Pandemic shifts regional bank’s tech roadmap

Happy State Bank, which has holdings of $3.8 billion, is prioritizing the interactive teller machine (ITM) to help bridge the gap between human interaction and social distancing as it revamps its digital product roadmap to better support customers during the pandemic.

“Technology is going to move from that second-tier priority all the way up to a first-tier priority. Anyone not working on PPP loans is going to be working on ITMs,” said Happy Bank CEO Mikel Williamson, who stepped into his new role this month, succeeding Pat Hickman, who remains chairman of the board.

ITMs are similar to ATMs, except “when you press the button, a live teller pops up and that teller can interact with [the customer] and have a conversation. They can do almost anything a teller inside that branch can do,” Williamson said. Amarillo, Texas-based Happy Bank already has two ITMs and is accelerating the rollout of six additional machines at select branches.

However, Happy Bank will have to streamline the technology integration with ITM software provider Hyosung, and Williamson hopes robotic process automation is the answer. Most ITM software relies on a method called “double entry,” which means the tellers speak with customers and complete transactions via the ITM technology, then re-enter the transaction information into the bank’s core software system.

“What we’re doing is trying to figure out how to take a bot and make it so once the teller enters that in the [ITM] system, the bot takes over and puts it into the core system,” Williamson said. “It’s going to be a little clunkier than we would like, and we’re really hoping that the core systems will open up and integrate with these new ITMs.”

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Once the tech integration kinks are solved, Happy Bank will benefit from the fact that the ITM tellers are centrally located, giving the bank flexibility on operating hours and languages offered, and provide safe social distancing for customers. When the new ITMs roll out “very shortly,” the Amarillo, Texas-based bank will expand the live teller hours from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. so people who work round the clock, like nurses, can do their banking with the new technology.

The ITMs will also provide service in multiple languages, Williamson said, noting that it can be challenging to staff a bank with employees who speak all the languages necessary in a market. “This allows us to staff one central center with several different languages and anyone stopping in an ITM can request that language and they’ll just be transferred to another teller.”

The pandemic has forced banks to speed up product-development timelines and re-evaluate which innovations to prioritize. And moving forward, Happy Bank’s tech projects will likely deploy at faster than in pre-coronavirus times. “What the [pandemic] has forced us to do is to take some of the cushion out of those timelines and making sure that we know the technology that’s out there that we can implement quickly,” Williamson said.

Happy Bank is the 21st-largest bank in Texas and operates 43 branch locations in the state.