Think | Stack, Arkatechture, and Glia Help People's Credit Union Drive Innovation on AWS

People’s Credit Union breaks down data silos to gain deeper business insights, increase member satisfaction, cut reporting time from weeks to minutes, and drive digital innovation with integrated partner solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS). People’s worked with Think | Stack to migrate applications to AWS before implementing Arkatechture’s data analytics, and Glia’s digital customer engagement solutions, all running on AWS.

Since its founding in 1922, People’s Credit Union has provided checking, savings, loans, and other financial services to members across Rhode Island. Today, the organization has six branch locations throughout Rhode Island.

Several years ago, as it sought to enable digital transformation, People’s was faced with a difficult decision: whether to modernize its IT environment or invest more resources into updating its aging data center. “Much of our equipment was nearing end of life, and we needed to figure out where to go next,” says Sean Daly, president and chief executive officer at People's Credit Union. “We knew we had to put money into upgrading our environment, but we also wanted to find out how to redeploy resources into creating innovative applications for our members.” People’s also wanted to improve the resiliency of its data center, located on an island susceptible to hurricanes and other storms.

To gain better insights into its members, the organization also needed to find a way to extract more from its data. “We had a lot of siloed data from disparate sources, such as our online banking and consumer lending systems,” Daly says.

To overcome these challenges and better meet its members’ needs, People’s decided to move to AWS. “Although our core technology provider had an option, we knew the cloud would provide the scalability, agility, and resiliency we needed,” Daly says.

People’s began its cloud journey by engaging Think | Stack, a Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO) and AWS Partner. Think | Stack led a design and assessment process and migrated People’s entire application environment to AWS. It now runs applications on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, stores data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and benefits from AWS security services. Think | Stack also provided managed services, such as device and patch management, and helped People’s implement Amazon WorkSpaces, allowing remote employees to seamlessly access company resources while working from home. Think | Stack then created redundant data centers to enable hourly data replication and increase resiliency and security. “We helped People’s Credit Union design, build, and manage a technology foundation powered by AWS, placing it on a path to growth and modernization,” says Chris Sachse, chief executive officer at Think | Stack.

Migrating to the AWS was only the beginning for People’s Credit Union. “The migration was step one, but the real innovation happened after that. It was about finding cloud-based tools to plug into our environment to help us get more out of our data,” Daly says. To achieve that goal, People’s turned to Arkatechture, a CUSO and AWS Partner. Arkatechture created a data warehouse that breaks down data silos by integrating data from different sources across the business and presenting it as a single view. The hosted solution, Arkalytics, also includes a suite of credit union specific dashboards and predictive models.

The solution runs on Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 and uses AWS Fargate to provide on-demand compute capacity for containerized applications. The Arkatechture data warehouse also includes machine learning models based on Amazon SageMaker. “We consolidated all data so People’s Credit Union could better understand the business by examining elements like branch performance, individual employee performance, and daily operations,” says Judith Bernholc, head of customer success at Arkatechture. Using Arkalytics, People’s leadership teams can leverage dashboards that provide deeper insights into operational efficiencies and business performance over time. “We now have a single source of truth for our data, which we never had before, and we’re also increasing QA reporting to gain further business insights,” says Daly.

Following the deployment of the Arkatechture solution, People’s Credit Union added further innovation by working with AWS Partner Glia, to implement an integrated digital customer engagement platform. It combines all customer interaction channels—video, on-screen voice, SMS, phone, chat, and co-browsing—into a single AWS platform.

With this solution, People’s meets its goals of boosting member satisfaction while reducing the number of customer calls that are deflected. “By using co-browsing and screen sharing to guide customers through the journey online, People’s Credit Union reduces call handling time overall because member service representatives can handle multiple calls at once,” says Greg Cummings, director of global partnerships at Glia. “The organization is also using the Glia platform’s built-in surveying capability, generating an increase in member satisfaction.” Adds Daly, “Our member service reps will be more efficient and productive while providing a superior experience for our members.”

With its new data analysis capabilities, People’s Credit Union automates routine reports enabling analysts to focus on more value-added activities such as creating custom reports & dashboards to meet emerging challenges. “Previously, we had to outsource custom reports, which could take 6-8 weeks,” says Daly. “Now, with Arkatechture on AWS, our analysts start their day, open the reports, and receive updated business insights in minutes. This not only informs them about the business, but also helps them pinpoint areas to focus on from a member service perspective.”

Additionally, People’s now has regularly updated business data. “Previously, we’d have outdated data by the time a meeting came around. Now, we simply pull up the dashboards and view fresh, relevant information,” says Chris Eden, vice president of information security and technology at People’s Credit Union. As a result, the organization has a deeper understanding of where the business is, allowing for better-informed business decisions. “It also increases our employee engagement, because they have access to the latest data,” says Daly. “Our entire focus centers on delivering value to our members, which is easier to do with new information.”

People’s Credit Union has simplified digital innovation by working with AWS partners to transform the organization’s business. For example, People’s recently launched an improved online banking platform that integrates digital branch functionality, and it’s also introducing a new consumer lending platform and updated credit cards. “Our revised banking platform will help us better compete against both mid-size and larger financial services institutions,” says Daly. “Our ability to drive innovation through technology has been enhanced by our relationship with AWS and these three partners we’ve been introduced to along the way. As we look to the future, we also know we’ll have the ability to integrate API management into our solutions, which will improve collaboration with other organizations. I don’t think we’d even be thinking about this if we weren’t on AWS and working with these great partners who have helped us transform our business.”