Fumbi Chima, BECU's executive vice president and chief information officer, is helming a multiyear project to modernize the credit union's technology, with a goal of making it easier to work with fintech partners and to remove pain points for members.
“At the heart of our digital transformation is the need to serve our members more quickly, as it’s now much easier and cheaper for consumers to switch financial institutions than ever before,” Chima said.
Chima was hired in October 2020 to run
Technologies such as robotic process automation, which uses software to perform mundane tasks previously done by staff, generate efficiencies and cost savings for financial institutions, said Dennis Gada, senior vice president and head of financial services for North America at Infosys, one of BECU’s technology partners. Instead of spending time gathering customer data, staff are freed to focus on giving in-person advice on investments and loans.
Prior to joining BECU, Chima was chief information officer at Adidas, where she led a customer-centric digital transformation initiative for the German athletic brand. She also worked on digital transformation at Fox Network Group, the luxury fashion brand Burberry, Walmart Asia and American Express’s global corporate technologies division.
Chima is also active in promoting diversity, women’s empowerment and inclusion, and has created mentoring opportunities for women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Currently, she is on the board of Women at Risk International Foundation.
"Because of my experience at other firms, I was recruited specifically for digital transformation, which involves not just transforming BECU’s technology but also the enterprise as a whole,” Chima said. “People think that if you transform the technology, then everything else gets fixed. But you also need to transform the enterprise’s way of working and its operating models. Our initiative encompasses both front- and back-office transformation.”
With $30.4 billion of assets, 60 branches and 1.34 million members, BECU is the fourth-largest U.S. credit union. Originally founded to serve Boeing employees across the U.S., BECU expanded its field of membership in the early 2000s to include residents of Washington, Idaho, Oregon and South Carolina.
Growth figures point to the success of BECU’s digital strategy. In 2021, the number of new members joining BECU online grew 21.25% to 17,600, and the value of digital loans rose by 60% to over $1 billion. BECU saw its overall assets grow by 12.7% in 2021 from $26.8 billion in 2020, while total deposits rose by 16% to $26.1 billion.
But the transformation process isn’t complete and will take a further three to five years, Chima said.
“Although we have some industry-leading capabilities in place, we aren’t consistent across the board,” she said. “Our goal is to make our members’ experience more seamless, which will require us to have a more open-source approach to IT.”
BECU is migrating from its legacy systems to a service-oriented architecture with a secure interoperable application programming interface layer, enabling plug-and-play integration, Chima said. “We’ll also migrate the right capabilities from our old environment, where it makes sense.”
Including an API layer in BECU’s IT architecture will facilitate integration with third-party service providers and fintechs. One fintech BECU has partnered with is the financial data platform MX in Lehi, Utah, which developed the BECU Envelopes mobile app feature, enabling BECU members to build savings through frequent, small-value transfers. BECU Envelopes will be rolled out to the credit union’s full membership in July or August, Chima said.
Another area BECU wants to improve on is its in-person account-opening process.
“When a BECU customer service agent opens an account for a new member in one of our branches, it can take up to 25 minutes,” Chima said. “The number of systems the agent has to go into to open the account is quite significant. Our goal is to simplify the process, so it becomes more transparent and takes the agent two minutes.”
BECU wants to integrate its various channels more closely, Chima said, so that when a member completes a product application form online and then goes to a branch, the employee sees all the information in the branch system that the member has entered online.
As part of this strategy, BECU has opened more branches in recent years — but they're not typical branches.
“Only a few of BECU’s branches include tellers,” said Owen Wheatley, lead partner, banking and financial services at the technology research firm ISG. “The vast majority are staffed with consultants who provide members with advice on financial products such as mortgages and investments. This strategy predated the pandemic and is far-sighted since these are exactly the kinds of services customers say they prefer in-person.”
To improve its back-office efficiency, BECU is introducing
“So far, we’ve implemented six back-office automation improvements within the mortgage area using RPA technology from UiPath, with more improvements planned,” Chima said, referring to robotic process automation. “We’re in the early stages of educating our business partners on the benefits of RPA, and find that our employees embrace RPA and want more of it.”
