Tower Community Bank sought to redefine its presence within its local US market. With the help of FintechOS, it launched a non-traditional point-of-sale lending solution for local practitioners to offer financing solutions to their customers.
Background
Tower Community Bank, a 50+ year old traditional brick and mortar US bank was looking to reposition itself within its local Tennessee market. Like many traditional community banks, Tower was looking for new ways to digitally transform its business and capture the next generation of banking customers. On a mission to think differently about how it engaged with its community, it sought innovative technology that would allow it to create a self-service function and support borrowers at significant moments in their lives.
Challenges
To bring its idea to life, Tower needed a solution resilient enough to integrate with its existing core infrastructure and new business partners. It was also important that the chosen technology was flexible enough to change, recalibrate, and launch new solutions as market demand shifted. Tower approached FintechOS looking for a partner who could quickly digitalize its vision to open new distribution channels and meet customers where they are, work with its existing legacy systems, and collaborate with local businesses.
Solution
Leaning into Tower’s presence in Nashville, Tennessee, a city known for its medical advancements, FintechOS built a non-traditional embedded point-of-sale (POS) lending solution called Momentum by Tower, for local medical practitioners to offer financing solutions to their customers. When it comes time to pay for elective health or dental surgeries or procedures, customers can apply for and withdraw loans directly from the bank’s Momentum by Tower digital product, with additional incentives for creating checking accounts and making deposits.
All aspects of the solution were defined using FintechOS Studio, a part of the FintechOS platform that allows non-technical teams to create and launch personalized products and customer journeys using a no-/low-code approach, driven by data and powered by automation. A flexible decisioning engine empowers the Tower team to define different types of loan products to be presented to each customer. Using prebuilt ecosystem connectors, customer credit checks are run in real-time, and all documents can be signed digitally to streamline the process. The solution is deployed within a web portal that runs inside the office of the practitioner, thus embedding the lending process directly into the sales process.
Results
FintechOS became a true partner for Tower, helping it quickly test new markets and brainstorm new avenues to utilize its extensive data stores, as well as accelerate customer journeys. Due to FintechOS’s Fintech Enablement platform, Tower has grown its number of loans, deposits, customers, and revenue streams, and now has the ability to expand geographically into areas it doesn’t currently have a physical presence.
The Future
Both Tower and FintechOS are excited about the bank’s plans to extend the point-of-loan solution to other markets in the community, such as HVAC companies and auto repair companies. The pair is also discussing the possibility of evolving Tower’s new account opening process, exploring new ways to cross-sell with customers, and considering a partial core revamp.
“The biggest benefit of working with FintechOS is the flexibility of the platform. You aren’t just paying for one specific niche product. You’re paying for the flexibility and the agility to take your creative ideas for whatever product it is that you want to launch and then to build a customer journey that meets that need.
Because of the flexibility it allows you to continually innovate, to change the product that you’re offering your customers, I can’t recommend FintechOS enough and it was definitely the right decision for our team.”
Brett Hollenbeck
VP, Virtual Bank Director, Tower Community Bank
