The Key to Fast-Track Digital Customer Experience Success for Banks and Credit Unions

Learn how a bank and credit institution can maximize their profits by choosing the right digital experience platform.

Banks and credit unions have not historically been the most bleeding-edge as far as technology is concerned. It’s no wonder that regulated, risk-averse organizations with legacy tech-debt tended to shy away from being early digital adopters. However, the pandemic forced financial organizations to quickly embrace digital technologies, causing a significant leapfrog effect that quickly pushed many forward—but into uncomfortable, unchartered waters. 

The need to meet growing customer experience demand while balancing compliance, security, internal IT resources and marketing’s urgent priority to get content out quickly, were large challenges that organizations had to solve in a matter of days.

The Challenges Financial Services Organizations Often Have with Their Website

Homestreet Bank, a west coast community bank based in Seattle, Washington, was able to ‘get by’ during the pandemic with their existing website. However, Misty Ford, SVP of Corporate Marketing at Homestreet has called that period of time ‘painful’. The legacy website CMS was heavily customized and required IT support for even minor content updates. The approval process for the updates also made edits and additions slow to implement. With customers relying on the website for branch information and urgent communication, Homestreet marketers felt frustrated that they couldn’t get things like branch alerts out fast enough.

It is fairly common for financial institutions to have the following challenges with their website platform:

• The content management solution is overly customized or not implemented in a way that non-technical marketers at the organization can make changes quickly
• Sites are slow and do not perform well due to unmanaged plug-ins, workarounds, old code or load heavy scripts
• IT and compliance being integrated into the approval and publishing process significantly limits how responsive an institution can act or react
• Financial Services organizations have unique needs such as section and page disclaimers, rates published across many pages of the site that need to get updated often, communication that often has to be branch/county or state-specific, content change audit trails, ADA compliance and many other considerations specific to their industry.

Aligning the Website with Business Goals

In addition, Homestreet also told us that it’s more than simply having the ability to quickly update content. They also need the website to easily be adaptable to new and changing business priorities. Her bank, like many others, don’t want to be laggards anymore. They know they can’t afford to lose customers that way. Misty mentioned she needed the site to be able to support future bank growth and wants to leverage the site to add geo-targeting, personalization, ability to recommend products based on life events or the customer journey, and any other features that will keep her bank competitive.

KuberaDX and Sitefinity = The Fast-Track to Digital Experience

In 2022, SilverTech, a premium digital agency partner of Progress Sitefinity, recognized that many of the financial organizations on their roster were challenged with similar issues as Homestreet Bank. They did not want to invest in a solution that didn’t grow and change with the needs of the organization and their customers.

As we helped organizations assess their needs and select technology solutions, we found there was a gap we could fill by developing a flexible, fully-brandable, nearly pre-configured solution on an enterprise-level DXP platform. This would give banks and credit unions what they needed:

Needs of Banking Services Providers

• Launch a new site in under 90 days that had the features and workflows banks and credit unions need to be competitive and compliant
• Scalable solution with feature and security updates to grow with the organization in the future
• Ability to update and maintain the site with non-technical resources and minimal training
• A pay-as-you-go SaaS solution with the ability to add on features and services as you need them
• An enterprise solution for the price a small or mid-sized bank or credit union can afford

The DXP solution that will help banks and credit unions get, and keep, a digital edge is called KuberaDX. It was named Best Digital Solution of 2022, at last year’s Bank Customer Experience Summit.

Why Homestreet Bank Chose KuberaDX

• To launch a robust solution that had flexible bank-specific modules and templates that significantly reduced the time to migrate the site and to launch
• Because it is built on top of Progress Sitefinity, a leading digital experience platform (DXP) in the market, and because the product is backed by a public company with a strong financial standing, bank executives and stakeholders had confidence in solution
• The Sitefinity roadmap is detailed and strategic, ensuring that the DXP will continue to scale to meet future needs
• The drag and drop UI makes it easy to use and allows marketing to make web changes without relying on IT or technical staff
• The API connectors mean that the website can integrate with virtually any other data-driven system they have
• To work with a digital implementation partner team with proven bank-vertical expertise