In case you missed yesterday’s post, here’s a brief recap. If you did read yesterday, you can jump down to cloud based telephony. Keep in mind, this is part of a larger strategy and some tie into one another, so you may want to review part 1 here.
Last Friday I released a letter to community financial institutions on surviving the “new normal”. This post is the second of three outlining 12 technologies that I feel will be vitally important for community banks to survive into the future.
It’s important that community banks and credit unions take the time to think about these things. Why?
Some of the 12 might already in place at your bank – if that’s the case, I want you to think about how well your current solution is working and can it be improved.
Some you’ve already considered and you or your board decided it just wasn’t the right time – if that’s the case, I encourage you to refresh those proposals and view the potential project through a new perspective.
Some you’ve never even considered – if that’s the case, I ask that you open your mind to what the needs of your customers, employees, and community will be in the future, where lockdowns are possible and social distancing is the norm.
One last thing: each of these technologies will need to be secured and each have their own nuances (and maybe that’s another post). Before you implement new technology, or make major changes to your existing solutions, you need to perform an adequate risk assessment, vendor due diligence, and apply appropriate controls. If you need help doing that or have any questions, please contact us at support@bedelsecurity.com.
Call center activity skyrocketed during the COVID-19 lockdown. Many Financial Institutions (FIs) found themselves fighting the increased call volume while trying to manage routing those calls to remote workers.
Even as we return to the “new normal”, it’s estimated that call center demand will remain higher than previous levels. How you handle phone calls in the future will be critical to the success of your FI. Some questions to ask yourself:
Do we need to rethink how our calls are routed and answered to handle an ever-increasing volume and improve customer experience?
Can our phone system accommodate remote employees and do it well?
If our main office were incapacitated, would we be able to re-route calls quickly?
While it’s not new, FI adoption of cloud-based telephone systems is still low. But in our post-pandemic landscape, it may be time to reconsider that.
A cloud based phone system is hosted in the cloud and is designed to be more resilient than traditional hardware phone systems. Call routing can be managed from anywhere, there’s no single point of failure, there’s no talk-path limitations, and they have a feature set that rivals any in-house phone system, including call center capabilities. So not only does it provide a feature set to make remote workforce management easier, but it also has many business continuity benefits.
There are solutions that can be managed themselves (like RingCentral https://www.ringcentral.com/) or if that sounds like too much, some of the core banking providers host these systems and can even provide answering and resolutions services for you like this: https://www.jackhenrybanking.com/retail-delivery/pages/jhacall-center.aspx
While many FIs faced the challenges of separating key employees to prevent both from becoming sick at the same time, others discovered single points of failure in key roles within their bank.
In certain outsourcing situations, some FIs found that the relationship provided natural social distancing and depth of bench that otherwise wouldn’t be available to them with conventional employees alone.
I’m not saying in any way that it’s time to let employees go and outsource all your operations. Your employees are your most valued asset!
I am saying that it may be time to review your key roles, determine where your depth of bench and/or succession plan is weak, and identify what vendor relationships you could leverage to strengthen your existing staff.
Some areas to consider:
In identifying a service provider, make sure you ask the right questions:
The SBA PPP loans in the midst of social distancing opened the eyes of many FIs to their limited capabilities to efficiently share files with customers. Some used their secure email portal, which can often be a painful experience for the customer and lender. Others just used clear text email, which is unsecure and an information security incident waiting to happen.
Having the ability to securely send and receive files to/from customers in an efficient way is a must going forward. There are very affordable, secure, easy to use solutions out there, so there’s little excuse to not have a solution like this.
We like, use, and recommend Citrix ShareFile as a solution for this. It’s roughly $15.50 per user per month. It has MFA, device management, and logging features from a security perspective. You can securely send one-time links to files that expire or set up folders for more permanent sharing relationships. It even allows you to embed an upload portal in your existing website: https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX207516?recommended
This goes hand-in-hand with Secure File Sharing and the logic is very similar. We need to make the ability to conduct business electronically as easy as possible for our customers and e-signatures are another way to do that. Similarly, this is a must going forward.
The three solutions that we typically see for this are:
I hope you’ve found this helpful. Please contact us with any questions at support@bedelsecurity.com.
Part 3 of this post will be available tomorrow and will cover our final 4 technologies, including new account opening methods and technologies to make the drive-thru channel more efficient.
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Our mission here at Bedel Security is focused around service. We want to serve community banks and credit unions to our very best ability and that’s an ever-evolving process.
Bedel Security was founded in March of 2015 by Chris Bedel with the dream of making a bigger impact by doing three things:
The bottom line is that we want to help as many financial institutions as we can, in any way we can. So how can we help you?