Customer Stories / Financial Services / United States 

2023
Archway Software Logo

Archway Software and WaFd Bank Modernize the Banking Experience Using AWS

WaFd Bank (WaFd) is a Seattle-based regional bank serving 200 branch locations across eight states.

6,600+ new accounts

using machine learning

45% reduction

in “asking for an agent” using call servicing experience with intelligent-voice banking

235% increase

Improved net promoter scores from 17 to 57

Overview

Supporting financial needs for a diverse customer base requires innovative solutions that put the customer experience at the center. WaFd realized that regional banks, though excellent at building customer relationships, were hampered by outdated systems and disconnected data infrastructure. WaFd decided to completely modernize its banking services with modern data infrastructure and solutions so that client-facing employees can better serve customers using data-driven insights into personalized product recommendations and customer experiences.

To realize this transformation, WaFd created Archway Software, a new technology startup company designed to bring best-of-breed data and machine learning (ML) services and solutions to market for the regional banking experience. This modernization initiative improved overall customer satisfaction and formed stronger banking relationships as seen in WaFd’s net promoter score results in 2023. Today, Archway Software’s principal mission is to help other financial institutions across the United States accelerate their journey and create innovative digital services in weeks, not years.

Archway team photo

Opportunity | Using AWS Services to Build a Digital-First Banking Infrastructure

In 2019, WaFd kicked off Initiative 2025 with the goal of achieving full digital transformation by 2025. WaFd formed its own innovation lab, called Pike Street Labs, to modernize banking services while maintaining operational continuity and the same community-first aspects that make banking with regional banks distinctively relationship-oriented. WaFd wanted to keep data at the center of its decision-making as it transitioned to a digital-first bank. “We knew where we wanted to end up—delivering great digital products and frictionless experiences to customers,” says Dustin Hubbard, president of Archway Software. “We just didn’t really know a path to get there.”

From the beginning, Pike Street Labs worked alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS) to find cloud-based solutions that fit the overall objective of using customer data to enchance the customer’s banking experience. This meant moving from outdated, disconnected data systems to a modern, cloud-based architecture that can support applications today and in the future. “Typically, banks depend on multiple vendors to provide solutions and the data is locked away in siloed third-party databases,” says Hubbard. “We wanted to unify all this data into a centralized solution and tie that data together without using fuzzy logic, a common problem with traditional data structures.” By migrating to the cloud, unifying client identities, and decommissioning legacy systems, the company also saved millions of dollars.

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Working alongside AWS, we systematically built momentum off each prior idea to create this powerful solution that will benefit the whole banking sector.” 

Dustin Hubbard
President, Archway Software

Solution | Improving the Customer Experience and Deepening Relationships

The first step WaFd took was to centralize these disparate data sources into a purpose-built data lake using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This new method of data organization made it easier and faster to get a comprehensive view of each customer, instead of having to manually combine and sort through siloed data. “The data lake was how we combined data in disparate systems at scale,” says Hubbard. “Once the data got in there, we could use all kinds of solutions, like ML, to improve marketing.” With the data lake in place, many new possibilities were opened for improving banking services.

For example, WaFd can now personalize customer offerings by using a comprehensive set of ML and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions from AWS. Using services such as Amazon SageMaker—a fully managed cloud service that provides the tools for building, training, and deploying ML models for predictive analytics—WaFd can now create tailored experiences based on customer behavior and predictions at every customer interaction.

WaFd also built an application called Customer 360, which makes customer data readily accessible to customer relationship managers during face-to-face customer interactions. Customer 360 presents dashboards with relevant customer information, which employees can access in near real time to provide services according to individual circumstances. With a more comprehensive view of its customer base, WaFd is growing its business by sending out timely and relevant product recommendations to its client and prospect database. This has resulted in over 6,600 new accounts being opened since 2021.

Another aspect of banking that WaFd sought to transform was the customer’s call center experience. Previously, calling the bank tended to be a tedious process of going through security measures and responding to prompts on the keypad. WaFd wanted customers to be able to log on to their accounts securely with voice biometrics and have a natural conversation with an AI voicebot to get resolutions faster, particularly for the myriad of tasks that don’t usually require a live representative.

The new call center solution was built with Amazon Lex, a fully managed AI service with advanced natural language models, and delivered 95 percent faster resolution times for account balance inquiries and reduced the volume of call traffic for live representatives by 45 percent when customers enrolled in voice identity. “It used to take more than 4 minutes for people to hear their checking account balance using the old prompt method,” says Hubbard. “Now, customers can just ask the voicebot and get the amount instantly.” Using Amazon Personalize, developers quickly build and deploy curated recommendations and intelligent user segmentation. The voicebot understands sentiment analysis in the customer’s voice by using Amazon Comprehend, a natural-language processing service. That means call center representatives can better understand a customer’s satisfaction with their experience and adjust their approach in the cases they do need to engage. This sentiment analysis helped mitigate the frequency of negative interactions. As a result, the bank raised its customer net promoter score—which gauges the likelihood of customers recommending the bank—to 57. The bank’s net promoter score was 44 the prior year, and only 17 in 2018 before it started its digital transformation journey.

With proven successes of WaFd’s own data and application transformation, Pike Street Labs spun out as a new, separate entity called Archway Software (Archway). Born from the principle that regional banks should have the technological infrastructure to stay on par with larger banks, Archway seeks to share the solutions on AWS that helped spur WaFd’s data transformation with other regional banks around the country. “Regional banks are so vital to the vibrancy of the US economy,” says Hubbard. “We realized that many institutions don’t have the technical foundation, resources, or time to implement a solution, so we created Archway to meet that need.”

Outcome | Transforming the Future of Regional Banking

Archway is now making its banking-innovation-as-a-service platform available nationwide. Banks looking to adopt Archway’s solutions are provided with an underlying platform called Keystone, which all other Archway products connect to and facilitates innovation in weeks. Product suites cover retail online banking, mobile banking, back-office functions, digital account opening, and contact center solutions. Archway’s philosophy is that ideas grow by the flywheel effect, whereby innovation self-perpetuates with each successive enhancement.

“We wanted to reimagine the way that people think about their banking relationships,” says Hubbard. “Working alongside AWS, we systematically built momentum off each prior idea to create this powerful solution that will benefit the whole banking sector.”

About WaFd Bank

WaFd Bank is a Seattle-based regional bank with 200 branches across eight states. Archway Software is an independent corporation that raised $15 million in Series A money in 2022. Archway provides banking-innovation-as-a-service solutions to financial institutions looking to adopt digital processes for better customer experiences and insights.

About Archway Software

Archway Software is an independent corporation that raised $15 million in Series A money in 2022. Archway provides banking-innovation-as-a-service solutions to financial institutions looking to adopt digital processes for better customer experiences and insights.

AWS Services Used

Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Learn more »

Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker is built on Amazon’s two decades of experience developing real-world ML applications, including product recommendations, personalization, intelligent shopping, robotics, and voice-assisted devices.

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Amazon Lex

Amazon Lex is a fully managed artificial intelligence (AI) service with advanced natural language models to design, build, test, and deploy conversational interfaces in applications.

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Amazon Personalize

Amazon Personalize allows developers to quickly build and deploy curated recommendations and intelligent user segmentation at scale using machine learning (ML).

Learn more »

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