Webinar Recording Now Available

A recording of last week's Webinar featuring Javelin, Alliant CU, and Frost Bank is now available (requires registration):

http://www.andera.com/index.cfm?Action=solutions.demoAndMore

Today's Webinar

Today we sponsored a Webinar entitled "The Untapped Channel: Trends and Best Practices in Online Account Opening." We were expecting a good turnout given the topic, the speaker lineup (Ed Langel from Alliant Credit Union, Jimmy Stead from Frost Bank, and Mark Schwanhausser from Javelin Research), and the free copies of Javelin's recent report on account opening we were giving away. But we were totally floored to have 1,000 people register, 700 of which actually attended today. What a crazy, enormous turnout.

Mark presented some key findings from his recent report, followed by Jimmy and Ed who both presented case studies of their institutions' successful efforts to use the Web as a sales channel. I wrapped up with some closing thoughts followed by group Q&A.

The funniest part was when one of the attendees must have accidentally hit the video conference button within LiveMeeting which apparently caused a live video of her smoking a cigarette to pop up on every other attendees screen. Distracting? Yes. Memorable? Totally.

Given the enormous turnout, we're going to make every effort to follow up with everyone who attended to send out the Javelin report. If you attended and haven't heard from us in a few days, send an email to afs (at) andera.com.

COCC Conference

Andera will be at the COCC client conference this week in Massachussets - if you're there, stop by and say hi to Brian Connolly.

Deposit Boom Over?

Interesting article here on the recent boom in bank deposits. However, I think we may be seeing this come to an end. Our new account transaction volumes peaked in March, which coincided exactly with the bottom in the stock market, as people sought out bank deposits while the market was moving down, and started moving away from deposits once the market turned up. Our transaction volumes have remained down about 15% from their March peak, which suggests money has continued moving away from banks and cash, hopefully a positive macroeconomic sign. Absent another major market correction, competition for deposits may start heating up again.

Partnership with Digital Insight

On Monday, we announced a new partnership with Digital Insight, a major online banking vendor and a unit of Intuit. Through this partnership, Andera's online account opening and funding platform has been seamlessly integrated with DI's online banking system, and is being offered by DI to their large base of 1,600 financial institution clients. Our teams have spent the last several months coordinating roles, responsibilities, and processes, all in an effort to optimize the implementation and support experience for clients and to maximize their post-launch success.

The first joint customer was Legence Bank, who was nice enough to participate in our press release, and whose positive experience was real validation for the preparation done by the DI and Andera teams before going to market, as well as for our new Edition lineup which further contributed to an easy implementation process. They were a terrific first customer, engaged and on the ball, and were up and running within just a couple of weeks. Since then, we have seen similar experiences with a number of other joint clients.

Needless to say, we at Andera are very excited about this partnership. We've had a long and storied history with DI over the years, including several of them as competitors, and if you've been reading this blog long enough you'll recall I've always thought we'd be better off on the same team. Now that we've gotten to know them so well, their people are terrific, absolutely fanatical about customer experience and satisfaction, and totally committed to their clients' success. We're looking forward to a long and successful relationship.

Accenture Article

Terry Moore from Accenture published a great article in American Banker this week which is a must-read for any bank marketers interested in turning their online channel into an engine for sales and growth. Excerpt below, and you can read the full article here.

"Banks have been slow to exploit the kinds of Web-based strategies retailers and other industries routinely employ to attract new prospects. Instead of focusing on driving high volumes of customer traffic to their sites and converting that traffic to product sales, as retailers do, banks have overemphasized commodity features on their sites, such as bill payments and account transfers."

Too Candid?

Javelin Research published a great report today on Online Account Opening which covers the market, the business case, the value proposition, and ten different vendors, all in a lot of detail. We don't have distribution rights so I can't give away any of their conclusions, but I will say that Andera was portrayed very favorably. If you can swing the price tag for the report, I'd highly recommend making the investment.

One area we got knocked on was our occasional growing pains that I have described on this blog. At the risk of getting in trouble for quoting the report, Javelin said:

Kroll is admirably forthright for acknowledging Andera’s problems, but the growing pains are a cautionary note in an industry that demands reliability.

After reading this, it occured to me that after being very candid about our problems, I should take the opportunity to also be very candid about how we've addressed them and the significant progress we've made.

There have really been two trouble spots for us as we've scaled our company:

System Capacity. As I chronicled here, issues occurred in February, as we saw an unprecedented and unexpected spike in transaction volume that we didn't properly plan for. We now believe the spike was due mostly to macroeconomic factors related to an increase in the national savings rate, that caused people to pull money out of securities (stocks, bonds, etc) and into cash, in the form of savings and money market accounts. Because of this surge in volume, our system occasionally slowed to an unnacceptable speed at peak periods (in some cases 14 second page response times) and even came down a couple of times over a couple of days.

As I chronicled here, we immediately reprioritized our ops and engineering teams, and challenged them with completing an already aggressive full year of upgrades in three months. The first of these upgrades was rolled out within a week, and with it came a material improvement in response time, along with a complete restoration of system stability (no more outages). More upgrades were rolled out along the way which continued to shave multiple seconds off response time, and last week we were back down to sub-five-second second page responses (at 95% percentile), which is within our target range. As of now, we have two major upgrades left (one related to our database and another related to our load balancing architecture) to round out our plan, both of which will further improve things. We believe we are today in a comfortable place, and given our new capacity planning and scaling framework, well positioned to tackle any level of higher volumes going forward.

Implementation Capacity. More than a year ago, in January of 2008, we found ourselves overcommitted as a result of faster-than-expected sales. Sounds like a good problem to have, but that didn't make it any less hard to solve. In blog posts here and here, I outlined the issues and our plan to resolve them, which among other things, included doubling staff on the implementation team and overhauling our implementation process from the ground up. It took some time for the changes to take effect, and with all the team growth there continued to be some slippage as people were coming up to speed and learning curves were being overcome. But by the middle of 2008, things were clicking and the shackles came off as we saw monthly launch count double from five to ten during the summer, more than enough at that point to handle new clients and deplete the backlog. Since then, things have continued to accelerate, but we have handled the volume well given our new team structure and improved processes, so there really has not been an implementation capacity issue for quite some time. Additionally, the new Editions we announced recently will further improve things, as many of our new customers going forward will benefit from much more streamlined setups, as evidenced by our recent two week implementation for a Premium Edition customer.

All of this is not nearly to say "mission accomplished," since things will continue to evolve and the challenges will change. But I am saying that I feel like we are quite well positioned to handle future growth now, unlike where we were a year or more ago. This is also not to say that we are perfect today - we're not, and like any company that operates in the real world, things still slip through the cracks and we do make mistakes. But fortunately these instances are manageable and relatively infrequent, and I think most importantly, we recognize the importance of minimizing them.

So am I wrong for being so candid on this blog? I hope not - I know it will turn some people off to find out we have issues, but I hope it convinces a much larger group, which recognizes that every company has issues, that ours are under control, taken seriously, handled competently, and less bad than most other companies out there.

Equifax Issues

It's been reported in the news recently that Equifax experienced a power outage last weekend which has affected some of their data services. We've seen sporadic issues throughout the week with their eIDVerifier platform which many of our customers use for identity verification. The impact has been more applications than usual being rejected or going into Review status based on the data we are getting from Equifax. We are monitoring the situation, which you can read more about here.

Early Feedback On Editions

Our first Premium Edition customer signed off today after just a quick two week implementation process. Here's an excerpt from an email they sent us (which I'll keep anonymous since we don't have permission to announce them):

As for the site, thank you so much for all your hard work and for making this project one of the easiest projects I’ve done. The working documents were wonderful and very easy to work with and understand.

This is great validation for our new Edition framework, and justifies our team's hard work developing packaged solutions which can be quickly and easily configured. It's early yet for our new Edition lineup, and we'll need to see a lot more go like this one, but the early returns are promising and our team is justifiably pumped.