How Key Integrations Unlock Operational Efficiency for Fiserv Institutions

Today, efficiency ranks as a top concern for banks and credit unions. The cost of the status quo can no longer be ignored, with nearly two-thirds of financial institutions (FIs) citing streamlining workflows for more efficiency as their top cost-saving priority.

Still, FIs face an array of operational challenges that impede their journey toward greater efficiency. From talent shortages and rising competitive pressures to navigating evolving regulatory burdens, today’s banks and credit unions are tasked with doing more with less in an increasingly complex environment.

To overcome the macro headwinds they face and achieve their efficiency goals, Fiserv institutions must identify and leverage the key integrations that enable them to streamline critical processes. In our latest webinar, we discussed priority integration areas for Fiserv customers and their real-world impact. In case you missed it, read on for insights from that session!

What challenges are Fiserv institutions facing?

Like most banks and credit unions, Fiserv customers are grappling with a unique set of problems in today’s evolving financial landscape, including:

• Talent shortage: While the “great resignation” may have subsided, skilled tech workers are still hard to find, making it even more difficult to capture operational efficiencies.

• Regulatory burdens: Compliance demands are ever-growing, putting pressure on teams to remain agile while following stringent regulations. Given the time-consuming and exacting nature of compliance workflows, they leave little room for staff to focus on value-building initiatives.

• Rising member and customer expectations: The digital age has empowered customers to expect fast, seamless service. Falling behind competitors has major consequences, and it can happen quickly.

Underscoring all of these (and other) challenges is the prevalence of operational silos. FIs often use disparate systems that don’t “speak the same language,” creating a complex environment where workflows break down without manual intervention and bottlenecks emerge. With this in mind, it's little wonder research shows that only about 30% of digital transformation initiatives are deemed successful, and tech investments often create more manual work for staff—not less.

In other words, as FIs have “modernized” by adding new systems and applications to their tech stacks to stay competitive and meet accountholder demands, they’ve inadvertently built unmanageably complex, hybrid ecosystems with a big interoperability issue. The good news is that with the right integrations, Fiserv institutions can dismantle these silos and ensure their critical systems communicate to reduce manual work, simplify complexity, and better address the objectives that add value.

Which integrations matter most for Fiserv customers?

When it comes to prioritizing integration efforts, Fiserv institutions can segment their thinking into three buckets.

1. Integrating your Fiserv core with other critical systems and applications

To unlock the full potential of your Fiserv core system (whether it's Premier, Signature, XP2, or DNA), ensure that it’s integrated with other critical systems in your environment, such as data warehouses, email systems, or VMWare.

2. Connecting miscellaneous environments

Automated workflows often break down when they involve external systems, like webpages or Excel spreadsheets, that ordinarily require input from a human operator. Finding a way to integrate these miscellaneous sources into your broader IT environment (for example, with an RPA solution), unlocks last-mile automation to close manual breakpoints.

3. Harmonizing non-core systems and applications

Outside of core processes, significant opportunities for efficiency can be found by harmonizing critical systems like mortgage solutions, OnBase, Prologue, and more to enable automated workflows across platforms.

By approaching integrations with this perspective, Fiserv customers can reduce operational bottlenecks and automate business-critical processes that would otherwise require manual intervention.

Business functions Fiserv institutions can transform with key integrations

With the right integrations, Fiserv users can reliably automate critical processes, bringing greater efficiency and operational resilience to their institutions. A more integrated and harmonious tech stack allows Fiserv institutions to implement deeper automation in business areas like these:

Loan origination, operations, and servicing  

By connecting your Fiserv core with third-party systems, you can automate loan origination file transfers. Seamlessly execute data extraction, facilitate file transfers, and dispatch any additional documents to external parties, like notifications or statements.  

What’s more, connecting to mortgage solutions like FICS allows you to automate file processing, reporting, and notices.  Automate end-of-day processes, seven-day posting, and updates to the core to reflect FICS information, significantly reducing the manual work associated with loan servicing.

Deposit operations

One of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive workflows in any financial institution, ACH processing can be automated from start to finish with the right integrations, including the unattended processing of origination files at the time of availability from the Fed. That means you’ll never miss a file or a processing window, and you’ll easily be able to enforce dual control for ACH uploads to the Fed.  

Strategic integrations simplify other payment processes, too. Build vital connections, so you can create and schedule workflows to send wire transfer files to your accounting department, archive the file, and transfer it anywhere else it needs to go, like Verafin. 

Compliance

By integrating email and document management solutions into a comprehensive automation platform, you can automate AML processing and notification tasks. For example, you might send emails to customers to let them know they need to send in a photo ID and documents to prove residency. Then, when files arrive, automatically route them to the necessary software to manage the verification process. 

IT Operations

Most Fiserv institutions use a wide range of systems and applications, creating a near-constant need for file transfer workflows. Leveraging an automation solution with native managed file transfer (MFT) capabilities to integrate with third-party systems and applications enables IT teams to cut down on single-use file transfer solutions, simplifying their tech stack.

By connecting with systems like Active Directory, IT departments empower other business functions to lock and unlock users through self-service buttons, removing the reliance on IT to reset passwords across multiple systems through a single integration.

Seamless integration, streamlined workflows

Fiserv institutions that prioritize enhanced integration capabilities to future-proof their businesses see undeniable payoff.

For example, before investing in OpCon, TruWest Credit Union considered a solution designed for their Fiserv core platform—they even installed and tested the tool. While it worked fine with the core, the solution couldn’t interact with systems outside the core, which led TruWest to take a closer look at OpCon.

Because TruWest chose an automation platform that could interact with other critical systems as well as their Fiserv core, the credit union achieved a 93% reduction in their run sheet and time savings exceeding 6,000 hours per year.

Prioritizing the right integrations positions Fiserv institutions for long-term success in a historically siloed industry. To learn more about the critical processes you can automate with key integrations in place, watch the full, on-demand recording of our recent webinar, or get in touch with SMA’s automation experts!