Ask Yourself These 5 Questions. It Might Be Time to Refresh Your Bank’s or Credit Union’s Check Processing and Payment Solutions
Deciding when it’s time to upgrade your check processing and payments infrastructure can be difficult, and a balancing act linked to other projects, budgets, and timelines. For many institutions, the term “upgrade” is often associated with time-consuming, costly efforts. However, this isn’t always true, and requires a bit more context when considering a refresh. It’s important for banks and credit unions to first consider when their last major upgrade took place, and how account holder behaviors and market trends have shifted since. Your aging solutions are likely still “getting the job done,” but at what cost to your institution and your account holders?
As solutions age, challenges grow in productivity and cost, and despite the decline of check volumes worldwide, the check remains a significant payment instrument that is not going away – prioritizing the need for a modernized approach with a consistent UX across channels, to ensure sustainable success.
Do your solutions need a refresh? What factors should you consider? Get started here with these 5 questions.
- Are you meeting account holder expectations?
The quick answer is ‘yes,’ but when you truly look at your organization from a holistic view, is that answer still true? Consumer behavior continues to shift but one thing remains the same – the need for simple, intuitive offerings that deliver the same level of service regardless of channel. Customers and members expect their financial institution to “meet them where they are” in their financial journey and to receive a consistent UX. Upgrading to a modern, cloud-based platform affords the opportunity to consolidate solutions across channels and to empower your institution to extend the same familiar service both in-person and when banking remotely from outside of the branch.
- Have you achieved interoperability across your payment and check processing solutions?
Historically when new technologies were introduced, banks and credit unions deployed separate platforms to serve each point of capture, often managed by separate teams and segmented by payment channel. While these deployments met the demand and delivered the needed capabilities for account holders, financial institutions have since suffered due to data inconsistencies and fragmented user journeys – not to mention a lack of interoperability. With many of these platforms aging, and likely infrastructure in place since Check 21, the time is now to explore modernization, open banking solutions that simplify the payments ecosystem and maximize internal resources and investments.
- Do your solutions easily flex and scale with changing needs and goals?
In addition to a centralized deployment mechanism, many aging solutions are installed on-premise, making growth, upgrades and maintenance a bit challenging. By leveraging the cloud, you’ll immediately gain access to an environment that scales quickly and exponentially, enabling you to achieve business goals when increased volumes, or new users and locations are needed.
- Are your aging payment processing solutions costly?
Trying to maximize your investment on legacy technology is often a race against the clock. With support and maintenance issues likely growing with time, and many aging solutions requiring the attention of specialized teams, now is the time to stay ahead of these challenges by deploying a hosted payments platform that can be managed centrally and through a single, set of common code – maximizing time and allowing you to focus on customer and member-facing services rather than your infrastructure.
- Do you run into internal roadblocks or delays because of siloed data?
In addition to the operational challenges of departmental silos noted earlier, your account holders will feel the setback as well in the price of slower-to-market solutions and disjointed user journeys. A powerful tool for strategic decision making at any institution, data utilization is often linked hand-in-hand with payments modernization projects. Without a single database and reporting dashboard to aggregate all of your bank’s or credit union’s enterprise-wide data points, financial institutions lack a true understanding of how each point-of-capture is performing, and the ability to quickly extract actionable information – such as feature adoptions, fraud stats, user journey insights, gaps in market adoption or education, and more. Leveraging data to better understand the needs of your account holders, and your institution overall, is a key differentiator to better services and improved satisfaction rates.
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above, let’s talk. With over 25 years of experience delivering advanced technologies to banks and credit unions of all sizes, Alogent understands that no two financial institutions are the same – each having their own unique requirements and processes for best serving their account holders. Our team of experts work tirelessly to ensure our solutions fit smoothly and seamlessly into your environment, positioning your institution for greater, sustainable success.
Alogent’s patent-pending platform, Unify, is a modern, cloud-based offering for banks and credit unions and is the only solution of its kind to universally addresses all deposit channels with an open-banking approach and single API. The productivity and cost-savings results are tenfold for banks and credit unions, as well as the user experience benefits felt by their customer and members.
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