Saying that TAB Bank, a fully digital bank headquartered in Ogden, Utah, began as a modest operation, would be an understatement. Established in 1998, the financial institution was started through an affiliation with a truck stop chain, where truckers could go to fax bills of lading documents to the bank for cards used to pay for fuel, as well as stop off and use fillable commercial loan applications. It was the 1990s pre-smartphone version of mobile banking.

Originally known as Transportation Alliance Bank, the $1.2 billion bank has evolved into a modern digital operation in a short time, given the bank was using fillable PDFs and email to facilitate commercial lending before 2017. The move to digitize TAB Bank has been a whirlwind, but a success, CEO Curt Queyrouze told Bank Automation News.

TAB Bank currently offers a full suite of digital personal and business banking solutions to all types of companies, with a decided focus on small business clients in the U.S. and parts of Canada, breaking down to 65% consumer and 35% commercial, with lending products being 100% commercial. The bank offers term loans, working capital lines of credit, factoring and treasury products, and consumer lending products, primarily through partnerships with tech-focused consumer lending providers and fintech marketplace lenders.

TAB Bank officially began its digital transformation journey in March 2017, with an investment in a new data platform. “We built our own middleware that we call ‘C3GO’ that sits on top of a modern data platform for comprehensive customer management,” Queyrouze told BAN. IT services and software solutions provider ValueMomentum and digital banking technology company Technisys acted as partners for this development.

The new digital platform allowed the bank a 360 degree view of the bank’s customer relationships, auto-synced to cloud-based core. Fiserv and Jack Henry serve as the bank’s core providers — Fiserv for lending operations and Jack Henry for the bank’s factoring business, a more specialized loan product.

By fall 2017, the bank had added a digital loan onboarding system and equipment term loans to its digital initiatives. The latter was built internally, with the bank using ValueMomentum for its development resources. “We reduced processing time from two weeks down to two to three hours,” Queyrouze said. “Our volumes increased from $5 million to $10 million per month to over $25 million originated.” Soon after, an unsecured term loan product was digitalized, making the loan deliverable, closing automatically and within minutes.

The bank’s automation efforts have paid off, with digital products now taking less than three minutes to set up, according to Queyrouze. “Our deposit onboarding was also developed in-house, but this will be replaced by a Technisys service within the next 30 days, and will include the ability to issue a virtual card immediately upon account opening,” he told BAN.

TAB Bank utilizes its in-house API stack to connect with third-party fintechs to receive customer application data, and “leveraged building our own API stack internally” for internal and external facing functions, Queyrouze said. “API development has been a key part of our strategy, especially as we move ahead.” The bank is currently in the process of launching a new mobile platform with the help of Technisys, and is set to launch a new consumer-facing and business mobile app.

In addition to APIs, TAB Bank is leveraging robotic processing automation (RPA) to input application data within TAB’s core banking system. Fiserv’s Precision Banking Platform handles ledger commercial loans and auto generates daily ACH files to push same-day funds to borrowers, and RPA is also utilized to categorize and store transferred documents into TAB’s document retention application.

It takes more than 50 fintech vendors to bring the digital bank to life, including data platform MX for transactional services, open finance solutions provider Plaid for integrating operations, and integration software company MuleSoft for its API platform, said TAB Bank CTO Nilendu Saha. The bank also has a banking-as-a-service model with several other fintechs.

In May, the bank partnered with cloud payments and financial messaging company Volante Technologies to help the bank provide real-time payments to its digital customer base. The next step, Saha said, will be to invest on the data side, especially in cloud, engineering, DevOps automation and RPA. “I’m looking at strategy,” he said. “Automation is where we can provide real time data for decision making, whether it’s front-end, customer facing, or it’s back-end.”