Q3 Recap

Congrats to the Andera team on another exciting and outstanding quarter. We welcomed 35 new financial institution clients during Q3, bringing our net total to 318 - the pace of customer additions has continued to increase each quarter to record levels, which we think is a function of growing industry awareness of the online environment as a sales channel, not just a servicing channel, along with the progress we've been making toward simplicity in all aspects of our product licensing and implementation. Excited for a strong end to '09 and beyond!

Performance Continues To Improve

Our ops and engineering teams have made very significant progress this year on system performance and response times, moving from what was admittedly sluggish performance at the beginning of this year, to what could now be called downright quick. We have more work to do, especially with some of the queries in our Management Console, but on balance we are well within our target range for most pages and well ahead of where we were in just the weeks and months past.

The data from last week for our consumer-facing application (account opening workflow), shows that 95% of pages were returned in 2.4 seconds or less, and 99% of pages were returned in 4 seconds or less. This data excludes pages with third party depencies (ID Verification, core system integration, etc) but is a good proxy for the performance of our system, and reflects very significant progress over similar measurements from earlier this year.

We're continuing to make progress on the Management Console (reporting) side as well, with some improvement already made and more to come, so stay tuned.

Two Interesting Customer Factoids

Like many other financial technology vendors, Andera's early adopters and initial customers were primarily credit unions, while traction with banks took longer to develop. Over the past eighteen months or so, despite market turmoil, we saw momentum among banks overtake credit unions, and as of this week, with the signing of our 309th customer, we now have more bank than credit union customers for the first time (155 vs 154).

Another interesting factoid is that we now have customers in 46 states, plus the District of Columbia, with only Delaware, Vermont, Hawaii, and Alaska missing.

300 Customers!

Andera passed a major milestone today with the signing of our 300th customer. Our entire team is deservedly psyched and should be really proud of what we're accomplishing. As these milestones come and go we never lose site of what's important - that we keep our promises and ultimately provide great service to the clients who entrust us with their online channel and increasingly scarce budgets. This is an exciting time and I want to congratulate our awesome team!

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.