Lumin Digital's cloud-native digital banking platform enables your credit union to innovate at breathtaking speed, with minimal risk or effort.
Lumin Digital's cloud-native digital banking platform enables your credit union to innovate at breathtaking speed, with minimal risk or effort.
Before Lumin Digital became the world leader in cloud-native digital banking solutions for credit unions, our employees were captivated by the ability of major digital brands like Amazon, Netflix, and others to improve continuously without disrupting their users. While digital banking has existed since the mid-90s, historically, credit unions and smaller financial institutions have lagged behind big tech players in delivering exceptional digital experiences for their users.
By 2017, the digital banking environment for credit unions was such that if your vendor released a platform upgrade every few months, that was considered good enough for most. However, Lumin Digital's founders understood that credit unions also wanted to move much faster. "We found ourselves frequently discussing those best-in-class brands that we use every day. What are they doing? How do they do it?" said Brian McNutt, vice president of product management and strategy. "And the thing that we kept coming back to was they were able to iterate quickly and safely." So our founders began to assemble a team uniquely qualified to address this experience gap, leveraging cloud-based technologies and the best practices of the industry's strongest digital players.
To build a new digital banking ecosystem from the ground up, it was imperative that our product and technology teams take steps to develop a sustainable vision for Lumin Digital's platform. "While much of our success is due to the technologies we chose or built, we also dedicated ourselves to overhauling the values and processes required to realize our vision of the industry's first continuously evolving, cloud-native platform," said Brian. Early on, the product and technology teams also made a critical decision to invest extensively in automation and quality engineering to ensure that Lumin Digital could not only deploy upgrades quickly but reliably and with no disruptions for credit union members and staff.
According to Kevin Gorlick, vice president of operations at Lumin Digital, this early decision now results in significant time savings for credit union partners. "We've built a solid track record with our upgrade cadence and our weekly demos give clients transparency into what is being delivered the following week. Because these upgrades go so well, our clients have learned to trust us like we are part of their own team." Anytime we deploy an update to a pre-production or a production environment, we run extensive automated tests. Automated tests allow us to move fast while maintaining high quality, but more importantly, that quality frees credit unions from using their own time doing manual regression testing so that they can focus on innovation and goals.
We've built a solid track record with our upgrade cadence and our weekly demos give clients transparency into what is being delivered the following week. Because these upgrades go so well, our clients have learned to trust us like we are part of their own team.
—Kevin Gorlick
VP of Operations
This decision to design our digital banking platform with a philosophy of continuous improvement has become a key pillar in what makes Lumin Digital different today. "To paraphrase Eric Ries in The Lean Startup, our fundamental activity is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then adjust if needed," Brian says. "To succeed at the highest level, everything we do should be geared toward accelerating that feedback loop. We don't measure success by the number of stuff we build, but by how much we learn." Thus, weekly upgrades empowers Lumin Digital and its credit union partners to learn in near real-time, which is how they create exceptional digital banking experiences.
For credit union staff, the benefit of receiving weekly upgrades is obvious: no more endless days testing releases, reporting bugs, tracking them, and retesting. The credit union can focus on what really matters: finding creative ways to better serve their members. "The cadence of our upgrades encourages each credit union to stay focused on their unique digital roadmaps while iterating on ideas, developing new features, and implementing user feedback and fixes quickly," said Kevin. "They no longer have to invest time in committees, unnecessary planning sessions, or waiting six months to push out the next iteration of a feature." And because of the quality of these updates, credit union operators can rest easy knowing that their call volumes and branch visits will not spike.
Due to our cloud-native architecture, our platform upgrades are deployed with zero-downtime for users, safeguarding against bad member experiences, decreased Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and potential revenue loss. While losing fees on a handful of transactions might not mean much, at scale this can be considerable. According to the results of a Gartner survey, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. Due to variations in operations of different businesses and their dependence on IT, downtime at the low end can be as much as $140,000 per hour, $300,000 per hour on average, and as much as $540,000 per hour at the high end. Over time, if there are significant outages and downtime, users may simply close their accounts and depart for another financial institution with a more reliable platform and better user experience.
For many digital banking providers, implementing a genuine zero-downtime approach simply takes too much time and effort that they don't have for individual clients. "They have to manage entire teams of people who are taking things in and out of load balancers. And when something goes wrong, it's catastrophic, and it can be incredibly hard to fix," said Kevin. "Fortunately, we were able to build, from day one, a true microservice architecture. We were able to work with technologies that make a lot of those painful, manual processes trivial."
Credit unions today should not accept platform upgrades less than weekly. If your digital banking provider cannot deliver on that, you're at serious risk of losing your members to more agile competitors with modern, cloud-native technology. Lumin Digital's platform provides you with precisely that kind of competitive advantage. You'll also be able to offer your members: