Alex Carriles, executive vice president and chief digital officer (CDO) at the $22.4 billion Simmons Bank, was just a little tired. He had just flown three hours to Houston the day after rolling out a new integration of credit cards to the bank’s board of directors. It’s been a busy 12 months for the Pine Bluff, Ark-based bank, which experienced a 30% increase in digital users in 2020, and boosted its Apple app rating from only two stars to 4.8 out of 5 stars.

“In the last 20 months as I joined Simmons Bank, it has been transformed substantially,” Carriles told Bank Automation News. “Yesterday, I presented to our board of directors, and they recognize that this is a pretty different bank from what it was a little under two years ago.”

At the regional bank, which has locations throughout the South and Midwest, a new customer can now open an account in three and half minutes, and be up and running transactions on their account within five minutes, Carriles said. To do so, all the customer needs is a photo of their driver’s license, a Social Security number, a mobile phone number and an email address. The rest of the information is extracted from the driver’s license scan, he said.

“Everything else is fully automated,” Carriles said. “So, you just enter those three fields, answer a few compliance questions, agree to the terms and conditions, and you have your new account, then you go straight at it, you go straight to funding.”

Even as Carriles finishes one project, he launches another on the bank’s digital road map, which is underpinned by automation. The most recent step on the roadmap: Automatic deposit from a scanned check.

“One of the top reasons why Gen Z applicants for newer digital bank accounts are declined, or they abandoned the process when opening an account online, is because they cannot fund that account,” Carriles said. He asked a group of bankers how to get around this issue and they said they’d get back to him. But the CDO is already solving for the problem. Simmons’ accepts automated deposits so a customer can fund a new account with their paycheck without ever setting foot inside the bank.

An open platform approach

Carriles’ team has taken an open-platform approach over a build-it approach to achieve this, using APIs to integrate with various solutions. For the first such integration, Simmons leveraged core and financial solution provider Jack Henry’s digital mobile and online banking platform for its credit cards. The bank’s credit card posts and processes are now handled by a legacy system that integrates via a custom-built API integration with Banno, Jack Henry’s digital platform.

The payments data is translated into a token, so only a token — not the credit card data — goes to the platform. As a result, customers can see their credit card information in near real time, as if it were a bank account, Carriles explained. He credits vendor Jack Henry for its open-platform approach and said leveraging APIs have enabled Simmons to pick best-of-breed solutions.

“That’s the beauty of this, being an open platform, is that we can integrate with it,” Carriles said. “We can augment its capacities and its data sources by building either our own middleware or connecting to somebody else’s APIs, or [by] leveraging an application programming interface from Jack Henry for their other products.

David Foss, president and CEO of Jack Henry, told BAN the open platform choice is a strategic decision.

“We’ve created this API environment with open connectivity, so that [the bank] can go to whoever they want, and whatever tools they want, and they can easily embed those things into our application to deliver a better experience for the consumer,” Foss said. “This philosophy that we have around open connectivity, and trying to enable the bank to leverage whatever tools they want, in connection with our technology, delivers a great experience for the end customer.”

Building a mobile-deposit solution

One project Simmons Bank did internally was its in-house mobile-deposit solution. Simmons Bank leveraged Jack Henry’s mobile deposit solution, customizing it to meet its business needs. Most banks have a one-size-fits-all deposit policy, Carriles said. A customer can deposit $5,000 a day and up to $15,000 a month, which doesn’t allow for much flexibility between customers. Therefore, Simmons created its own algorithm to determine the eligibility of individual customers based on their transaction history, such as their average deposits. The algorithm assigns each customer an eligibility score based on their history, which then connects to the bank’s mobile deposit solution. The algorithm applies 36 different risk profiles to the deposit.

SliverLake, a Jack Henry core solution, integrates with the mobile deposit system to apply holds in certain high-risk situations for deposits in real time — for example, if a customer exceeds their deposit limit three times. This keeps fraudsters from posting and immediately withdrawing funds. However, if the deposit is in line with the algorithm’s eligibility score, it is automatically posted. The process has also reduced the potential fraud risk, Carriles noted.

Previously, when customers made out-of-limit deposits, there was a manual review process. Simmons faced an average of 300-400 such reviews per day, some of which took two days to process. Now, there are fewer reviews due to larger deposits. Exceptions are automated by the system so that the same day a customer wants to use their account, they’re automatically scored and assigned a limit. Customers have noticed the bank’s automation and some have seen their deposit limits increase twentyfold, Carriles said.

Up next for Simmons is leveraging JHA PayCenter, another Jack Henry solution, to support the Zelle payments system, as well as other real-time payments. The bank is also working with APIs to connect phone cameras to bring even more control to its customers’ credit and debit cards, Carriles said. This year, the bank will focus on digital controls for credit and debit cards.

One clear reason for the push to automation and digital is that Simmons recognizes its customers now compare the bank to their other high-tech digital experiences.

“What was the last time you tried to Google something that it said, ‘I’m sorry, Google will be unavailable from Saturday from 4 p.m. until Monday at 6 a.m.’” Carriles said. “Our customers are not going to be comparing us necessarily with other banks; they’re going to be comparing their digital experience at Simmons with other digital experiences that they have elsewhere.”

Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.