloy. Synechron, a website development agency, created Rising Bank’s logo and website design.  

See also: How Rising Bank hit $150M in deposits in one year

Midwest BankCentre, meanwhile, uses nCino for business loan underwriting and Blend for mortgage and home equity loan applications, which the bank is considering adding to Rising Bank as well. Midwest also started offering data consultancy services to clients this month. And, Oberkfell said 80% of the bank’s employees are working from home.  

Midwest BankCentre is marketing Rising Bank in every state except its home state of Missouri, which helps the bank reach consumers in new markets without cannibalizing its existing customers. To start, Rising Bank offered a high-yield savings account and CD accounts, and added checking accounts in the third quarter of last year. According to Oberkfell, customers can open and fund an account in three minutes. 

“[Midwest BankCentre] knew what it should hold on to, what it needed to do very differently, and demonstrated that disruptive innovation does not require jettisoning existing technologies,” Bob Meara, senior analyst at Celent, said in a statement.