Strategizing Tech for a Credit Union That Serves Big Tech: Part One

When Mike Upton became a member of First Tech Credit Union in 1993 while working for a start-up in Portland, Ore., little did he know that the move symbolized a foreshadowing of his future career as a technology executive. He went on to work for several large software companies that service banks and credit unions, as well as with Capitol One’s Enterprise Digital team in Richmond, Va., and as SVP of mobile/online banking and consumer payments at Bank of America in Charlotte, N.C. Now, he’s chief digital and technology officer for First Tech, a $14 billion credit union based in San Jose, Calif., whose members include the employees of Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

In part one of this two part Q&A with CU Times, Upton discussed how prior digital investments help prepared First Tech for the pandemic, remote work, and how COVID-19 has shaped digital strategy and member experience. Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

CU Times: What digital investments did First Tech have in place that made it the most prepared to make the transition to remote working/banking in March 2020?

Upton: The work that we had been doing in virtualizing the credit union, moving it to the cloud and out of the traditional data center model, really ended up paying dividends. The reason we were on a cloud migration was really to ensure that we had the right scalability for the organization, the right resiliency, and the right types of disaster recovery and business continuity. So that infrastructure allowed us to be well-positioned with the membership when consumers made the shift to embracing digital because we were in a highly secure, resilient, flexible and scalable environment. Prior to the pandemic, we were doing it just for good business continuity and hygiene – we’re a rapidly growing organization and so strategically, we knew we needed to operate in those environments, and the pandemic obviously accelerated all of that. But because we were already well down the path on that strategy, we were able to manage that change without disruption.

It was the same thing with our employee base. Once it became clear that we needed to have our employees working in a safe and healthy environment, which meant not working in large clusters but rather remotely back at home, those infrastructure investments helped us. We also have a robust VPN infrastructure in place, so within 24 hours of the notification, we were able to virtualize probably 90% of the credit union’s 1,500 employees to their homes with little to no disruption. We did accelerate some work that we had planned around our contact center, with being able to put our contact center agents in home environments, so we had a good part of that underway but clearly the pandemic accelerated those plans.

CU Times: Many credit unions that never imagined taking their workforce remote pre-pandemic surprised themselves when they were forced to pull it off quickly and successfully. Did you feel this way at all at First Tech?

Upton: In some cases, there’s a personal history that may bring a different lens to this topic. Prior to First Tech, I worked at Capitol One at the Richmond [Va.] campus and was part of the newly-founded digital team back there. Before that I was in Charlotte [N.C.] at Bank of America where I was a digital executive. Those are globally distributed companies, so the concept of global distribution and remote work wasn’t a foreign concept for myself and a number of different leaders here at First Tech who also had experience in some of these larger institutions. We were able to bring a lot of perspective and experience to the credit union, which was really the impetus behind the strategies in the first place. Nobody had the pandemic in mind, but you could see a trending toward distributed work, remote work and employees bringing their own devices. The speed at which it happened was clearly a surprise, but honestly we knew this was where work was going.

I think the biggest observation for a lot of folks was that the psychology, more than the technology, was the thing to navigate. As leaders, that humanity, and that reinforcement that our culture is stronger than a location, really put a lot of leaders to the test as much or more than it put technology to the test.

Another thing we keep in mind – I’m a parent of four children – is that the effects of working at home cascade into people’s lives. Now I’d never say that the tech was flawless, of course I’d love to get there, but it was ready and supported people in their time of need, because they were dealing with so many more dynamics than just work. Making sure that we’re giving them the tools and making things available, and that the systems were up and resilient, was super important as people were dealing with tremendous upheaval in their personal lives outside of work. The last thing they needed was to have a bunch of tech problems when they sat down at their keyboard and monitor at home.

CU Times: Are a portion of First Tech’s employees still working remotely?

Upton: We still have the vast majority working remotely, but there are some roles where remote is simply not an option, based on the job function or environment. In terms of returning to corporate, that is still a fluid topic. Our North Star is we have to be sure we’re putting our employees in a safe and healthy environment, and if that means remaining remote distributed, we’re going to stay the course. We did have hopes that we would start to return folks to our corporate facilities in the fourth quarter, but the Delta surge changed that, and it became clear that was not the right thing to do for our employees. We’ll be targeting for and keeping an eye on things potentially after the first of the year.

We’re also watching what our employer partners are doing – we’re the credit union for Amazon and Microsoft – because the cues of those organizations resonate with our employee base. We believe we’re always going to be in a hybrid, flexible model. We don’t know exactly what the details of that will look like, and we will experiment to see what fits best for First Tech and our culture.

Through these times of uncertainty, one thing we’ve continued to be proud of is that our ability to serve and satisfy our membership, in all the ways in which we measure it, has remained stable or increased. So we feel comfortable and confident that we can do this in whatever form it takes, and we just have to remain agile and emotionally resilient. And our part in tech is to make sure we’re delivering seamless and flawless technology experiences not just to the members, but equally to the employees.

CU Times: Has the pandemic-induced shift to digital that we’ve seen this past year and a half changed First Tech’s approach to its overall, long-term digital strategy in any way? How so?

Upton: It certainly has been influenced. Pre-pandemic, 80% of our new account openings occurred in person through our experience centers, or through the contact center. With the shift to digital, that’s reversed, so 80% of our new business comes through digital with the balance coming through the retail centers. So that’s caused us to adjust what the physical, in-person experience is going to look like. We’re doing banking by appointment models and set up a virtual experience center, and both of those are resonating well with our membership. As things change to a different normal, we’re going to see where the consumer goes, and we feel that we’re able to make the shifts to account for that.

CU Times: How has the concept of member experience, and what makes for an excellent member experience, changed due to the pandemic?

Upton: One thing we’ve really been talking about pursuing is bringing in more engagement, interaction, warmth and humanity to digital. Pre-pandemic, digital was in large part very transactional, and it still is, but there’s been a noted shift in thinking across the entire credit union of digital being a preferred channel, and even more of a focus on, how do we make it easier and more engaging? Those are important shifts, because they then start to drive conversations about your data analytics and insights, and how you start to derive those insights to create experiences in digital environments from an end-to-end perspective that are more delightful, human, warmer, engaged and richer.

Our conversations are starting to move beyond simply new features and capabilities. And UI and UX folks are like, “It’s our day in the sunshine, we’ve been telling you this for years!” That ease of navigation, that simplicity, taking something that could be complex or challenging and ensuring that it is simplified, reducing the number of clicks, navigation and breaking points – there’s a much richer conversation about the whole thing.

But making that work simply, seamlessly and in a personalized way becomes much more complex, and it takes thoughtful, strategic deployment, operational readiness, data management and data governance. These experiences are only as good as the data behind them. We feel very fortunate because another strategy we put in place a number of years ago was the establishment of an enterprise data center of excellence. We have a team of data scientists that work there, and a community of data stewards that work to govern and validate datasets for our enterprise warehouse. So we know that’s the type of work we need to do in order to curate simple, seamless, personalized and more humanistic experiences.