The Technology Was Never the Hard Part

Days after the institution rolled out Zelle, a head teller stood at the counter and told a customer she would not use it herself. CarrieAnne Cormier, who ran retail and operations at a bank and a credit union, was on a branch visit and overheard it. She remembers the words exactly. “I don’t use that either. It’s scary.” The platform was live. The training was done. Someone at the front line had already decided what the new service was worth, and she had decided against it. That is where a transformation is won or lost.

What decides it

What stalls a transformation or saves it is people, culture, mandate, and execution. The platform seldom decides. Jay Tkachuk, who led digital banking at Security Service Federal Credit Union and then Golden 1, puts the odds bluntly from his own experience. “More than half end in failure,” he says, and the failures trace to people far more often than to platforms.

The signal shows up long before launch. At one institution CarrieAnne joined, every small decision ran to the top. Staff could not refund a customer fifty dollars without executive sign-off. When approval for a fifty-dollar refund travels that far up the organization, the culture is not ready, and she could read it “before you can even start to talk about technology.” She has watched digital get treated as a side project across institutions, still parked with whichever team ran the core in 2007, with no clear owner for the experience the customer or member touches.

The mandate is the other half. Someone must own the change and hold the authority to push it through, and one person decides whether that authority is real. Jay is direct about who that is. When egos and turf get in the way, the CEO is the one who settles it. “They are the ultimate arbiter,” he says. The pattern that fails is easy to recognize. A CEO announces the transformation, names a leader to run it, and then stays out of the rooms where the resistance lives. Some of the leaders commit, some do not, and the work stalls between them. Jay’s verdict is plain. “The human factor interfered.”

Sometimes the platform is the problem. Jay is the first to say so. “If everything is wired to the core, any new implementation is very difficult,” he says. It also takes longer and costs more. An institution tied tightly to an aging core is slower to change than one that is not, and no amount of willpower changes that overnight. Even then, the human choice sits one step earlier. Someone selected that architecture. Someone decides now whether to live within it, replace it, or build around it. A hard constraint in the core is real. What the institution does about it is a human call, and that call is where the outcome turns.

“Team members need to use the products. It starts there. You don’t go working at Ann Taylor and wear Old Navy.” – CarrieAnne Cormier

The hard part is the follow-through

If the platform is the easy part, the hard part is everything the earlier scenes were missing: adoption, ownership, clear language, and follow-through. Chris Rigoni, who heads partner banking and payments at Axiom Bank, names the scarce skill. “Everybody can come up with an idea,” he says. Very few can carry one into something that works. The teller who would not use Zelle, the refund that needed an executive’s sign-off, and the CEO who watched from outside the room were human failures that looked like technology problems. A rollout is a start. What happens in the weeks after, in training and habit and accountability, decides whether the value ever shows up.

Three things that make the difference

The work is human, and a few concrete steps improve the odds. Three came up again and again across these conversations.

Define the job before you fill it. Jay sets the mandate, the authority, and the reporting line up front, in writing, before the collisions start. “I like doing that work right up front,” he says. The friction that follows an undefined role is built into the structure, and defining the role early takes it away.

Run a working team instead of a committee. CarrieAnne built one she called Tech Table, a standing cross-functional group from retail, marketing, training, and IT that met every two weeks to surface what was coming. “It wasn’t a decision committee,” she says. A ten-person committee slows the work. A small team that meets often gets it done.

Put the product in your employees’ hands first. Scott Hurlbert, who runs digital channels at Provident Bank, brings a new service “to your own employees first, and then to your customers.” CarrieAnne says the same thing more sharply. “You don’t go working at Ann Taylor and wear Old Navy.” A staff that uses the product recommends it. A staff that does not use it steers customers away, the way that head teller did.

We build personalization technology, so we will name the obvious part. The platform is the easy part. Our software reads how a customer or member behaves inside the digital experience and shapes what they see next. It pays off only when someone owns that experience, keeps the content and offers behind it worth showing, and acts on what the behavior reveals. That is human work, the same work these conversations kept returning to. Scott’s advice to anyone buying technology fits ours. Make it your own and keep people there to mind the store.

There is a hopeful turn in this, and the rest of the series will follow it. The advantages that decide a transformation are human, and a smaller institution sits close enough to its people to build them.

If you are weighing a change and want to pressure-test whether your organization is ready for it, before the platform question, we are glad to talk it through.

This article is part of a series that draws on the first episodes of Next Best Action, our podcast on how banks and credit unions adapt. The guests have had different roles at different institutions, and on a few questions, they keep reaching the same answer. Each issue takes one of those questions.

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