Arvest Bank signed a five-year partnership with Google Cloud to accelerate its plans for a full digital transformation.
Arvest plans to use the partnership to migrate its data centers to Google Cloud and leverage Google Cloud’s artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to enhance customer experience and create efficiencies. Specifically, Arvest plans to use Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI Insights tool to improve customer experience and use Document AI to advance commercial lending decisions and meet regulatory requirements.
Laura Merling, a 20-year digital products veteran, joined Arvest Bank as chief transformation and operations officer in October. She’s bringing what she learned at AT&T, Ford, Google and other businesses to Arvest, helping it use technology to transform how it approaches relationships with customers and create better operational efficiency.
“We already moved our first full set of data to Google Cloud about two weeks ago, and with that, we actually saw performance gains,” Merling said. “So if we’re running a report against the data, we now get a 30% to 50% improvement in the speed at which that happens. So imagine you’re either in a branch or in a contact center and a customer calls you, the information comes a lot faster to be able to help that customer versus having to wait for processing. So it’s a huge efficiency gain that benefits our customers.”
Arvest added some automation to its contact center to empower customers who prefer self-service. Merling said the changes Arvest already made reduced calls to the contact center by about 1,000 a day, and the bank is just getting started.
The bank plans to use Google Document AI for its mortgage service center in Overland Park to simplify processing documents and automate data input, reusing information customers already have provided to the bank, she said.
"We want to make sure another thing we get from Google Cloud is agility, so we can move quickly and be able to do things fast without having to order hardware or set new software up,” Merling said. “So we're excited about what we might learn along the way. We look at this as a really incredible opportunity.”
Arvest has more than $26 billion in assets, with more than 830,000 retail and business customers at more than 200 branches in communities throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. Arvest has 19 branches in the Kansas City area and ranks 21st by market share of deposits, with $698.8 million.
