Arvest Bank reskills IT to support its banking core refresh

“It was all fear factor,” she says. “‘I’m going to lose my job,’ or ‘I don’t know this technology and I’m not going to get a chance to learn it.’”

Staff comments on the survey showed they didn’t feel their skills were valued, or even known, by management.

That prompted Arvest to create a program to help staff upskill or reskill. “We actually borrowed it from one of our partners,” she says. “They created it for their company internally.”

The upskilling program, called me@arvest, began in February 2022 with training for the IT team on Google Cloud as the company prepared to move its on-prem workloads there. “We needed people to know those skills,” says Merling. But creating the next wave of learning journeys took longer than planned. By the time it eventually happened in July, people were getting nervous they weren’t going to get the education, she adds.

The turning point was a full day of training around Google Cloud in November, with 500 people in the room and another 500 online. “We had our executives there, the bank presidents, the whole technology team plus,” she says.

Initially offered to the IT team, and later to operations staff, me@arvest will soon open to the marketing department.

Along the way, Merling decided to hire someone within the IT organization to run the program, which previously ran through HR. This plan enables her to meet the IT team’s skills needs up to ten years out.

A new purpose

One part of the original strategy Merling kept was the new core banking software from Thought Machine that Arvest had already experimented with — but now instead of redefining retail banking, it’s underpinning the modernization of the bank’s commercial lending processes.

“We’re basically rebuilding the entire technology stack for the bank by assuming a banking-as-a-service construct, whether we choose to use it or not,” she says.

By that, she means drawing on Thought Machine’s cloud-native, microservices-based approach, building new products and services that can be accessed through its APIs.

With the move to Thought Machine just beginning, the old core banking software won’t be going away just yet, so Arvest is using Google Cloud to deliver a single view of its customers. “It’s a key part of being able to serve customers going forward,” she says.

Merling brought in external help to stand up Google Cloud, training her own staff in parallel to ensure ongoing maintenance. “The Thought Machine work we did ourselves,” she says.

Under her transformation and operations umbrella are the CIO responsible for the existing core software, and the CTO building the new software. The development team was initially small, but is expanding through a mix of new hires and, as people learn new skills, internal transfers.

“My commitment to them was to make sure to bring everybody along for the ride,” she says. “I didn’t want to create an ‘us versus them’ situation. That’s super important to be able to grow the bank for the long term.”

Money talks

It’s a truism, but “90% of change management is communication,” she says.

To that end, each month she holds skip-level meetings with the second-level managers in her team, as well as “transformation talks” where the changes are presented to staff. Alongside the slow burn of rebuilding the banking core, these talks are also a chance to discuss “quick wins”: smaller technology changes that make a difference, such as the recent introduction of pre-authentication for customers calling the contact center. “That saved a minimum of 200 to 300 hours a month in call time,” says Merling.