Foundation for success
Given the current disruptions in the banking industry, delivering truly personalized experiences requires incumbents to transform their digital strategy. TAB Bank, after over 20 years of navigating evolving customer expectations, was no exception. Formed in 1998 to provide accessible banking services for truckers at truck stops, meeting customers where they have always been a part of TAB Bank’s DNA. Fast forward to today, the Utah-based bank has expanded its customer base, specializing in serving small-to-medium-sized enterprises across a variety of industries, including transportation and freight, government contractors, manufacturers, and more. Given this expansive customer base, TAB Bank needed to adapt its connectivity strategy to scale while still delivering on its core mission of providing personalized customer experiences.
The true roadblock to serving its customers with these valuable experiences was a lack of data availability across three disparate core banking platforms. Curt Queyrouze, TAB President, noted that “we were always trying to service customers on the phone while manually gathering and pulling information that was relevant in order to understand who this person is that we’re talking to. It was difficult to see the whole picture at once.” The TAB Bank team quickly recognized that the foundation for its digital strategy needed to shift towards unlocking and centralizing customer data. Taking on an API-led approach to integration, TAB Bank “streamlined data from [its] core banking platforms, matching, and merging it, creating a centralized database that can aggregate certain aspects for customers and employees to visualize at speed.” By unlocking these systems, TAB Bank created a loosely coupled architecture around its core banking platforms, allowing them to be application-agnostic moving forward. Furthermore, it built a strong foundation to innovate around open banking and remain flexible in order to quickly deliver on new services, including Paycheck Protect Program (PPP) loan handling amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Open-banking experience
After securely unlocking data internally, publishing over 200 APIs with MuleSoft, TAB Bank shifted its focus towards leveraging this data to create meaningful customer experiences. By creating an agile, open-banking platform that encourages third-party collaboration, TAB Bank met customers’ expectations, allowing fintechs and other partners to build and deliver their own services using TAB Bank as a backend system.
For example, leveraging an Open Banking API, TAB Bank transformed its online application experience. The bank shifted away from a fillable PDF application to a solution that enabled customer account and transaction data to flow seamlessly, in real-time, between back-end and third-party systems. In doing so, TAB Bank offered customers a completely automated enrollment process, where the account approval, mandatory KYC (Know Your Customer) verification process, and account funding could be completed in just three minutes.
TAB has signed an agreement with Plaid to use Plaid Exchange, Plaid’s open finance solution, which will be enabled via the Mulesoft platform. Through this integration, TAB customers will be able to link their account to Plaid-powered fintech applications in a seamless, secure and reliable way.
These reusable APIs removed the need for partners to design open-banking solutions from scratch, by building their products and services upon existing core capabilities from TAB Bank’s process and experience layers.
“As a branchless bank, we knew that being digital meant being digital for everyone – both our customers and our partners. That meant creating a truly agile platform for our partners to come in and build incredible experiences for their own customers,” said Queyrouze. “MuleSoft has been pivotal in allowing us to create that platform, exposing APIs that both we and our partners can use as building blocks for future projects. As a result, we can dramatically speed up innovation and reduce demands on time and resources. With MuleSoft, we’re building services that are beneficial to all organizations, not just banks, and that capability will enable us to continue to grow our network of partners as we move forwards.”
Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) during COVID-19
Although always top of mind for TAB Bank, the importance of remaining flexible and agile to quickly innovate and deliver on new services was accentuated by COVID-19. Given the circumstances, bringing a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans handling service to market was incredibly time-sensitive. Continuing to leverage an API-led integration strategy enabled the TAB Bank team to semi-automate Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans handling, reducing application processing time from 30 minutes down to 30 seconds. The bank accelerated the speed at which loans can be granted, reducing its reliance on manual application approval processes by 80%.
“Even before COVID-19, SMEs were being underserved by traditional providers when it came to loans, but the disruption of the pandemic made this considerably worse,” said Queyrouze. “Our mission is to become the premier SME banking platform, and we want to support our customers by giving them the services it needs not just to survive, but to thrive. MuleSoft was the perfect partner to undertake this mission with us, allowing us to deliver business-critical services much faster, in ways that would not have been possible otherwise. We have greatly simplified our loans approval processes with MuleSoft, helping us deliver 6,100 PPP loans that have protected more than 47,000 jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
For more information on how API-led connectivity can help banks streamline costly processes and accelerate the delivery of connected customer experiences, watch our webinar Streamline and scale lending with API-led integration.
