By Jason Schwabline, Chief Strategy Officer

Deciding when it’s time to upgrade your check processing and payments infrastructure can be tricky. For many, the term “upgrade” is associated with time-consuming, costly efforts, but that doesn’t have to be true. It’s important to consider the date of your last major upgrade, and how customer behaviors and market trends have shifted since. Your aging solutions are likely still “getting the job done,” but at what cost to your bank and account holders?

As solutions age, challenges grow in productivity and cost, and despite the decline of check volumes worldwide, checks remain a significant payment instrument – prioritizing the need for a modernized approach that ensures sustainable success.

Ask yourself these questions to assess your 2022 priorities and payments modernization goals.

  1. Are you meeting customer expectations?
    Consumer behavior continues to shift but one thing remains the same – the need for simple, intuitive offerings that deliver the same level of service regardless of channel. Users expect their banks to “meet them where they are” in their financial journey and to receive a consistent UX. Upgrading to a modern, cloud-based platform affords the opportunity to consolidate solutions across channels and extend the same familiar service both in-person and when banking remotely from outside of the branch.

  2. Have you achieved interoperability across your payment and check processing solutions?
    Historically when new technologies were introduced, banks deployed separate platforms to serve each point of capture, often managed by separate teams and segmented by channel. While these deployments delivered the needed capabilities for account holders at the time, banks have since suffered due to data inconsistencies and fragmented user journeys – not to mention a lack of interoperability. With many of these platforms aging, and likely in place since Check 21 – nearly 17 years ago, the time is now to explore modernization solutions that simplify the payments ecosystem and maximize internal resources and investments.

  3. Do your solutions easily flex and scale with changing needs and goals?
    In addition to a centralized deployment mechanism, many aging solutions are installed on-premises, making growth, upgrades, and maintenance challenging. By leveraging the cloud, you’ll immediately gain access to an environment that scales quickly and exponentially, enabling you to achieve business goals when increased volumes, or new users and locations are needed.

  4. Are your aging check processing solutions costly?
    With support and maintenance issues likely growing with time, and many aging solutions requiring specialized IT teams, 2022 is the year to stay ahead of these challenges by deploying a hosted payments platform that can be managed centrally and through a single, set of common code – maximizing time and allowing you to focus on customer-facing services.

  5. Do you run into internal roadblocks or delays because of siloed data?
    In addition to the operational challenges, your customers will feel the setback too in the price of slower-to-market solutions and disjointed user journeys. A powerful tool for strategic decision making at any bank, data utilization is often linked with payments modernization projects. Without a single database and reporting dashboard to aggregate your bank’s enterprise-wide data points, you’ll lack a true understanding of how each point-of-capture is performing, and the ability to quickly extract actionable information – like feature adoptions, fraud stats, user journey insights, gaps in market adoption or education, and more. Leveraging data to better understand customer needs and your bank overall is a key differentiator to better services and improved satisfaction rates.

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above, let’s talk. With over 25 years of experience delivering advanced technologies to banks of all sizes, Alogent understands that no two financial institutions are the same. Alogent’s patent-pending platform, Unify, is a modern, cloud-based offering for financial institutions, and is the only solution of its kind that universally addresses all payment channels by using a single API. The productivity and cost-savings results are tenfold for banks, as well as their customers.

Click here to learn more in an eBook. »