Displeasure was high among customers of WECU in 2019.
The Bellingham, Washington, credit union's NPS score had dipped from the high 60s to 27 within six months of converting to a Fiserv DNA core and Fiserv's Architect digital banking solution in October 2018. Mobile app functionality was cumbersome and the app was essentially a shrunken version of the desktop site.
Jack Ingram was the newly minted chief information officer at the time, having joined the $2.7 billion-asset credit union 10 months before the core conversion. It was clear the institution needed to solve this issue, and Ingram asked that the task be assigned to him.
"It was a sink or swim kind of moment," he said. "When technology is not performing, even if it's not directly under my purview, it's a reflection on me and my team. I would rather own it and take all the licks then take the licks and not have skin in the game."
He and his team concluded that no single vendor would deliver the experiences the credit union and its members wanted. Instead, they decided a multitude of fintech partners could both fill in the gaps and enrich the digital banking experience.
It's a problem many small financial institutions have to face when competing with the resources of large banks: how to combine their personal, down-to-earth service with advanced technology, said Gilles Ubagh, a strategic advisor in commercial banking and payments at Aite-Novarica Group. "When small [financial institutions] do have partnerships, they won't necessarily be across the stack and so many product areas, especially so many customer-facing areas," he said. The sheer number of partnerships that WECU has forged is unusual for its size, "and a harbinger of where the market is likely to lead in the near term," said Ubagh.
For his creative and strategic use of fintech partners to mend technology troubles at WECU, Jack Ingram is being recognized as one of American Banker's Innovators of the Year in 2023.
American Banker's editorial staff chose 20 leaders who have done groundbreaking work during the past year.
Ingram spent his early years in eastern Oregon before attending Western Oregon University in Monmouth. "Growing up, things were tight, and my family lived paycheck to paycheck," he said. "I didn't have my first computer until I was in my freshman year of college. I was so broke I couldn't afford one so I bought pieces and built one." He then spent nearly 17 years at a community bank before pivoting to WECU.
"I hired him because of his experience but also because I could tell he was innovative, he challenges the status quo, and he is always looking for ways to improve," said Jennifer Kutcher, the president and CEO of WECU. "He has contributed significantly to the culture within the organization and getting others excited about thinking differently."
One of Ingram's earliest priorities when heading up this project was to improve the mobile app.
In early 2019, WECU teamed up with BankingOn, a mobile user experience company. The new app, launched in early 2020, is almost completely built using native code and Google's open-source Flutter framework for app development. It uses Fiserv Architect for backend and database functionality. Early 2020 also marked the debut of YouX, an online program built with software-as-a-service platform Influitive that encourages customer feedback and engagement. A version for children is called You(th)x.
Ingram and his digital products team called on Technivation to upgrade the desktop experience. The refreshed online banking experience rolled out in 2021. They chose AmpliFi to enhance its checking account and credit card rewards in 2021, such as adding credits to a card balance. Posh Technologies is behind the digital assistant, which came on the scene in 2022 and feeds directly into live chat at the contact center. Ingram and his team also updated WECU's external account aggregation display with Plaid in 2022, so customers can easily move money between these entities and view them in-line with their WECU accounts. Ingram said it has garnered far better engagement than the previous vendor, largely thanks to the embedded nature of the experience.
One enhancement that Ingram is most proud of is what he calls the Marketplace within the WECU app, which the credit union launched last year.
"There is this tendency to throw a laundry list of stuff under the 'More' menu," he said.
Instead, the app now curates checking, savings, card and loan products in a simple and visually appealing way.
"We wanted to put relationship origination at the heart of our conversation," he said. "Behind the scenes, we had to make sure the experience was super slick." Ingram and his digital products team chose Mantl and Alloy to enable speedy account opening and know-your-customer checks, respectively, and CreditSnap to prequalify customers for loans. The next step is to deploy decisioning application programming interfaces to better curate those suggestions for individual users, rather than presenting the same bucket to everyone.
Ingram saw immediate upticks in loan volume once WECU launched CreditSnap. "Marketing affects a bunch of this stuff, but if you don't have the experience to back it and don't make it easy for consumers to engage with the credit union, you'll see abandonment," he said. "We've done pretty well on that front."
WECU recently branched out of Whatcom County. It added a location in Skagit County to its south in April, with another to come by the end of the year.
"As new people come into our growing market we want to ensure it's easy to grab those folks and facilitate that quick, easy relationship build," said Ingram. One of his next steps is to develop a friend referral mechanism.
His ongoing work has paid off. The credit union's NPS scores started climbing again around the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020. By the end of 2022, WECU's score sat at 73.
By Kutcher's count, Ingram has helped the credit union partner with 17 fintech firms and it has six more relationships in the works.
"We wanted to be leading edge but not bleeding edge," said Kutcher. "With Jack's expertise and drive he has allowed us to take on more calculated risk. If we start down a track and realize it isn't what is best, we pivot. We're more nimble now."
