Tinder-style bank app picks up steam with Temenos

Temenos’ Infinity Engage, the Tinder-style platform made famous by Umpqua’s Go-To app, is gaining adoption among the bank’s competitors. BlueShore Financial went live with the platform last week to match customers not with dates, but with advisers through the mobile app.

“What we’re looking to do is ensure that it continues to reinforce our model of a single point of contact with our financial advisers,” said Fred Cook, chief information officer at BlueShore Financial. “This is just another very powerful tool for them to continue having that human-digital element of talking and being available to their clients.”

Portland-based Umpqua Bank, which has $29 billion in assets, has made a name for itself prioritizing a human-digital approach to customer service since launching its Go-To app as a core offering in April 2019, and other financial institutions are now following suit. By the third quarter, Umpqua had gained more than 70,000 users on the app, buoyed by a 38% bump usage from prior quarter levels. With Engage, customers are able to interact with their own personal banker through the convenience of text in a channel that is auditable and compliant.

The Engage platform has gone through an acquisition journey in recent years. Umpqua’s internal innovation subsidiary Pivotus Ventures created the mobile app and software behind the platform before Kony bought Pivotus in 2018, in an unusual instance of a bank selling tech to a software vendor rather than the other way around. Last summer, Temenos bought Kony and the coveted Engage platform. There are 10 institutions worldwide using Engage, according to Temenos, which declined to specify institution names.

The Geneva-based software provider has since made upgrades to the tech. According to Scott Hathaway, senior director in the business solutions group at Temenos, the software vendor dedicates about 20% of its revenue to research and development. Unlike the mainly anonymous chat functions most banks use to address one-off problems, Hathaway said the Engage app promotes relationship banking as customers chat one-on-one with a trusted banker, as has been the case at Umpqua.

Although bank customers have been able to access the platform through mobile in the past, Temenos recently launched mobile on the back end for bankers, allowing them to service clients anywhere with a smartphone. The platform stores and encrypts conversations in the cloud.

“We offer this as a [software-as-a-service] product, complete managed service, and then provide access to those financial institutions to acquire all the chat archives in a frequent time period,” Hathaway said. The vendor is targeting small and mid-size institutions with the solution.

BlueShore, a Vancouver-based institution with about $6 billion in assets under administration, is rolling out the Engage platform in stages. To start, it will be available for advisers to communicate with existing clients. And although it will only be available to about four advisers now, the plan is to roll it out to all advisers in 2021. With this metered approach, BlueShore is focused on learning the platform for now before moving further into back-end development and customization through APIs. Cook expects to begin start rolling the tool out more widely during the first or second quarter of next year.

For BlueShore, text-based conversations with advisers will hopefully just be the beginning of its work with Engage. The institution would like to integrate video into the platform, and Cook said he could see the Engage helping acquire new customers curious about interacting with BlueShore. The new digital channel is meant to complement the institution’s branch approach, which is all about comfort. Its “financial spa” branches feature refreshments, a kids’ zone, fresh-cut flowers, free Wi-Fi, local art and even spa products like lotions and soaps.

“Umpqua has done a really good job of aligning their digital approach to their branch,” Cook said. “To see a large institution like Umpqua be able to do it — versus a boutique like us — gave us that confidence that we will be able to do some really unique things with the Engage platform.”