WaFd President and CEO Brent Beardall has a 5-year plan to become a digital-first bank.

“Not a digital-only bank and not a brick-and-mortar only bank, but a digital-first bank where we provide the channels that are supported by relationships,” Beardall said. “Too often when you have a digital relationship it’s all just generic, there’s nothing personal about it. Wouldn’t it be great every time you open your mobile app, you saw your banker and here’s your banker’s cell phone?”

Seattle-based WaFd, formerly Washington Federal Bank, has $17.9 billion of assets and a West Coast footprint in eight states. Throughout the pandemic, the regional bank has experienced an acceleration of digital adoption with 99% of banking transactions completed via online channels, ATMs and call centers, Beardall said, up from 85% last year.

The shift to out-of-branch channels has WaFd exploring digital enhancements and automation to keep up with customer preferences, Beardall said. Specifically, he brought up the use of personalized data to offer new banking products and the use of analytics to give customer-specific financial advice in real-time. Another area the bank wants to invest in is the creation of a hybrid model with branches and online channels, in which the branch locations act as showrooms for banking products to support the digital relationships.

With those aspirations in mind, WaFd is being practical in its approach.

“First thing’s first, it’s an iterative process — we don’t have all the answers,” Beardall said. “But I’ve been with the bank now, it’ll be 20 years in January, and I’m so tired of systems that don’t speak to one another, the constant failure of banking systems is a lack of integration.”

As one of the first steps to becoming a digital-first bank, WaFd announced this week it is integrating nCino’s commercial banking platform to allow for more tech integrations with microservice layers, which use an architecture style that pulls in a collection of services. The new system comes with a document management portal that will allow the bank to collect documents from clients and analyze the data in one centralized hub. The document portal also plugs into the bank’s loan origination software to generate the loan documents and applications and is automated, relieving the need for WaFd bankers to correspond for each document via email, Beardall said.

Further down the digital roadmap, WaFd is looking to revamp its mobile platform with the help of Lehi, Utah-based MX, which the bank invested in last year. MX provides digital banking solutions to the likes of Ally Financial, BECU and BBVA.

“The recipe of success for us has always been relationships and an unbelievably strong balance sheet, and the recipe of the future will be those two, plus technology,” Beardall said. “As an industry, we’re just unbelievably antiquated and that’s why I think the real opportunity is for a bank that gets it and wants to be progressive from a technology standpoint.”