As a Midwestern bank with more than 150 years of supporting northern and central Indiana, Lake City Bank’s legacy is community-focused and built on delivering a disciplined blend of personal and professional service.
The bank’s leadership team has deliberately adopted proven technologies rather than jumping on every new trend. However, they could see a major shift coming. Commonly referred to as “The Great Wealth Transfer,” this demographic change would require more than just great service from the wealth management department. Lake City Bank relationship managers needed to deliver a better, more unified digital experience across wealth, retail, and commercial lines of business.
Having grown to nearly $4B in assets under management from a single family trust relationship nearly 25 years ago, Lake City Bank saw a strategic opportunity to compete with much bigger banks. If they could transform the back-office tools and the customer experience, they could secure the next generation of high-net-worth clients.
Carrie Gutman, formerly the Chief Fiduciary Officer, now the Senior Vice President and Chief Wealth Advisory Officer, drove this technology transformation at the bank. Having joined the Lake City Bank team during the Wealth Access implementation phase, Carrie immediately saw the importance of bringing in the new technology partner.
“We wanted to give the client and our advisors the opportunity to see the whole client relationship. And so Wealth Access gives us that opportunity to take a look at the full picture of where our clients’ financial accounts and investments are held and how they are managed —so that we can better advise.”
Committed to Doing It Right, The First Time
Lake City Bank’s leadership entered the partnership with a single focus: do right by existing customers and prepare the institution for the next generation of customers. By making this decision early, they were prepared to adjust when the project required a longer development timeline for a foundational integration to the core banking provider.
The benefit of the additional time allowed for deeper partnership and a quality of execution that would have suffered if anyone had pushed it too fast. The complexity of the integration has given Lake City Bank a high-fidelity data pipeline that powers insights across many lines of business.
“Our clients don’t care about our silos. We try very hard to not have silos. Wealth Access and Q2 built a relationship to present a unified experience for our clients. I think the integration of data also helps us to communicate better internally to serve the client.”
Document Delivery Drives Adoption
As Lake City Bank rolled out the solution to clients, initially by invitation only, they discovered how much demand there was for Wealth Access, especially for the secure document vault. Beyond the simplicity of sourcing tax statements every year, there is an added benefit for estate and trust planning: heirs and attorneys can easily see the 30,000 ft view of assets and find specific documents as needed.
Internally, Lake City Bank prioritizes their culture and takes a measured approach to change management. They’ve established an internal champion for Wealth Access and are training their support team and advisors on ways to leverage the platform to enhance how they service clients and improve efficiency on the team. The goal is delivering a great customer experience and empowering team members to do their best work, whatever shape that takes.
“The biggest aha moment was that adoption would be driven by delivery of documents. At tax time, clients are concerned about delivery of documents. We are considering delivering all of our statements and tax documents to the vault. We believe we will save money on mailing, we will deliver the documents faster to the client, and we drive adoption. That is a win-win that we didn’t anticipate.”
Positioning for a Multi-Generational Customer Base
Seamless digital experiences have become table stakes for most of the financial services industry. Younger customers expect it, and when they encounter legacy or paper-based processes that could obviously be digital, they may consider looking elsewhere to meet their needs. Lake City Bank’s leadership team recognized that their technology stack could be a barrier to competing to serve the next generation.
Lake City Bank wants to be the easy, obvious choice for managing inherited wealth, to keep building their multi-generational customer base (154 years and counting) was to make Lake City the easy, obvious choice for managing inherited wealth.
The partnership with Wealth Access was more than a technology implementation – it was about positioning Lake City Bank as an institution of choice for wealth management.
“We are in the midst of the great wealth transfer. Personally, I have three kids in their early to late twenties, and I know they expect to be able to have a digital experience. We need to provide that robust digital experience to the next generation in order to be prepared to serve them.”
Meaningful Outcomes
The goals of partnering with Wealth Access were simple, even if the execution held a lot of complexity behind the scenes:
- Modernize the wealth management interface for Lake City Bank team and clients
- Sunset the previous platform
- Create a unified, hygienic data view across retail, commercial, and wealth
- Deliver a relationship-forward, digital experience for high-net-worth clients
- Position Lake City Bank as a trusted and innovative partner for the great wealth transfer
- Integrate with the core trust system and digital banking providers to ensure ongoing support and data integrity
- Equip staff with the tools to spend more time on relationships and planning, with less time spent on reporting and analysis
- Efficient and modern delivery systems for statements and tax documents
Testimonial
“We wanted the client experience to be better. There’s a whole list of things that we’re evaluating as we become more mature in the use of Wealth Access, such as the use of the vault and driving electronic delivery and exchange of data with our clients through that vault. We like to see outside and held-away assets—that helps us better understand the clients’ financial picture and helps with presentation of a more accurate financial plan. The next step is leading with planning. Being able to bring the data together for accurate financial plans, allows us to better advise clients. We are able to see what tax, retirement, estate and other financial planning opportunities there are for the client, which also created business opportunities.“
~ Carrie Gutman, SVP, Chief Wealth Advisory Officer
