Driving Financial Growth with Simplified Digital Banking | Innovation Federal Credit Union

So if I want to say buy a car, I shouldn't have to fill in a loan application or I shouldn't have to go shop to the different dealerships or shop to the different banks to find out who's going to give me the best deal. Open banking will allow us to get the best price to the member, allow us to find the best product for the member across multiple financial institutions and allow them to make that purchase without going to a bank to get a money order. You know we could either grow in very traditional ways through mergers and acquisitions and those kinds of things or we could take something that was a little bit different and going digital first, going mobile first. The digital platform is going to be extremely key for us. So the platform needs to be powerful enough and reliable enough so that we can scale into those markets where we can bring on 100, 200 members a week so that we're able to drive the growth that we need. We wanted to make sure that we had a technology stack that was appropriate. Something could grow very quickly with us and also serve our membership across the country. Our traditional stack couldn't do that, cloud could. So we looked for all the very traditional things that you would with cloud such as high resiliency, elasticity, the ability to grow, high security. But the other thing that we were looking for is to simplify our support, simplify our management of it and simplify our ability to go to the market quickly. We reached out to Equinix and were referred to a partner Encore and the group put together an edge network that allowed us to connect those different cloud platforms together and we ended up achieving many of the things that we were really looking for. The whole setup is a bit of a differentiator from an IT perspective. It's very easy to stand things up. It's very very quick to deploy new technology. It's very simple to manage. It's very simple to make secure. A lot of those things that become very complex when you have multiple systems, we can do them very easily. Ultimately they can they can bank any way they want, anywhere they want, with any platform that they want, with any application that they want. But where the real power is going to come in is when you start to be able to move money. Examples of that would be things like auto adjudicating loans in real time or payment products in real time through e-commerce platforms. We have information like we've never had before. We can see the speed to log in. We know the types of devices that are on our network, whether it's an iOS or an Android device. We know the types of transactions that people are doing and what kind of services we can bring to market to improve. So having the platform that we have today, we're able to quickly make those changes to really deliver a good digital experience for members.