Digital-first banking

Away from the handful of huge, well-known banks in the United States, there are around 9,000 regional banks and credit unions that actually serve the majority of the market.

“The United States is an interesting market,” explains Alex Shootman, CEO of Alkami Technology, a digital sales and service platform provider for American banks and credit unions.

“About 40 percent of the United States banking market is covered by mega banks, but about 60 percent of the market is covered by the regional banks and credit unions.”

At a time of increasing consolidation and market pressures, local financial institutions know sticking with the status quo is not enough to survive, let alone thrive.

“They have to compete digitally against the largest banks in the world, and they don’t have the technology or the people that a large megabank has,” Shootman adds.

With the rise of disruptive fintech startups and global banking giants offering strong competition to long-standing credit unions and smaller banks, Alkami Technology supports financial organizations to deliver seamless digital experiences to customers.

In the vast majority of cases, the end user will never even know that Alkami Technology is powering this tech ecosystem.

“If you’re doing business with a smaller bank in the United States and you’ve got a great digital experience, it’s possible that under the covers, they’re using our technology,” Shootman says.

Direct feedback

It’s practically impossible to find an executive who says they don’t prioritize customers. But for Shootman, action speaks far louder than words.

“Every executive says, ‘We care about our customers.’ It’s what you do that demonstrates that,” he points out.

At Alkami Technology, financial performance and corporate culture go hand in hand. Through an initiative called the customer journey wall, which mapped the full life cycle of its client relationships, Shootman and his team are able to gain deeply valuable insights into exactly what the business is doing well and, perhaps most importantly, where more can be done.

“We gave every customer two green stickers and two red stickers, asking them to put the green stickers where we do a great job and put the red stickers where we need to do a better job,” he says.

As a direct result of this transparent process, Shootman was provided with clear areas that clients felt were perfect, as well as three areas where improvements could be prioritized.

“Those three moments created the next three years’ worth of work for the company,” he adds.

Drawing on guidance from business management expert Patrick Lencioni, Alkami Technology quickly identified the staff members who exactly reflected the business at its best and then used these employees to help define corporate values.

“The values of a company already exist. Your mission is to determine what the core values are and what the aspirational values are,” Shootman explains.

“We win together and how you show up matters.”

Future of digital banking

There’s no question in Shootman’s mind that the next stage of the banking industry will seek to master customer personalization and be deeply data-driven and predictive.

“Where’s digital banking going? It’s going toward anticipatory banking and the institutions are going to have to use AI,” he says.

After going through years of enhancements when it comes to the user experience, Shootman argues that banking is now transitioning into the phase where personalization is perfected. Drawing on the life cycle of digital music platforms and the success of companies like Spotify, it’s crystal clear to Shootman that a similar shift is coming to financial services.

“The reason why Spotify won is that they knew how to drive personalization. In the planning horizon, the ability to do anticipatory banking and the ability to know you as an individual are what our customers are going to need to do,” he explains.

“Of course, AI will play a central role in this future, with teams at Alkami Technology having spent the past 18 months building out a data infrastructure that can turn into the data source for our customers to be able to run their own AI models.”

In what is expected to be a highly complex and rapidly changing financial services industry over the next few years, Alkami Technology is ready to support smaller institutions to compete at the highest levels and power the future of finance.