Credit union (CU) members expect all elements of their CUs to be seamless and personalized, including tools for making payments, accessing financial data and managing money.
Ent Credit Union said it meets these challenges by replacing legacy technology infrastructure and product management frameworks with agile, cutting-edge successors.
“Ent’s current banking platform was adopted 12 years ago,” Tanan Miles, the CU’s senior vice president of electronic banking, told PYMNTS, explaining that system processes tend to connect inflexibly with older setups.
“We might be building something way over in this corner of Ent’s online banking universe, and we roll it out and somehow break something over here in the cellar,” Miles said.
To prevent these hiccups, Ent is unveiling a new technology infrastructure, moving away from relying on FinTechs to develop new features. Miles said Ent needs substantial agility and cannot trust third-party partners alone when it comes to innovation.
“Customizations have ensured Ent’s digital banking services have remained relevant and members’ experiences remain smooth, but the aggregation of technical debt carries risks,” Miles said. “Not only do new features incur heightened development complexity and financial downsides, but looking forward, a dated platform limits our capacity to pivot quickly and turn out new features as they come to market.”
The pandemic created some steep technical challenges for the CU in terms of how to provide highly personalized digital banking for its members, especially those who were financially impacted.
Miles said that while Ent quickly offered digital pandemic-related solutions — such as delaying loan payment deadlines and offering emergency loan applications — it found that these critical interventions required members to take the next steps. That changed as these processes have become fully digital.
He added that “one of the biggest takeaways for Ent has been to draw on our awareness that members have been trending more and more toward using digital channels and to focus on implementing a more agile digital banking architecture that positions us to release features and iterate more quickly moving forward.”
For more on what Ent and other CUs are doing to embrace digitization, download the Credit Union Tracker, a PYMNTS and PSCU collaboration.
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