1000011010101010 0010101001100001 “BANK BOARD MEMBERS AND EXECUTIVES NEED TO UNDERSTAND NOT JUST THEIR 0101110001110000 OWN MICRO NEEDS GOING FORWARD, BUT THE MACRO TRENDS THAT MAY 0111000111000001 TRANSFORM HOW EVERYONE ELSE 0000110101010101 DOES BUSINESS.” 01010100110000 10 0101110001110000 00 10000110101010 0000101010011000 1010101110001110 10000 10000110101 1110000010101001 Expanding your 1010101010111000 bank’s services. 100110000 1000011 By putting 1000111000001010 you first. 0001101010101011 1010100110000 100 1011100011100000 0 100001101010101 0000101010011000 1010101110001110
in Everett, Mass., offers a look at how one local bank successfully changed vendors and upgraded what had become a series of cumbersome and dated systems. The bank extensively quizzed vendors, using a 26-page questionnaire. The questions ranged from how often customer statements would be churned out to the number and range of transactions a teller could expect to do in a typical day. A dozen executives at the bank were part of team that spent months interviewing various vendors pitching core processing systems. However, the clincher was the committee’s visit to another bank, which was a customer of the vendor, in this case Jack Henry. “They could see the software in action in the same setting and environment where we would be using it,” she recalled. Agreed, said COCC’s Bessel, who contends there is no better way of sizing up a vendor than sitting down face-to-face with a customer. And banks should also get vendors to explain how they would handle a worse-case scenario, whether it’s a natural disaster like Hurricane
TOM MCBRIDE, FISERV
Sandy or a manmade mess or glitch. How do they handle customer communications in crises? And do they have the capacity and commitment to see the emergency through and get bank operations back online as soon as possible? “Did you have a disaster, and how did you deal with it?” is a good place to start, Bessel said. BNE
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