Develop and deliver first phase of Haventree Bank digital customer engagement strategy

Business Problem

Haventree Bank has a strategy to become the most digitally enabled alternative mortgage lender in Canada.  The current capability is heavily based on email and telephone interaction with clients and mortgage brokers which involves significant resources, has no self-serve capability and provides a less than industry standard customer experience.  Haventree Bank also did not have an established program/project management function and IT capability was focused on infrastructure management vs devops.  

Solution

We worked to engage project sponsorship, senior management, technology leadership and external vendors to develop the use case and desired customer experience for the first phase of the program which was the development and delivery of a customer portal.  The customer portal would enable secure, online communication between Haventree and their clients as well as the ability to initiate service requests and provide self-serve capability for the most frequent customer service requests.  We then worked with the stakeholders to map out the required system architecture as well as internal and external integration requirements, cyber security and data integration. Working across multiple departments and lines of business, we established a program management office and implemented project management disciplines as Haventree had never undertaken a project of this size and scope and co-ordination across a wide range of internal teams and external partners and vendors was critical to the success of the project. 

Results

Our role was to build out the program office capability, manage the program to completion and ensure that communication, project management and governance processes were established and maintained. After some consideration, it was determined that the best approach was to develop a proprietary portal (vs build on and existing SaaS platform like SF.com).  This decision was made as a result of Haventree’s requirements for extensive customization to accommodate their operating model, the need for customized integrations and the view on cost control and scalability of subsequent phases of the program.  As a result, a new Azure environment needed to be established, configured and integrated into the Haventree IT infrastructure.  The process involved in developing the architecture and required existing system integrations surfaced challenges with core systems that needed to be resolved both for general business purposes and to enable the appropriate flow of data.  Critical requirements included integrations with the core mortgage banking platform as well as with Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud.  A late requirement was for a robust and configurable firewall capability on the new Azure environment and specialized vendors were engaged and onboarded to assist with completing this task.

Haventree successfully launched the portal and is now working on planning for subsequent phases of additional functionality.  Program management capability and process is established within the organization and can be leveraged for subsequent initiatives.