FNBO Drives Deeper, More Meaningful Customer Conversations

If you ask First National Bank of Omaha (FNBO) Senior Director of Data Enablement, Andy Max, why FNBO is so unique, he’ll likely point to the bank’s innovation. “Ultimately, we’re a mid-sized bank with a lot of large-bank capabilities,” he says. “What I mean by that is, we have a full enterprise data team and full innovation team here.” Although rare for a mid-sized bank to have such a robust investment in technology and data, FNBO has long been ahead of the curve.

Independent and family owned for 165 years, FNBO is a recognized pioneer and early adopter. It was among the nation’s first financial institutions to issue credit cards—a novel concept in the 1960s. Decades later, it became America’s first company to adopt fuel cell technology as its primary power source.

So, when it came to digital banking, FNBO’s challenge was never about keeping pace with technology; it was about managing it. With terabyte-upon-terabyte of highly secure data flowing throughout its operation—with customer data in multiple systems—it was time consuming to compile full, up-to-date customer profiles for FNBO’s Relationship Managers (RMs), Payment Advisors (PAs) and Payment Specialists.

“One of our challenges was that all parts of the bank were independently putting in data requests to us,” Max says. “We needed data to flow to the right team members, across departments, to get the complete picture of each customer helping our team build customer relationships, because customer relationships are what we value most.”

Max and his team knew it was data that would drive deeper customer conversations about which of FNBO’s products and services belonged on the customer’s radar. “We operate in 10 core systems today, with robust payment offerings from Merchant Services to Global Banking to Commercial Cards and more. Data needed to be useful to RMs in the moment. Data doesn’t lie. It doesn’t have feelings or emotions and helps us identify the most helpful conversations for our customers,” Max says.

FNBO Finds Immediate Value in Q2 PrecisionLender
FNBO wanted to use Andi®, PrecisionLender’s virtual assistant, as a strategic tool and channel to push timely and pertinent information to Relationship Managers and Payment Advisors as a component of a broader data strategy.  This enables RMs and PAs to spend more time focused on customer relationships. “I really like the spirit of what Andi® is,” Max says. “I like that she’s there to help. I like that she sees the possibilities are endless, and I think as we continue to integrate more information and more communication in a simpler work environment for our employees, she’ll continue to be a big part of that.

“Today, FNBO’s RMs, PAs, and Payment Specialists don’t have to hunt for information. It finds them in places they already work, enabling them to focus more of their time building customer relationships as a trusted advisor. That’s because Andi’s® suggestions go beyond just pricing.  It enables the FNBO team to quickly react to customer conversations, adjust, and follow up with scenarios that best fit those conversations. PrecisionLender and Andi are a large part of supporting our teams to work this way.

“Relationship Managers better understand the right opportunities, based on the way the customer actually transacts with FNBO,” Max says. “They can talk about products that we haven’t put in front of the customer yet that would be most useful to them. We know it’s a competitive pricing environment, but we’re focused on bringing the right opportunities to our customers that enable them to better manage their financial wellbeing.

“Customers haven’t routinely looked to banks to find payment or money movement solutions,” he says. “Customers have a lot going on. If we have solutions that can help give them some time back, that’s what we want to do. That’s a trade I think pretty much all our customers would be willing to make.”

Always pushing the envelope on innovation, FNBO asked Q2 to customize Andi’s® suggestions to make them more helpful by aligning with FNBO-specific protocols. Q2 was able to complete and deliver the customized Andi® skill within 45 days, to the delight of FNBO’s Commercial team members. “One thing I love about this partnership is Q2 always tells me, ‘We can do it.’ I just love that approach and it’s quick. We started right away. We were able to get the documentation and legal work in place quickly and we had the goal of going live in one month.

“Once we made the decision to move forward with Q2, we had a plan within four hours, and within 45 days, we were ready to go to market – and by ‘go to market,’ I mean we were able to train our employees and provide them with a better experience. To be able to do that in 30-45 days—and knowing that whenever we have our next idea, it’s only 30-45 days away from implementation—is really exciting,” Max says.

The Results? Tailored Informed Decisions
Aside from the custom work, “We were able to start adding out-of-the-box functionality with the customizations,” Max says. “Now, we’re turning on those nudges. We’re partnering with our finance teams to understand, from a financial aspect, which out-of-the-box alerts and awareness we want to bring to our frontline staff. I was pleasantly surprised with how easy that was, and that’s coming from someone who’s worked with data here at FNBO for almost 10 years.

“To complement the customer insights piece, RMs and frontline employees now have an aggregated customer profile in one place, which RMs and PAs use to better understand our customers and save time doing it. To bring a line of sight to our RMs in one place has been very helpful. We’ll now be pricing the majority of our products in one place, and I really believe that’s what customers want. We’re competing with banks that span from $100 million in assets to some of the largest financial institutions, so we need to make sure we’re not leaving anything out.”

Improved Internal Collaboration
“PrecisionLender is one of three tools that delivers information to support our RMs, Pas, and Payment Specialists, providing an easily assessable, comprehensive understanding of our customers. FNBO is committed to delivering information in places where employees already work and not introducing new channels. By providing quick access to product information across all commercial business lines, it’s sparking more cross-business-line conversations internally. There’s more engagement with data. There’s more conversation than we’ve ever had in multiple business lines around customer solutions and awareness.

“What we’re able to provide our customer-facing employees will continue to improve and grow in the spirit of supporting our customers,” Max continues. “You start to see eyes open up a little bit more—and engagement start to occur—from employees who maybe hadn’t had that strong of engagement in the past. That’s really starting to boil up to the forefront. We’re seeing large improvements in engagement levels right now, and I’m excited to say we have highly engaged teams continuing to learn how we can further refine and make the Andi® delivery channel even better. Now, we can flip the script to say, ‘Hey, we want to share this opportunity with you, what do you think?’”

Andi® delivers information at the right time, such as how a pricing recommendation, if accepted, would impact the customer relationship going forward. She also gauges the impact on FNBO if this opportunity were lost and determines the risk if the entire relationship were lost. Employees are empowered to choose whether to use Andi’s insights and advice.

Q2-FNBO Partnership Enriches FNBO’s Internal and External Relationships
Overall, the value of FNBO’s partnership with Q2 is noticeable to FNBO, day in and day out. “The Q2 team helped us deliver a product that was above our initial expectations, and that just comes from their experience. I feel like the highway’s been opened. Parts of the bank that I may not be as familiar with come to light and we start to learn about what opportunities we might not be thinking about every day. I didn’t understand this about my customer before. I didn’t know this or that,” Max says.

“I couldn’t be happier with Q2’s collaborative approach, the milestones we hit, and the effectiveness of the communication between us which is ultimately allowing us to deliver a better product than we had initially conceptualized upfront. And that’s the value in our partnership with Q2.”