Alkami Technology, Inc. (ALKT) Earnings Call Transcript

Yes, exactly. And I think as all -- as humans, when we feel heard and validated, we tend to not get us upset, right? It's like Okay. I understand that. Okay. So let's say, assuming I don't think either one of you just do conversion projects for fun, that you have other jobs at your banks and credit unions, how did your team balance conversion work with normal business operations? So knowing you're doing both of these, working it off the side of your desk, Nick, I'll start with you. How did you balance all of that?

Certainly, the -- this project was one of our big company priorities. We had 3 to 5 people pretty much working full time on this during our 10-month implementation. So we had a project manager, an internal project manager, myself. We had a digital banking administrator. Those are the 3 core people and then critical people, actually careful about using that core people confused. We had our treasury management and business banking admin and then our internal core administrator. So those 3 to 5 people on any given day are spending the bulk of their time working on this project. For context, we have about 350 employees. So we have 5 working on it almost full time. I think that core administrator, that internal person for us is really key. There's so much coordination. We were same core as Julie, but one of those early banks on this particular core to come over to Alkami. And so we really needed our core expert. There's no project manager that's going to have the institutional knowledge of all those core decisions you made through the years. So she was really critical. And we just occasionally had buy-in from other departments to fill holes or prioritize projects if other things were overlapping with this. But this standing on stage, telling everyone we're going to do this. This was a North Star for us to make sure we kept implementation on track and met our deadline.

Perfect. Perfect. Julie, how about for you?

So on our side, we established 2 project managers for the project. One of them was myself and then one of them was our Vice President of Projects. And the 2 of us really worked that high-level overview with the team that was also comprised of another approximately 20 people from each department. So by having the 2 of us being able to work hand-in-hand with each other, we really were able to keep each other accountable, organized, and that's both with the core and with Alkami, right? Because there's a lot of different moving pieces that go along with it. So that was really nice to be able to have somebody really to beat bouncing ideas or brainstorming with at all times. The other side of it, too, if one of us was on vacation and sick, pulled away for their everyday job, that other individual was really able to respond to the e-mails, questions and was able to make decisions because you have that backup and you have that intimate knowledge with each other. And we really found that there was a lot less bottleneck that way. The project can continue on and keep moving because you weren't waiting just for one person to get back. And then from there, too, we also use a consultant from the core, and that very much helped along the way, too, as we had to start working through the process at a pretty minute level.

Perfect. I'm curious, Julie, with the 2 resources that you had, did you guys split tasks with -- you used the word bottleneck. That's what in my little -- did you guys use one person that was more like testing focused, like a test lead almost and one was a PM? Or was it truly like we're just going to divide and conquer the word?

It was divide and conquer. So like we had an internal project meeting every single week. And then me and my counterpart, we met every week as well, and we reviewed taskless, where's outstanding, what's going on, what haven't we heard back from yet, what do we need to hear from the department. And then we created those agendas together every single week so that we seriously throughout the entire thing, we were like one person and either one of us would be able to handle something and either one of us would be able to monitor that relationship.

I love it. I hope you guys are still friend.

We absolutely are. Yes, one of my favorite.

All right. Well, Robert, I would love to give some space and time for you to just talk about a couple of things in the implementation framework. For those of you that are joining us, take some time to kind of look over all of this. I know it's a lot of words. However, Robert, point out a few things here around what Alkami is doing and how we're collaborating with our clients.

Yes. No, thanks for coming. There's a lot of steps here, right, but a lot of good information that really plays out yet. But I think it's really important, especially just as we're just discussing a minute ago with Nick and Julie in regards to preparation, right, and getting that readiness and understanding your risk and your dependencies. And that definitely is a partnership that we do with our financial institutions as well, right, to make sure that we're also monitoring those on our end, right, and cross-sharing some of that information and co-collaborating on those. But one thing, I mean, if you've been through implementations before, this is pretty much -- the steps are usually the same. But what really sets us apart, I feel, is related to solution design. We really go above and beyond to ensure that we're creating an environment that is easy to test, right, that has all of the items that configured for you all and getting you ready in your own personalized environment. And that really sets us apart from other folks to ensure that where you're actually operating and testing it is actually what the end result is going to look like. Oftentimes, you can get a demo, site and Ovation bank or something other that kind of is static information and not custom to your platform. But again, with solution design and how we go about doing that, let me take a step back, right? How we go before we actually create your environment, we actually meet with you with our technical resources to look at what is your current provider providing you now, right? What does it look like? What's the look and feel? What are you used to? And then we take that information and then we create, again, this test environment for you that's Alkami's, right? And showing you where the differences are, what are those nuances having you focus on specific testing elements, right, that may be new. Oftentimes, our customers are coming from a certain platform, and then they're not only looking for parity, but then also looking for enhancements as well, right? So we make sure that we rigorously test those end-to-end to ensure, right, once you go live, it's successful and your members or clients are not impacted by the change. Yes. And I think the other one is just really testing. We're really heavy on testing. We want to ensure that we're really getting in there. We have, again, as I mentioned, those technical resources that are there to timely address those tickets that you're submitting write any changes or any tweaks that you want to see changed, again, leveraging that dedicated technical resource team to get those implemented as soon as possible for you all. Yes. Anything specific, Katie or Nick or Julie that...

No, I would say I think that you hit the nail on the head with solution design. If I was to say an example, I have seen -- because I work more upstream in the sales cycle, I've seen what that process is, and then I see how your team gets engaged. And I think the thing that is really beautiful that you guys do as a part of that solution design is to say, let me see your existing platform. And kind of to what Nick said earlier, like you forget the things that you've done on this core that you've been on for 20 years, right? So sometimes we see the same thing with the digital banking provider. So when we do a demo of your existing system, what our team is looking at is looking at that going, hold on a second. I don't know what that is in the scope. And so I have an example where I was sitting in the room watching from a process perspective and somebody goes, yes, and then we click here to do international bill pay. And we were like, international. Okay, where is that at? But we were able to identify that missing item that everybody had just forgotten about, right, because it was a custom tool that they had built out in their existing platform and that we hadn't gotten as a part of the scope, but we were able to avoid that by 8 months and find that risk way upstream versus when you -- when the client got into testing. So to your point, again, we're going to save test and then test some more and we your hands are from testing, go pass from ibuprofen and keep testing. So we were able to avoid that risk by 8 months and getting them into that environment by just doing a simple demo. And so that is always -- I know what your team is looking for, like how do we avoid and mitigate risks earlier and shift as much of that risk left in the project space versus finding it later and potentially facing delays. So I think that solution design is just so critical to the overall process. And I love hearing that you're still doing that and that the teams are finding value in it, too. If you all on the webinar have any questions about this slide, please pop them into the chat. We're all here and happy to jump in and answer any of those questions that you may have. All right. So let's talk about overall conversion. I have lots of opinions about the data. Nobody wants to hear from me, I promise. So we're going to talk to Nick and Julie again around what their experience was for the actual conversion. So Nick, I'm going to start with you. What part of launch really felt like it required the most coordination across teams and call centers and vendors? And how did you go about making sure that, that was in alignment? And then Julie, I'm also going to pop over to you, so get your thinking cap on. So go ahead, Nick, we'll start with you.

Yes. I mean the thing that I think rightfully keeps most people up at night and requires the most coordination is go-live date. I mean that's the time when your customers are going to experience a good or bad experience based on how you did, right? That's the moment of truth. So that required a fair amount of coordination. So for us, we have a primary customer care team. That's our call center. We also doubled that by getting people from our branches and other departments around the bank to be a dedicated digital banking customer call center. Even a 2x call center, I will tell you, was not enough on day 1. We also coordinated having both Alkami and our core representatives. We had 2 people like Julie from the core who are on the project with us, and we had them on site. And that's really critical when they can hear directly from the customer, hear directly from our team, what's going on, and we're all in the room together, kind of marching to the same beat. There's no -- let's set up a conference bridge or anything, everyone's together. And even little stuff like making sure food is ordered and the beverage cooler is stocked and everyone's caffeinated. There's going to be some long days. Call center is going to be open later. It's going to be some early mornings. So a lot of coordination across quite a few teams to make that happen. The other thing that we did kind of found during testing that there was a couple of commercial business functions that were a little bit more complex. And so we took -- we did about 40,000 people on our main conversion, but we took 300 business customers and we did them at a later date. That really allowed us to do, call it, white glove or concierge service. So we had a team of about 20 bankers. They each had about 15 to 20 customers. They reached out to them a couple of days or weeks before. I am Nick, I'm going to help you with this conversion. No call -- there's no call center number, you just call me directly. And then when that group went live, each banker just had to check in with those 15 businesses. That was a big win for us. I don't think we could have done given that service to those critical commercial customers. While it was only 300 of the 40,000 and change, it's about 25% of the dollars in the bank. So that group needed some extra attention. Lastly, because of what we learned on launch day and maybe not having the full resource in the customer care that we anticipated enough people on phones. So other people had to jump in. We set up a triage team for that second wave. So there were 6 people that weren't assigned to a customer that if any one of those concierge bankers had an issue, they could drop an e-mail to this dedicated e-mail group that was a triage team, and we could pick it up and take it and they could stay on the phone working with those other customers and really make sure we were delivering on the promise that we wanted for those big commercial customers.

Sure. So I -- go-live day is the day that you always focus on, right? But for us, I really feel that it was the coordination of bringing the files over from our core that weekend prior. So Friday, Saturday, Sunday, that is a long couple of days. And what we did is we actually met on site and we just hunkered down. So there was a group of us. We all met at one location. And we really made it so that it was a fun it was a fun environment, right? We knew it was going to be long days. We knew there was going to be a lot of files coming in from those files. We worked exceptions, but we were all there. We were able to be high 5 in when we did something really great and then be able to be like, oh my gosh, we need a brainstorm because we didn't think through maybe this part of the process or how do we need to look at X, Y and Z. But we had a lot of fun with it, and we just kind of made it exciting. We did high 5 here and there and just kept people animated and going because just like Nick said, it gets really long, and you have to make sure that you keep that excitement up so you can kind of keep grinding through. So go-live week for us, too, one of the things that we did there is we purchased shirts for the entire organization. And then the eBanking champs were able to wear pins to distinguish themselves as well as they got different color shirts, too. So that was really fun, too. It was kind of a way to keep the entire organization engaged and just be able to say like, hey, this is something that is coming out, we know, but we're making it fun for you too, along the way. And then lastly, for us, we work really hard with those e-banking champions again. So on Monday, just like Nick had mentioned, you're ready to go, you're there. We worked through those exceptions that weekend prior. And then our eBanking champs were the ones who are answering the calls and e-mails and providing the support for our customers. And we are so very thankful for them because that allowed the project team and our digital banking team to focus on any outstanding items or surprises that may have shown up that first week. So we could be on bridge calls working with Alkami, talking through items, but they were really a big part of our success that -- those first couple of weeks.

I love that both of you focused on morale boosting. I think that's something that we see hitting this on, like we tell them, we tell clients like here's something that's going to be really important, but that you heated that advice and you brought it more upstream into the project cycle also. So I know that both of you did stuff for your institutions like shirts or bonuses or things like that to make sure that they felt valued. And to your point, Nick, nobody has ever met at food and that drink being stashed like it's so critical because there's times that the call center can barely get up to get a snack, right? And again, nobody is calling them to say, thank you. We really appreciate you putting us through all of this hard work. And so to have the organization recognizing them and saying, thank you, I think, is so important. So I'm curious from you -- we'll do this one just for you, Nick. What was harder than expected?

We did not plan as well for the weekend before go-live as Julie did. I think that one really took us by surprise from Friday night at about 7:00 through Sunday night later than that, we were hands on keyboards, almost nonstop, probably 5 to 10 people depending on what file was coming over, exception need to be worked or discussion need to be had. We had a Teams meeting every 3 hours. We worked independently usually from home or some people came to the office. We didn't power or get together like Julie did that was much smarter. So we're sharing files and coordinating. But I think what we -- what I didn't appreciate was how burned out everybody was the weekend before -- right before another week or probably the busiest week, more late nights ahead. So I wish we would have coordinated that go-live weekend work a little bit better, either by doing some things earlier in the project or just coming from the fact that we were going to have to do that and either have more people available or make some other accommodations so that we didn't bring our levels key people right before a big week.

I'm curious from both of you, how did you monitor business continuity, keeping the train on the tracks and also the account holder experience because you and I both know you're going to send out probably 10 communications and nobody is going to read any of those. So I'm curious from your experience, how did you monitor both of those and making sure that the ROI in that first week and everybody being burn out to your point next, they work the weekend before. How did you balance all of that? Let's start with you, Nick.

Yes. I think one of the things we leaned on a lot from Alkami was the adoption rate. You've implemented a couple of hundred institutions. So seeing where we were after 4 hours live, 8 hours live, 2 days live, et cetera, to know where we getting enough people in. That was our only real benchmark. Obviously, Alkami would have that data. We wouldn't. We haven't done this many times. We also monitor the app stores in real time. So especially with like a Google Play Store, it's connected to your Google account. People are using the real names in some reviews if there was a name that we knew and we would either post a comment or we just call them directly, hey, Saga review, you're having trouble getting in. Let's see if we can fix that. Certainly monitored the call volume and the wait times. There was -- that was probably less able to be managed in the moment, but there are some takeaways for us for that second wave of business customers that we did and future projects that might have an interruption is what kind of volume we might expect. And then going beyond that first week, we get a daily report of dollars and accounts at the bank, and there's people that might be upset or unhappy or on what happened during the conversion and they will often claim or threaten to leave or close their accounts. We saw very little of that. I think that's a short-term pain where they might have been unable to get in for an hour or 2. And I think there's a lot more work to change your bank than it is to just be a little patient for 2 hours. So we didn't see any material change to that number in the months ahead. But those are the big thing we watch adoption rate, call data, app stores and then in the weeks after the dollars and the accounts to the bank.

Okay. Perfect. How about for you, Julie?

So internally, just like Nick, we really focused on that adoption rate and made sure to share that with the project team as well as the eBanking channels -- champs, excuse me. So the higher the route became or the more adoption, the more the excitement really grew and you could see kind of like Nick said, you guys have implemented so many other FIs. So for us, it was kind of like a competition. We're like, well, so how are we doing against somebody else? Like we're doing really great, right? Our customers rock. They're all getting in. So it was kind of something that you made into it being fun. So that way, you could really share with your employees as well to kind of be able to say like, hey, you guys, we're like 50% adoption. We're halfway there. And you're doing great, keep up with it, keep going because we're so close. During that first month, I would say we mostly heard from the customers that could not get in and needed a bit more help. And that came in via phone calls, e-mails, chats, so our team really just made sure to stay empathetic and understanding. And honestly, our customers were really well receptive to that, and they were able to come in and we were able to get them into the product just the way they needed to be. We also had our eBanking champs at each location. So customers were able to stop by and stop in person if they were having issues as well and somebody was there right on site to be able to help walk them through. That was a really nice feature for us, and they did help with few customers that just came in person. And then the last thing that we did to really be able to have that communication and be able to help with that account holder experience or that customer experience was really those first 2 weeks we created something called Digital Days. And we had certain locations that would have people on site that would be able to help you. So if you were really truly struggling, you could go in during those Digital Days, and there might be another eBanking champion there, but there also was the project team there. So even myself included. I went out to the Digital Days, met with people, what do you like? What don't you like? And how can I help you get in? And I think that was a really great thing to work with our customer on because if they were frustrated, I could say, well, help me understand because I'm actually on the project team, and I'd love to know what you're thinking right now. And during those Digital Days then, we also did giveaways. We had treats there for them, but the biggest thing was really knowing that they could find us if they needed to find us.

I love it. I love it so much. I wish I was a user for either one of you. So one I could have just probably gotten some swag. All right, my friends. Well, we are getting close to the end. Just a few minutes left. So I want to make sure we're being very cautious of our time. I hope all of you have heard on the webinar today that overall, it's really important to just make sure from start to finish, you're in alignment. Your teams are in alignment, you're in alignment with your vendor and you're staying in lockstep. So it's so important to have a good partnership. But with Alkami, we're here every step of the way from the initial alignment with sales through the core, all the way through data conversion, configurations testing and getting ready for launch. So I would love to be a part of that experience as we go forward, but I think that you hear overall here, it's so important to be plugged in, in every aspect of those and making sure that your teams are aligned also. As you talk about preparing your call center, it's really important. I heard Nick say, we had a secondary call center still wasn't enough. We try to prepare everyone that your experience is going to have between a 200% and 300% call volume increase that first week of launch. You can do all the preparing you want, but nobody still is going to read that information. You're still going to have folks that didn't confirm their contact information. And so there's just going to be some things you're going to want to do. I would advise here a couple of things just in making sure that you're in lockstep. It's let's load test that call system. You may not have done it in quite a while. The last thing you want is to have people have any kind of issue getting through, right? You don't want to have them get a busy signal. And then also think about maybe adjusting your call routing. Having folks press right away if they're calling for digital banking instead of waiting to have the option be down in option 7, for example. Let's have them right from the beginning. We know they're going to be calling in for digital. Let's have that be option 1 straight from the beginning. But having people ready for those calls is so important to make sure that you're prepared. As we talk about the actual call center staff or the frontline staff in the branches, some of what Julie mentioned, making sure they're prepared also, what are some basic things like supported browsers, supported devices. One of my favorite examples is still from being in a launch and having a gentleman call in and we said, what type of device are you on? And he said, "I don't know it's orange." Okay. Well, let's start through some other steps then and identifying if it's an Apple device or a Samsung device or something else. But those call center teams are going to get all kinds of examples like that. And so making sure that you have a path that guides both a user experience, but also a call center and frontline experience is just really important that everybody stays in lockstep. And then lastly, I would say something I know I heard both of Julie and I say is it's handling things with empathy, understanding that your users didn't ask for this experience. So they may have been complaining for a while, but they didn't say they wanted to go through a digital conversion. So understanding that if they're coming to you, it's probably because they're frustrated. And so responding with empathy is just so important and making sure that your teams as a whole stay in lockstep for that experience. All right. I would love to just hear from you that are still with us on the webinar. If you would like to get more information around what does a readiness conversion look like, what does the implementation look like? And where do you stand? Please respond here, and we will have somebody reach out to you from Alkami if you want to hear more information. All right. 30 seconds each, I would love to hear from you what is the lessons learned. So Julie, I'm going to start with you. What do you -- you had known from before beginning a project? What would you have done differently? What would you love to know?

Sure. So you kind of actually touched on it before, Katie. For us during the sales project or sales process, excuse me, or during the sculping, be specific in your questions or your responses in the integrations and the processes. Go down to the minutia and explain, right? Not every core, not every FI is going to have the same exact process, and it may not be as simple as an API. You really don't want to get further along in your project and then all of a sudden be like, oh shoot, we have international bill pay. And what can we do with that? Because it may not have been something that cropped up before because maybe another FI doesn't offer that. And then the other thing is that just like Nick, we had an FI consultant actually from the core that worked with us, so that was professional service hours that we used, and they were a technical expert as well. So while I am now really versed in APIs and how that works, having that person though from the core there was really instrumental for us in being able to talk through some of the processes between our core and Alkami.

Perfect. How about for you, Nick, what would you absolutely do again?

I think the deadlines for me worked out really well. I don't know that we were smart enough to have picked these, but our go-live was November 3. And so because of end of year freezes and other holiday things, it was kind of like November 3 or sometime in January. And I think having that hard deadline really pushed us to say, we're not moving the state, like it's going to be a 10th implementation, and that's going to be that. I'm not sure that we hit all of our early deadlines. Those came in when sometimes we'd hit one early, it'd be a little late, but that hard deadline, having it on a date that felt really immovable was something that I was happy for. The other thing just from a morale that I feel really good about is the Friday before we went go live, we gave everybody on the project team and the customer care team and everyone that was impacted a bonus before that week. I think that really helped with the morale heading into that week that they knew that they were going to be well taken care of, and we acknowledge the extra work ahead of time. That was a big win for us to just keep spirits high going into a challenging week.

I love it. I mean I don't know anybody that complains about more money before a hard week. So I think that's a great idea. What about from you, Robert, what are you seeing? And what would you recommend for any...

Yes. I think Julie and Nick did an excellent job of organically covering some of those best practices and lessons learned. But key takeaways here that I always like to remind our clients is really understanding your resources, right? You heard from Julie and Nick on how they had dedicated alignment and delineation in these roles and ensuring their success going forward. So -- and we'll do that on from an Alkami side, right, providing you with our upfront, what does our framework look like? What does your project schedule look like? What do your playbooks look like so that you can already start kind of aligning the resources you have and having those honest conversations, right, with your leadership teams to say, hey, these are the people that we need, and this is what they're going to work on. So that's number one there. And number two is, again, what Julie and Nick all talked about, right, just keeping it fun, being flexible and keeping it fun. Overcommunicate, right, to your clients internally, to Alkami, to your third-party vendors, right? Always keep that open line of communication. And again, as you're a trusted partner here at Alkami, we will help ensure that and drive some of those activities for you as well.

Perfect. Thank you so much. All right everybody here. If this sounded like something you want to be a part of, again, I want to get some more information, scan the QR code. We would love to have a conversation around what's next and potentially even introduce you to Julie and Nick, if you have more questions, and we'd love to just help guide your path. So Mike, I'm going to give this back to you. Thank you for giving us time and space today to have a conversation.

Thank you, Katie, Robert, Nicholas and Julie for sharing your insights with us today. I'd like to ask our audience to take a moment to complete the survey that will appear on your screen. Your feedback is important as we strive to address the key issues impacting the industry, especially in today's dynamic business environment. You can learn more about ProSight and find other relevant content and insights on our website, prosightfa.org. This concludes our webinar. Thank you for joining us, and have a wonderful day.