Not all customers want a traditional bank. For 50 years, this institution has offered check cashing, loans, and credit and debit card products for all types of customers across the United States.

The company's goal was to give customers an omnichannel experience across digital and physical channels so that interactions started through one channel (online) could be easily continued through another (at the teller window). The bank knew that to accomplish this, it needed to make sure customer data was complete, accurate, and accessible to employees needing the data to enrich and personalize the customer experience.

A challenge the institution faced was the inconsistent way customer data was collected and stored. Because each channel collects different information, and the systems were not connected, the data for each channel was siloed. The view of each customer was fragmented and incomplete. To solve this problem, the company sought an integration and analytics platform that could bring all the data on all of its systems together.

"If you can control your data intake or aggregate all of that information, your data becomes more reliable," said the firm's director of enterprise architecture, data, business intelligence, integration, and innovation.

With an open API-driven and microservices-based framework powered by TIBCO underpinning its infrastructure, the bank integrated its customer information. Staff now has a common way of looking up, creating, and updating a customer's information across all channels, and the bank can ensure that information is managed and governed correctly, enabling a consistent omnichannel experience.

"We could really unify the customer experience, how they interact with us, and capture events to detect customer activity and prevent fraud across the different channels," said the firm's director.

Additionally, the firm implemented an event-driven architecture that uses business rules to improve the customer experience. The rules drive in-branch customer engagement tracking, push scoring mechanisms based on demographics and location, and deter fraud.

With the powerful TIBCO API management platform, the company can keep its business rules in one, centralized place with clear visibility into what those rules are and how valuable they are to the business. Further, it gained visibility into how customer experience-related models are being executed.

"TIBCO has a full picture of what I'm looking for when it comes to realizing complex event processing, and ultimately that's where we're trying to go to improve customer experience and operations," the director said.

Before, the business was very transaction-driven, with little emphasis on customer awareness. Now, it’s shifted to customer-centric, with the ability for in-depth analysis to create a more personalized experience. Not only can the bank make every interaction more personalized, it can also intelligently upsell and cross-sell. To do this, it profiled the demographics of the customers it serves. That information sparked insights that allowed the company to spend money more wisely on marketing and products, and to choose the best geographies for opening new branches.

"There are lots of benefits in getting to know who our customers really are and making the right investment based on our population of customers," explained the firm's director.

The bank now has a better understanding of customer interactions—everything from chatbots to social media is informing machine learning and AI to decipher what the customer wants or needs. The company can then act upon those needs in real time.

"As the company matures, we get a better sense of our customer-centric analysis, and we can use that data to build better machine learning models and feedback loops."

Additionally, the company has incorporated AI and visual analytics so that it can better understand loan metrics. This has led to increased insight, so decisions can be made in real time.

"We've been able to use TIBCO in a different way to better enrich and accelerate our underwriting model, which requires a lot of data analysis to determine the probability of loan default for a customer."

Leveraging a new, cutting-edge, integration, event processing, and analytics platform also required a shift in culture. The firm has embraced a culture of innovation which led to more modern, self-service processes.

"If people see the benefit of unifying on a platform and using that as your integration platform, you save time, money, effort, and you gain the time to market," said the firm's director. "You gain visibility into how your data flows into your company, and all it does is benefit everybody at the end of the day."

According to the firm, a company needs a vision of digital maturity and to understand that changing to a more modern platform can benefit the company and its stakeholders.

"Using a platform like TIBCO allows you to be future proof and gives you the agility that you need to excel forward, not only from a development standpoint but from a business transformation and enterprise architecture standpoint."