Breaking the Traditional Bank Technology Implementation Model

Manual business banking processes are long, tedious, and painful. 

While there’s ample technology available to make processing term loans and lines of credit easier for financial institutions, similarly painful implementations have left many banks and credit unions opting for pen and paper.

That’s because the typical bank tech implementation model requires months and months to get a platform up and running inside of an institution.

Why The Bank Tech Implementation Mold Needed Breaking

Even in the era of Software as a Service (SaaS), some vendors require six months of prep work before a bank or credit union can get from the time the contract is signed, to the time of the initial project kicks off. Even then, there can be as much as another six months worth of testing and refining before training can begin. All in all, the typical bank tech implementation can take anywhere from 12 to 18 months before an institution is finally launched and starting to get value from the platform they purchased.

Numerated has been there before. But there are two things that forced us to break this mold and provide one the most efficient implementations available in the fintech space.

First and foremost, we listened. As our partners and weekly webinar attendees know, we’re constantly looking for feedback from the banks and credit unions we work with, for ways we can continue to build the platform they want.

For years, we’ve heard our partners talk about the pain they’ve experienced with other vendors’ long implementations. As a leader, we wanted to change that and provide a better experience.

Secondly, the unprecedented events of the last year forced us to rethink the way we did implementations and to optimize them in order to meet the demand we were seeing for our platform—more than a hundred institutions looking for implementations, and as many as 40 in a single week.

How Numerated Built a More Efficient Implementation for Banks and Credit Unions

They say necessity is the mother of all invention. And that couldn’t be more true when we talk about optimizing Numerated’s implementation process.

When asked about how we’re able to shrink bank tech implementations down to as little as 10 weeks, our Head of Bank Products Carrie Asprinio described it as “kind of a crazy thing.”

“We stood up a hundred banks in a week,” Carrie said, reflecting on the Paycheck Protection Program. “And so we asked ourselves, how can we make all of our implementations quicker?”

In the time since, Numerated has been working around the clock to take what we’ve learned in the last year—helping nearly 150 banks and credit unions process more than $50B in PPP loans—to build the most efficient implementation available to financial institutions, today.

Numerated’s implementation model is designed around a simple philosophy: Get banks and credit unions the value they paid for as efficiently as possible.

Doing so required breaking implementations into five main components that allow lenders to get up and running quickly, while still providing them the flexibility to customize their platform as they use it. Today, a standard implementation with Numerated includes:

• Activation Checklist: The activation checklists provide every institution with a good starting point. This checklist makes it easier for banks and credit unions to come in and get set up quickly—not just with the product but with everything from IT as well. Ultimately, the activation checklists provides Numerated with the ability to deliver a platform that is ready to use, and that meets the institution’s expectations, right off the bat.

• Ready-To-Go Configuration: Over the last year our product team has been hard at work researching industry best practices and working directly with partner institutions to develop what we call product templates. These product templates are ready-to-go, standard configurations of all of the business banking products available on the Numerated platform. These ready-to-go configurations can be added to a platform almost immediately, letting users run with them. This allows banks and credit unions to get comfortable with the platform, while custom configurations are still being implemented.

• Standard Documentation: One of the most common areas of slow down for a bank tech implementation comes at the documentation stage, as they often require legal review. We’ve worked with a partner to make sure Numerated has a set of standard legal docs that financial institutions can review and start using quickly. All standard docs are ready to go for DocuSign integration, meaning as soon as users are set up in a testing environment, they can begin learning to use the docs with actual test data. Again, this allows banks and credit unions to recognize value more quickly, while their legal team works to update any docs that need to be customized.

• Data Loading: Most bank technology today requires integration with an institution’s core system. This is an extremely technical process that takes a long time and often delays other implementation work. Over the last year as more than a hundred banks adopted the Numerated platform, we needed to find a way to make data loading easier. During PPP we learned that we were able to add data to the platform quickly without needing to go through the process of setting up an SFTP for a core integration. While Numerated still provides core integrations that enable even higher levels of automation, the ability to upload data via local files means core integrations won’t prevent users from getting data onto the platform more quickly.

• Customization: Our ability to provide an out-of-the-box solution means banks and credit unions can get started quickly. It does not mean that these institutions are limited to standard products, however. By moving customization from the front, to the tail end of the implementation process, we’re able to speed time to value while still providing the exact experience each bank and credit union is looking for.

Learn More About How We’re Making Implementations Easy

As a digital lending platform designed to dramatically reduce work for financial institutions and their clients, “easy” is in our DNA.

With Numerated, banks and credit unions can quickly recognize the value in their purchase with implementations completed in weeks, not months (or more than a year).

To learn more about Numerated’s implementation model from our Chief Customer Officer and Director of Implementations, watch our webinar on breaking the traditional bank technology implementation model, above.

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