Case Study: Montecito Bank & Trust

Bring Them Back!

Overview

Client

Montecito Bank & Trust

Industry

Personal and Commercial Banking, Financial Services, and Wealth Management

Project

Redesign and develop three online banking applications. Integrate multiple legacy banking systems into the new consumer, commercial, and wealth management applications. 

Impact: Supporting over 200 employees, and over $2.46 billion in assets. 

Soup Group's Contribution

Business Analysis, Brand Consulting, Creative Services, Software Product Consulting, Software Development, Systems Integration, Project management

Goals

Regain Our Customers’ Confidence, ASAP!

The Montecito Bank and Trust online banking systems were creating nightmares for their clients and customer service. The legacy core banking systems and applications that they relied upon couldn’t support customers’ rising expectations. Unexpectedly, their personal, commercial, credit card, and wealth management customers were leaving to find other, more modern banking solutions.

Most of Montecito’s customer service and retention issues were directly related to their online banking system. Most problematic were the inherent constraints in the aforementioned legacy banking systems. To make matters worse, the owners of these disparate systems were making it difficult and sometimes impossible to modify anything.

Montecito had never experienced customer attrition like this before. To call this an emergency would be an understatement. What was supposed to have been a customer service benefit that attracted and retained customers was now the exact opposite. 

As a bank that prides itself on community and customer service, Montecito knew they needed to remedy these problems with a customer-centric modern online banking system.

“Montecito’s vision for a modern online banking system was very full-featured and complex. With Soup Group’s partnership, we were able to create a solution that made our vision a reality. The new banking system was a crucial part of our sustainability and future growth.”

— Rob Skinner
CEO, The Towbes Group

Soup Group's Solution

Going deep …

Create an easy-to-use, reliable, and synergistic transactional system using their third-party core banking systems for the three distinct types of customers. That was obvious and clear, but building it required going deep. Thankfully, Montecito didn’t flinch at this challenge and were with us every step of the way.

Create Synergy

Connecting people to connect software

Possibly the most valuable part of our solution was creating productive relationships with the owners of their legacy banking systems. Without their cooperation, a viable, interconnected solution would have been cost-prohibitive and unlikely good enough to retain and recapture customers.

These relationships paid dividends by providing better access to their application framework and more timely assistance. As a result, our new synergistic solution launched on time. It offered seamless interactions between all of the legacy systems, transparent escrows for ACH transfers, and easy transitions between customer account types.

Overall, the vendor connections that Soup Group made were key in ensuring that the complicated underpinnings of Montecito’s online banking system were not part of their customers’ experience. 

Transparent Security

Single sign-on

We developed an inclusive interface for all owned accounts — personal, commercial, and wealth management. Not only were these customer account types available within one interface, but with the core banking systems seamlessly connected, their clients could now access anything and everything with a single sign-on.

Each of their legacy systems required their own authentication, but our layered security architecture alleviated the need to log in separately when accessing a new service, which included the complexities of bank transfers, credit and debit card functionality, overnight transactions, and merchant services.  

Modernize the User Experience

Personalization and flexible account access

Soup Group built an interface that allowed Montecito’s customers to have a customized online banking experience. Regardless of their account type, customers could quickly choose their desired tools, easily filter detailed data, and to make the experience a little sweeter, they could customize their interface.

By leveraging our single sign-on system while keeping customer service always in mind, we made access to every aspect of a customer’s accounts easy, fast, and available 24/7.  

Results & Nuance

Our measures of success

The turnaround took less than 12 months from the time of launching the new online banking applications. After one year, Montecito’s customers were returning at a record pace. Within two years, Montecito exceeded their previous high watermark. 

The returning and newly acquired customers were very satisfied and this positioned Montecito to take advantage of their continued investment in new locations and services, which would be greatly responsible for the aggressive growth they were about to experience.

Continued Growth

Montecito is an incredible organization, and we are in no way taking credit for their growth over the past 9 years. Soup Group’s role in Montecito’s upward progress was to remove one appreciable barrier to their advancement, an antiquated online banking system.

Since launching the Soup Group solution, Montecito has experienced 15.71% growth year after year, and grew from managing $1.1 billion in assets to now managing over $2.46 billion.

Montecito Bank & Trust - Regained Customers & Long-term Growth

Reenergizing client services

A major part of our goal was to create a comprehensive user experience that included all the tools needed to perform any and all transactions. With this front of mind, Soup Group reduced customer service requests to a trickle.

As a result of this success, Montecito could now divert the resources previously gobbled up by online support requests to other more important areas of the organization.

Soup Group's new Online Banking solution reduced Montecito Bank & Trust's customer service requests to a trickle.

Sharpening Focus on community

Being a community bank, Montecito Bank and Trust’s community involvement has always been a core value. Unfortunately, with so many of their resources being redirected to counteract their online banking system’s shortcomings, there was little time to focus on community projects.

Once the Soup Group solution was in place, Montecito could resume their concentration on helping local nonprofits achieve their goals. To this day, Montecito Bank and Trust’s commitment to their community helps to make Santa Barbara, and the surrounding areas, a better place to live and work.

After Soup Group launched their new Online Banking solution, Montecito Bank & Trust was able to focus their attention on community involvement.

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