TCM Teams With LemonadeLXP to Help Community Banks Go Digital

TCM Bank and growth platform LemonadeLXP have teamed to help community banks increase their digital footprint.

“TCM is committed to delivering the best cardholder experience for our community bank clients,” C.J. Littrell, executive vice president and chief operating officer at TCM Bank, said in a Tuesday (Sept. 5) news release.

“Our arrangement with LemonadeLXP helps further that effort by providing exciting new training support to create a seamless interactive experience for our community bank partners,” he added.

Founded in 2018, LemonadeLXP provides “rapid authoring tools” that let users train and support staff and digital customers. TCM Bank is a subsidiary of ICBA Bancard and an issuer of credit cards for community banks.

According to the release, LemonadeLXP will help TCM support digital banking customers with “a unique combination of game-based learning, technology walkthroughs, role-play scenarios and powerful analytics.”

The partnership is happening at a time when digital-first/digital-only banks are gaining ground, though customers are still uncertain about switching from traditional banks to a neobank.

“Unfamiliarity with non banks plays a role, as does satisfaction with current — and typically traditional — banking models,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.

That’s according to findings from “How Consumers Use Digital Banks,” a PYMNTS and Treasury Prime collaboration using information from a survey of over 2,120 U.S. consumers. The study looked at consumer attitudes toward neobanks and the reasons people will (or won’t) experiment with this form of banking.

Although there is steady interest in digital banking and FinTech services such as PayPal, Venmo and Chime, many consumers polled for the study said they think of these as “auxiliary banking services — supplements to the services offered by their more traditional banks,” with few consumers using just digital-only banks.

Setting aside those who have used PayPal and Venmo, “25% of consumers have used a neobank, digital bank or FinTech with bank-like services in the past 12 months. Just 10% of respondents said that their primary bank accounts are with digital banks,” the report said.

More recently, PYMNTS spoke with Serena Smith, chief client officer at i2c, who said that while banks have made great strides with digital innovations, “there’s still a long way to go.”

Just as 9/11 forced financial services firms to move towards the electronic clearing of checks (via the Check 21 Act), Smith said, COVID-19 has pushed the entire industry toward another change, using digital channels for banking.

“But those channels were not utilized at scale,” she added, “and COVID forced the market, and [financial institutions] not yet embracing digital technology to implement solutions quickly.”