“Let's add more silos in our institution”

Banks and credit unions follow a well-worn approach to solving experience problems across the institution: During year-end planning and budgeting, stakeholders debate their most pressing needs. This includes upgrading or replacing product applications, origination processes, and other problematic customer-facing experiences.

The “winners” in this process receive budget, and then go through vendor selection, contracting, and implementation. The cycle repeats annually, and after a few years the institution has deployed several new and improved experiences, but with many drawbacks:

• Deploying a turnkey point solution entails significant operational disruption. Adapting people and processes to accommodate a new system is time consuming, expensive, and not always worth the effort.
• With scores of different experiences across your enterprise systems, including digital applications, static webforms, and even PDFs, solving them one-at-a-time will take forever.
• Each new system and vendor adds to due diligence overhead and ongoing vendor management costs.
• Each new vendor adds duplicative costs for data storage, API maintenance, and 3rd party data access charges.
• All of the new and improved experiences are still fragmented; your customers (and your bankers!) still face disparate interfaces and siloed data, leaving them frustrated and resulting in abandonment.
• Each new tech stack adds risk: your data security is only as good as your weakest fintech (we believe that over time, stacking more and more fintechs on top of enterprise systems could result in fallout similar to the BaaS space: weak controls leading to frequent PII leaks and a regulatory response to the problem).

Ascent's Experience Platform

Until recently, the traditional one-at-a-time approach was the only way to attack experience problems. However, open banking and 3rd party data sources, plus maturing APIs from core and other enterprise vendors, are making data much more accessible. The ability to consume and leverage that data in service to the customer experience is the next big thing.

By combining expanded data access with lightweight, modern SaaS technology, Ascent can streamline and simplify the experience for every product application and every form you have across the institution. From the most complex new-product applications to the most mundane forms, Ascent reduces abandonment, increases win rates, and helps you grow!

Ascent does this without disrupting your existing systems or processes. It deploys in a handful of weeks and frees you to select and quickly deploy the needed applications and forms with less cost, less disruption, and less risk. Ascent provides a fast return on investment that only grows as you expand its use.

Ascent is a great experience for the customer, and frees bankers from the typical manual back-and-forth effort on data and document collection. This gives them more time to engage effectively with customers.

Additionally, with each interaction, Ascent learns more about the customer, prefilling more questions and improving the process. With every subsequent experience better than the last, you can improve relationships with new and existing customers, and drive loyalty in a new and exciting way!

Ascent offers many benefits:

• It reduces application abandonment and improves both cross-sell and customer retention
• It simplifies and speeds integration of new applications & forms into the institution's infrastructure
• It reduces due diligence and vendor management overhead by reducing the number of application vendors
• It provides greater control and security by eliminating disparate applications, forms, and PDFs
• It future-proofs your organization to launch new products and continually adopt the latest and greatest approach

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