We helped a Western New York bank retain customers by implementing real-time person-to-person Zelle payments for retail banking. We're continuing to partner with the bank to bring Zelle to small business and other commercial customers.
A bank headquartered in Western New York saw that it needed to offer real-time payments to its customers to keep up with how banking needs were evolving. Increasingly, customers wanted to be able to send and receive money instantly at the touch of a smartphone. This bank needed the ability to offer person-to-person, instant digital payments to both retain and grow customers — and Zelle offered the solution the bank needed.
The attraction of Zelle is that it offers an entire network of real-time P2P transactions. Customers at two different banks can instantly send or receive money — and split the check for dinner or some other shared expense — as long as each of their banks have Zelle.
But as a third-party system, it takes a lot of complex planning and technological expertise to integrate Zelle into all of a bank’s account types and systems. This bank chose to work with g2o because we had the know-how to make Zelle work seamlessly for them.
We also had the advantage of having collaborated with them before, so we understood how they worked and how best to help them with an initiative that would affect multiple areas of their business.
Success of this initiative hinged on collaboration across multiple banking systems, multiple teams inside the bank, our teams at g2o, and Zelle.
The first phase of the initiative involved integrating Zelle for the bank’s retail banking customers. We worked with their team to develop, and put into production all of the data and technology changes needed to make Zelle work with the bank’s systems, which required coordination across multiple systems both inside the bank and out.
Our experience team designed the interface clients would use to send and receive payments in a way that was consistent with both the bank’s branding and Zelle’s.
The initial phase of the Zelle initiative successfully allowed the bank’s retail customers — those with accounts such as personal checking or savings — the capability to immediately send payments. It met the bank’s goal of retaining customers, who might have opted to switch to other banks who offered this in-demand service if this bank hadn’t implemented Zelle.
Now we’re collaborating with the bank to roll out Zelle for small business and other commercial banking customers.
