Innovation Credit Union eyes massive digital growth and goes national with solution from VeriPark and Microsoft

Strategic disruption

Sometimes it takes more than changing how you work to achieve new organizational goals. You might need to completely disrupt the status quo and transition to a new way of working. You might also need someone like Dean Gagne, a disrupter who is accomplished enough to enjoy the title of Chief Disruption Officer at Innovation Credit Union in Canada. Growth was stagnating at Innovation, and Gagne was asked to help come up with a plan to double its 58,000 membership. To make that happen, “We made a couple of strategic decisions,” he says. 

Innovation’s first decision was to expand geographically beyond its home province, which meant gaining approval to become a federal credit union, making it subject to regulation across Canada. Second, the credit union decided to expand digitally. Research showed that Innovation’s target customers are digitally savvy and more likely to take their business to an organization that offers primarily digital options than to a conventional bank. And the research also showed that a fully digital experience was even more popular with existing customers. “We did not want to increase our membership with more bricks and mortar,” says Gagne. 

This is where disruption came into play. “Historically, online and mobile banking, customer relationship management, and account and loan origination systems do not talk to each other,” says Gagne, noting that their only connection might be that they’re in the same building. “We wanted to fix that with software in a single integration layer, bringing together all those functions beneath a unified customer interface.” Gagne evaluated 37 different banking software vendors, but none of them fulfilled all of the credit union’s criteria. 

Innovation’s current environment featuring Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform offered an example of the sort of solution that Gagne was looking for. “It was as if we were trying to build a Microsoft Bank,” he says. “In one of our meetings with Microsoft, we told them, ‘If you had a digital bank, we would buy it!’” Microsoft doesn’t offer a banking platform, but Innovation’s Microsoft account team knew someone who does: VeriPark. 

Banking on Microsoft

Global financial solutions provider VeriPark offers a complete suite of cloud-first banking applications and services built on Azure and Dynamics 365. “Microsoft provides our cloud and CRM platforms, and VeriPark enabled us to productize them,” says Gagne. VeriPark describes the solution as an “intelligent customer experience suite” consisting of four transformational pillars. The first two pillars are VeriChannel, an omnichannel delivery platform for a unified, consistent user experience across devices and touchpoints, and VeriBranch for branch automation, and both are built on the Azure platform. The other pillars, built on Dynamics 365, are VeriTouch, the customer engagement piece optimized with industry best practices to serve, solve, and sell, and VeriLoan, which handles loan origination. The cloud-first solution can be tailored to a specific customer’s requirements and quickly deployed. “Everything runs on Azure and Dynamics 365 and is fully managed by VeriPark,” says Selim Hasan, Sales Director at VeriPark. “So, it only took us two or three days to do a proof of concept for Innovation.”

The credit union adopted the entire suite, which Gagne says was an easy decision. “VeriPark and Microsoft had exactly what we needed to achieve a genuine digital transformation.” According to Gagne, not going all-in from the start with the disruptive change of transitioning from a conventional institution to a fully digital banking and financial services business would have been a mistake. This sometimes happens when businesses try to adapt rather than replace conventional operations. Gagne cites a bank CEO colleague who confirmed that his transformational journey did not bear fruit by making piecemeal changes. “His project finally took off and saw immediate gains after deploying VeriPark’s processes more or less out of the box.” 

Returns on investment

A significant benefit of Innovation’s new digital architecture is separating the front-end customer experience from the supporting back-end services. On the back end, all the credit union’s data resides in Azure Data Lake and is processed in Azure Synapse Analytics, which drives internal and external regulatory reporting and feeds the CRM system to help turn data into actionable information. “We can adapt much more quickly and safely to marketing demands. A small change on the front end could have security implications for the infrastructure in the old system,” says Gagne. “Now that we have split the experience and authentication, we can make real-time adjustments to the public-facing side and perform A-B testing daily. We have removed the handcuffs and can get things done.” 

The VeriPark solution also provides Innovation’s customers with a unified experience across platforms and devices, with single sign-on and a fully integrated self-service environment. For example, members can sign in from a phone and create a new account in less than a minute. Moreover, they can enter requests, track progress, and receive proactive updates without visiting a branch or calling a representative if they need customer service. “If you can get the status of your pizza delivery on your phone, why shouldn’t you be able to get the status of your loan request?” asked Gagne.

An inevitable solution

The day that Innovation decided to go digital seems a world away. Gagne has an architecture diagram that shows multiple boxes, each representing a largely isolated business function previously served by siloed on-premises software. “And the different colors indicate all the different datacenters they were sitting in,” he says. The cloud-first transformation and the crucially important interoperability that VeriPark provided now seem indispensable and almost inevitable. “Innovation already had Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 and had selected Azure for its cloud transformation. Innovation had everything Microsoft in place, but it did not have the right partner to help take full advantage of it,” says Hasan. “VeriPark filled that gap. Because Microsoft is releasing new things like cloud voice capabilities for contact centers, more financial services vendors are now migrating to Azure. Whenever there is a new Microsoft feature or solution relevant to the finance industry, we will adapt it for Innovation Credit Union.”

Find out more about Innovation Credit Union on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.