The Peoples Community Bank, a $300 million institution near Madison, Wis., is beginning to upgrade its core tech stack after 30 years in a move that will allow the bank to snip ties with various third-party providers and develop several new features under one platform.  

“It’s been our bank’s long-term goal — simplifying the customer experience — so it was a wake-up call,” said Quinn Christensen, senior vice president of operations at the bank. “Technology is moving so quickly, it was taking too much of our time with our current core product to roll out new products or services.” Already, the bank has lined up a new CRM, a data analytics platform, 24-hour customer service and an upgraded mobile banking platform slated to launch by yearend 2021.  

The Peoples Community began looking to grow market share within its footprint, it found its existing core had “shortfalls,” and lacked the open architecture framework required to roll out new apps and features, Christensen said. As such, the Mazomanie, Wis.-based lender inked a deal with London-based Finastra, its existing core provider, to upgrade to Finastra’s “Fusion Phoenix” system.  

However, The Peoples Community is still one year out from being able to start its projects since the bank is slated to go live on the new core system next year. Currently, the bank’s digital offerings are made up of a patchwork of products by various third-party providers, Christensen explained. “Operationally, it’s tough … because we need to have access to many third-parties that all need to speak with each other,” he said. It will take a year to wrangle the various platforms that support the bank’s services like mobile and online banking, mobile wallets, and bank account management, into one unified channel using the open APIs offered within the new system. 

The change to the new core will allow The Peoples Community to drop its current mobile banking platform provider, NCR, for Finastra’s mobile banking product, Christensen said. The current setup has bank customers downloading a separate app for each new mobile banking feature or product, which “can cause headaches for both the operations here at the bank, but also with customers when a system is down,” he said.  

Also read: Citizens innovates around its legacy core

Implementing a CRM solution for marketing and sales is also a priority, Christensen said. The bank currently has no centralized hub to track customer information, which has made it near impossible for it to record customer touchpoints when inquiries or activity occur between the different consumer-facing channels. Another priority will be integrating Finastra’s data and analytics platform, which provides demographic data on existing and potential customers within a geographic footprint. Christensen said he hopes the data and analytics will enable The Peoples Community to go after new business and deepen existing relationships with the opportunity to cross-sell other banking products.  

The expansion of the The Peoples Community Bank’s partnership with Finastra comes as other community banks tap the vendor for their new core banking systems. Sterling Federal Bank, an Illinois-based bank with $430 million of assets, updated its core with Finastra last month, as did Barwick Bank, one of the smallest banks in Georgia, in May. And larger institutions with more than $1 billion of assets are also tackling the same issues; the $177 billion Citizens Bank recently told Bank Innovation about its creative workarounds for its legacy core. 

“Like most banks, we have a lot of legacy systems, so we do have to make sure the different channels for the different legacy systems can talk to each other to effectively leverage that data in a smart, efficient way,” Citizens Chief Experience Officer Beth Johnson said. “That transformation is really centered around how do we respond quickly to changing customer needs — digital is the core of that — as we think about developing our services and products across the bank.” 

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