Remedy Blog

Cryptocurrencies get a lot of attention these days. Much of that attention is due to the volatility of the asset compared to other currencies. In other words, if I bought a bitcoin for $15,000 a couple years ago, could it be worth $45,000 today?

Our partner, Charlie Kelly, was asked by The American Association of Bank Directors to join their podcast, “Calling All Bank Directors” to explain Bank Technology to outside Directors. The association felt that outside bank directors were often less familiar with bank technology than they should be.

If you are in charge of marketing or data analytics at your bank, you likely are familiar with the concept of the primary account relationship. For those of you that are new to the concept, it goes something like this: People can shop anywhere for their financial products. Most of us have relationships with more than one financial institution. You may have your checking account and your savings accounts at one bank, your auto loan with a credit union, and your mortgage somewhere else. Your student loan may be with an online-only lender.

When it comes to financial institution technology (everything from teller lines to client-facing mobile applications) used by your bank or credit union, you might be tied to a core vendor for five, seven, maybe even ten years. For technology that usually comprises the 3rd largest expense, negotiations are crucial and simultaneously, quite infrequent.

Beginning the renewal process at the “right” time can be one of the most important decisions of the overall process. Most vendors will allow an early renewal, within reason, but I am quite certain a lot of banks are not aware of that timeframe and do not fully understand the value of renewing early. What is the appropriate timeframe? Keep reading.

Bankers provide digital tools to their customers, but many community bank CEO’s and even most “Digital Experts” from large financial technology organizations struggle to answer two questions related to their digital users:

For most credit unions or community banks, strategic planning is a once-a-year process. This boardroom meeting would typically include a few staff members (CEO, CFO and COO) and full board of directors with a third-party consultant moderator presenting a lot of financial figures and talking about growth in 1, 3 and 5 years increments. Recently, I facilitated a strategic planning session for a credit union board of directors. In this blog, I will share my lessons learned and some quick ways to level up and grow the business.

In a previous life working at one of the largest core vendors, I had the opportunity to evaluate the decisions of over 100 credit union clients’ who migrated their core software from being hosted in-house (I/H) to being hosted in an outsourced (O/S) environment at their vendor.