Building a digital platform for City National Bank of Florida to drive $50 million in new revenue

Our Impact

City National Bank of Florida, a $20 billion regional bank, has set their sights on becoming the leader in their region. To achieve this goal, they have embarked on a large-scale initiative to modernize its IT and operations leveraging Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, nCino Loan Origination System, Azure, and Mulesoft. 

The bank is investing in a digital operating model to improve customer experience, create efficiencies and enhance data-driven decision making. For example, streamlining and automating aspects of the loan origination process allows loans to be closed faster. A modern technology platform will also equip relationship managers with better customer insight, to sell more successfully and work more productively. This transformation will also reduce administrative and IT costs and make it easier to integrate future acquisitions.  

City National Bank of Florida wanted a partner that wasn’t just focused on delivering the technology, but was also focused on creating a true digital operating model that would deliver measurable results. That’s why they chose West Monroe. 

Backed by experience and proprietary tools designed to deliver benefits faster, we helped City National Bank of Florida enact four key pieces of their digital plan: 

• Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, with new customer insight powered by Einstein Analytics 

• A bank-wide nCino loan origination system that boosts speed, experience, and efficiency 

• A first-of-its-kind Azure data platform that creates a single source of customer data

• An innovative integration approach that unlocks new revenue streams 

Just months into the transformation, the impact was already undeniable. 

The Full Story

The Challenge 

To sell successfully in an increasingly competitive market, the bank’s relationship managers needed clear, comprehensive, and timely insight about customer needs. However, with key information scattered across different systems, teams had to rely on manual activity to produce weekly reports. 

By migrating operations to Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, supported by the platform’s Einstein Analytics, the bank wanted to:

• Improve the customer experience through more targeted recommendations for support and bank products
• Enable managers to capture opportunities, leads, and referrals while on the go
• Standardize processes for managing referrals 

An Undeniably Different Approach 

West Monroe was ready. Having been a Salesforce pioneer since the beginning, we have delivered many innovative, impact-generating Salesforce solutions for banks and financial institutions of all types. We quickly fielded a multidisciplinary team with deep understanding of bank operations, as well as the technology, data and analytics, and Salesforce expertise necessary to address the bank’s needs and goals. Our team got right to work—applying an approach guided by key principles:

1. Technology alone will not achieve the bank’s goals. We leveraged our ability to design extraordinary, customer-first experiences, powered by Salesforce tools, that make a difference in the marketplace. 
2. We challenged the bank to adopt best practices that will create greater efficiency and optimize their overall use of the platform.  
3. Using new insight is key to maximizing return on the investment in technology. We applied our data and analytics expertise to help the bank use new data and reporting capabilities to make better-informed business decisions.  
4. Because return depends on adoption, we brought significant focus and expertise to support the change involved—making sure people understood and embraced the new capabilities this solution provided. 

Real Results

In the first six months of operating with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, City National Bank of Florida sold new deposit, loan, and treasury products to 50% of their existing household relationships. That produced more than $800 million in net deposit growth across all lines of business—primarily in private banking and commercial services.  

In addition, the bank exceeded their goals for client-sourced lead meetings. Before the introduction of Financial Services Cloud, 53% of bankers conducted three to four lead meetings per week. Following the introduction, that percentage increased to 63%.  

Finally, the bank was able to originate and fund more than 9,000 PPP loans in Q2 and Q3 of 2020, totaling more than $2 billion thanks to the readiness of their Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and integrations via APIs. 

The Full Story

The Challenge 

To take maximum advantage of a new Salesforce-based platform, City National Bank of Florida wanted to bring lending activity for all lines of business into a single nCino loan origination system. 

Fast and successful transition to this platform was critical. From a competitive standpoint, the bank was counting on nCino’s capabilities to deliver the speed, convenience, and trust that their clients expect. The solution would also eliminate manual effort and duplicative data entry—creating a faster and more efficient deal flow—and improving risk management.

An Undeniably Different Approach 

West Monroe came prepared with a unique approach and toolset for designing, building, and implementing an nCino solution for successful adoption.  

Having seen that success requires aligning the organization and processes to realize the true benefits of technology, we started by fielding a multidisciplinary team that included banking operations, customer experience, technology, nCino, and change management expertise. This variety of perspectives enabled us to address the multitude of considerations that ultimately shape the success of this type of project.  

We also came equipped with best practices for optimizing use of the nCino platform, as well as proprietary development tools and accelerators that allowed us to design and deploy the solution faster.  

And we didn’t stop when the technology was implemented. We worked side-by-side with the bank, using a robust change management plan to encourage successful adoption. 

Real Results

During the first 90 days, the bank moved 317 loans totaling $1.4 billion through the nCino system. With the nCino Loan Origination System in place, 500 bank employees now have extended digital lending functionality and 100% visibility into the stage and status of any deal.

Our solution’s communication (Chatter) and documentation (DocMan) features allow employees to quickly find information they need—reducing dependency on email to facilitate deal flow by 80%. The system also provides clear assignments for data entry and handoffs, allowing deals to move seamlessly without duplication or rework. Underwriters can calculate relationship exposure easier, enabling them to adhere to the bank’s risk policies.  

Even better, having a bank-wide loan origination system that runs in the familiar Salesforce environment reduces the training, change management, and administrative burden. It is easier for the bank to transfer talent to meet current needs, onboard new hires, maintain the system, and integrate third-party applications into their lending workflow. 

The Full Story

The Challenge

A modern data platform is essential to City National Bank of Florida’s digital operating model and their goal of providing an enhanced customer and employee experience. It can provide relationship managers with a more complete view of their customers, boosting sales effectiveness and success. It can also eliminate the need for costly, time consuming, error-prone manual work.  

Delivering a new data platform, however, is an extremely complex endeavor—one made all the more challenging by an accelerated timeline and the need for coordinating development with the simultaneous implementation of multiple, complex, co-dependent systems. That’s why the bank turned to West Monroe to help them ensure quick wins along the process and the change management strategy to maintain momentum.

An Undeniably Different Approach

We were ready with a cross-functional team of experts who knew how to cut through complexity to meet the data requirements of the bank’s goal to truly be digital. This included bridging the data divides between the banks financial core and its integrated Salesforce-nCino cloud platform. 

We understand that successful delivery is not only about technical expertise. We’ve built our approach on a foundation of:

• Collaboration: Including a willingness to work with and within the bank’s IT and program management organizations and with its other partners 
• Delivery excellence: Including transparency around progress, roadblocks, risks, and hurdles 
• Value creation: Including a continuous focus on user adoption and tangible results to inspire executive buy-in 

These qualities fostered a strong partnership, enabling us to deliver a first-of-its-kind Azure data platform—including ingestion, storage, and orchestration capabilities—in just 10 months. This is in marked contrast with the multi-year efforts of the past. In turn, this helped us meet multiple, back-to-back go-live dates associated with the bank’s new Salesforce platform.  

Real Results 

Bank employees can now perform critical business functions on the Salesforce platform—bolstered by a single source of data that allows them to be more productive and successful in their roles. This solution empowered more than 100 pilot system users with new data in 20 weeks and a total of 800 employees within 22 weeks.  

Since the launch of the Azure data platform, the bank’s Net Promoter Score® has increased from 64 to 85 and employees are able to support more bank clients. For example, clients per full-time equivalent increased from 58 to 67, and transactions through more efficient digital channels have increased by 7%.  

This effort inspired further confidence in the bank’s digital operating model and the potential of a universal data source to drive superior customer experience. It also unlocked new interest in additional data-driven digital initiatives, such as AI-ready dashboards and personalized customer outreach campaigns.

The Full Story

The Challenge 

Capitalizing on City National Bank of Florida’s new digital platform – including Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and the nCino Loan Origination System – requires efficient flow of data among systems.  

Given the bank’s business strategy, this isn’t just an internal challenge; integration must also extend to potential third-party partners. In particular, their “open banking” strategy calls for pursuing new revenue streams through software integration with other Fintech companies.

Through involvement with the bank’s broader digital vision and strategy, our team already understood the challenges, priorities, and risks. This helped us craft an integration architecture solution that enables short-term strategies while also preparing the bank for rapid growth over the longer term.

An Undeniably Different Approach 

When it comes to complex integration initiatives with aggressive timelines, we’ve been there many times and understand what it takes to deliver.  

Management and coordination are critical to these types of initiatives. We established a centralized project management approach that provided the bank with a single point of contact and ensured close collaboration—not only among those working on this project but also with the many other teams working on facets of the digital operating model. 

Using an iterative design approach, we were able to validate work in a simulated environment before starting development—thereby reducing risk. 

Our deep technical and functional experience in the Fintech space allowed us to accelerate integration to meet the bank’s goals. Leveraging MuleSoft as the integration platform as a service (IPaaS), we rapidly designed reusable application programming interfaces (APIs) that connect system services within the bank and secure connections with external partners. We quickly delivered a minimum viable product that is enabling the bank to realize short-term benefits, as well as a plan for future enhancements. 

Real Results

By enabling secure connections with other Fintech companies via an API subscription model, our solution unlocked $50 million in projected additional revenue. As a first step toward that, we helped the bank successfully deploy this approach for one target business segment. Having flexible, reusable APIs will allow the bank to extend this model to other target segments. This approach also significantly reduces integration maintenance costs.  

Additionally, the solution enables bank employees to perform the majority of their work in one tool, providing a substantial productivity boost. Because the solution enables daily batch migration of data from the bank’s data warehouse into its Salesforce environment, the residential mortgage team can see and react to developments in the loan opportunity pipeline in near real time. And because the project resolved data consolidation and quality issues, the daily integration loads now have a 99.9% success rate.